The survey asked institutions to rate the importance of three key areas related to staffing: recruitment, retention, and retirement. Figure 14 (.pdf) shows the percentage of institutions rating each of the three areas as “very important.” Ninety-six percent of responding institutions indicated that recruiting new faculty was very important to them; 89 percent reported that retaining current faculty was. Only 19 percent of institutions, however, reported that retiring older faculty was very important—a significant finding given the aging of the faculty population. The National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, a project of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, estimates that the average age of faculty increased from forty-seven to fifty between 1988 and 2004. In 2004, the average age of full-time tenured faculty members was fifty-four. This aging of the faculty population has many implications for policy and practice that go beyond the scope of this report.
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(2/15/07)