Resistant To Retirement
Last week NPR ran a story titled “On Campus, Older Faculty Keep On Keepin’ On.” If they have the option, many just aren’t ready to retire in their sixties.
Faculty who have achieved tenure cannot be terminated without cause and there is no mandatory retirement age. One study found that sixty percent of faculty planned to work past age seventy and fifteen percent planned to work past age eighty. Ninety percent of faculty who planned to work past the typical retirement age reported it was because they loved their jobs, while more than forty percent reported that one reason was concerns over financial security. Currently, one third of faculty are age fifty-five and older compared to twenty percent of the rest of the workforce.
Universities don’t necessarily want tenured faculty hanging around so long. When older faculty leave universities can replace them with cheaper, part-time and adjunct-instructors. In fact, the percentage of faculty who are part time has climbed from twenty-two percent in 1969 to sixty-seven percent today.
Universities offer buyouts to encourage older faculty to leave, but often there is little interest. Recently faculty at Hofstra University’s Law School were offered two years of salary to leave and no one accepted. At Nebraska, only seventy-nine out of two hundred forty-five eligible faculty accepted a one year salary buyout in 2010.
The NPR story is here.
