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New Report Explores Faculty Retirement Policies
By Wendi Maloney
U.S. colleges and universities are increasingly offering tenured faculty members incentives to retire, according to the Survey of Faculty Retirement Policies 2007, released in February by the AAUP. As many faculty members nationwide approach traditional retirement age, institutions are using retirement incentives and phased retirement—in which faculty members work part time after relinquishing tenure—to renew their faculties. Phased retirement has the added benefit of permitting institutions to continue to draw on the expertise of long-time professors.
A project of the AAUP’s Committee on Retirement, the survey updates a similar study published by the AAUP in 2000. The committee revised the survey instrument and redistributed it in 2006 to investigate how institutions might have changed their policies since 2000 to deal with the aging of many faculty members nationwide and with other emerging issues, such as escalating health-care costs.
“The 2007 survey provides important new information on the nature of college and university faculty retirement programs, on the availability of health-insurance benefits for retirees and their spouses, and on retirement policies for part-time faculty,” says Cornell University labor economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a consultant to the AAUP’s retirement committee. Ehrenberg wrote the report on the 2000 retirement-policies survey; higher education scholar Valerie Martin Conley of Ohio University, a member of the retirement committee, wrote the current report. “Academic institutions and their faculty members can use the information provided by the survey to see how their faculty benefit programs compare to those of their competitors,” Ehrenberg adds. “And the list of Web sites that describe institutional faculty benefit programs in more detail, available on request from the AAUP, will be an important data source for academia for years to come.”
The survey was co-sponsored by the American Council on Education, the American Association of Community Colleges, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, and the National Association of College and University Business Officers. The TIAA-CREF Institute, the research foundation sponsored by faculty retirement insurance provider TIAA-CREF, and the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute generously financed the survey. Data collection was conducted by the Survey Research Institute at Cornell University. The sample included 1,361 public and private doctoral, master’s-granting, bachelor’s-granting, and two-year institutions, of which 567 completed the instrument, reflecting a response rate of 42 percent.
A print version will be published in the May–June issue of Academe.
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