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AAUP Retirement Survey Receives Gift
By Wendi Maloney
The AAUP’s survey of changes in faculty retirement policies received a special gift of $10,000 last fall from The Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI). The survey, sponsored by the Association’s retirement committee, will provide comparative information on retirement incentive plans, phased retirement plans, and health insurance coverage for retirees. It will update a survey on the same topics the committee published in 2000.
The TIAA-CREF Institute provided funding to update the survey instrument in order to elicit details about how policies have changed over the past five years. In editing the survey instrument, committee members developed a series of additional items exploring post-retirement health-benefits. The extra items require more time on the part of the research group administering the survey—and hence more funding, which CHERI has agreed to provide.
Labor economist Ronald Ehrenberg founded CHERI and serves as its director; he is also a consultant to the AAUP’s retirement committee. “I’m glad to do this,” says Ehrenberg. “It’s fortunate that there is money in CHERI’s account. The survey is especially important right now because of the rapid changes that are occurring in post-retirement health insurance policies, and there’s a need to generate data on how faculty are faring.” Ehrenberg and Valerie Conley of Ohio University, a retirement committee member, will analyze the survey results and prepare a report for publication in Academe. Ehrenberg notes that CHERI regularly uses its resources to conduct surveys whose results the institute will analyze and help disseminate.
Last fall, Ehrenberg received the 2005 Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship for his success in involving undergraduates in substantive research in economics. Since 2000, he has published six papers that have had at least one undergraduate co-author, and he has supervised two papers in which undergraduates were the only authors. He ties this work, like his involvement in the AAUP survey, to his service to the profession. “I try to involve promising undergraduate students in research early in their careers in the hope that doing so will encourage them to pursue PhD study in economics,” he says. “Given the declining numbers of American students going for PhDs, I believe that faculty at major research universities have an obligation to try to contribute to the flow of students into PhD programs.”
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