As many tenured faculty members approach traditionally acceptable retirement ages, observers of higher education are speculating about whether they will leave voluntarily, expect incentives to do so, or refuse to give up their positions indefinitely, leaving institutions with an aged faculty in desperate need of renewal. Although the 2007 Survey of Changes in Faculty Retirement Policies will not definitively end such speculation, it does point to trends in the way that institutions and faculty members are approaching retirement. The survey data also suggest, however, that a more important subject for speculation may be whether or not institutions can recruit and retain enough faculty to meet their growth and replacement needs.
The Committee on Retirement of the American Association of University Professors initiated its first retirement policies survey in 2000 to address a lack of reliable and systematically collected information on retirement policies and practices across U.S. institutions of higher education. At the end of the 1990s, there was a sense that institutions had been modifying policies and practices to gain more control over the timing of individual retirement decisions since mandatory retirement for tenured faculty members had ended in 1994. To gauge whether or not—and if so how—institutions were actually changing retirement policies, the 2000 survey elicited information about regular retirement programs for tenured faculty members, the prevalence and characteristics of retirement-incentive and phased-retirement programs, polices applicable to retired faculty, and perceptions regarding the end of mandatory retirement. A detailed report of the findings was published on the AAUP’s Web site, and an article by report author Ronald G. Ehrenberg ("Career’s End: A Survey of Faculty Retirement Policies") was published in the July–August 2001 issue of Academe, the AAUP’s bimonthly magazine. (Both items remain accessible through the AAUP’s Web site.)
In 2005–06, the Committee on Retirement updated the survey instrument and redistributed it with an eye toward exploring how institutions might have changed their policies to deal with escalating health-care costs and the aging of so many faculty members nationwide. Specifically, the survey asked institutions to report the number of faculty members enrolled in each type of institutional retirement plan, details about the plans and any retirement incentives offered, and information about the availability and cost of medical insurance and long-term health-care options for retiring faculty members and their spouses and dependents. The committee hopes the survey will help faculty members who are planning their own retirements, faculty groups who want to improve policies on their campuses, and institutions seeking to develop more effective retirement programs. This report summarizes the survey findings.
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(2/15/07)