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Originally published in 1991.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691602585 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #169 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d) |
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Faculty Retirement in the Arts and Sciences
By Albert Rees, Sharon P. Smith
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04287-9
CHAPTER 1
Background and Plan of Study
This study was undertaken because of the 1986 amendments to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which will abolish mandatory retirement for tenured faculty members in colleges and universities effective January 1, 1994. These amendments also required that a study of the consequences of the elimination of mandatory retirement on higher education be conducted by the National Academy of Sciences. At the time our study got under way, the Congress had not yet funded the National Academy of Sciences study, and it seemed doubtful mat it would do so. The Academy study has since been funded and is now under way. However, because of its late start, its research will not involve the kind of quantitative data collection emphasized in this project. The scope of the Academy study will be broader than ours, covering additional types of institutions and faculties other than arts and sciences. The staffs of the two projects have been cooperating to reduce the overlap between their efforts.
The present study has been funded by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It has been guided by an advisory committee chosen by the American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Universities, the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. A list of the members of the advisory committee is given in Appendix A.
The original Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 protected workers between the ages of 40 and 65. Since almost all institutions of higher education had mandatory retirement ages of 65 or above, it had little impact on retirement rules in higher education. In 1978, the law was amended to raise the upper limit of the protected class to age 70. As a result of concerns expressed by representatives of higher education, particularly concern over the shortage of jobs for young scholars, the effective date of this change as it applied to tenured faculty was delayed until July 1,1982. Many institutions raised the age of mandatory retirement to 70 before this date; others did so when required by the new law.
The 1986 amendments that will abolish mandatory retirement in 1994 have caused great concern among senior administrators of colleges and universities and others involved with higher education. Henry Rosovsky, dean of arts and sciences at Harvard University, has written:
No institution interested in preserving quality can tolerate a growing gerontocracy that necessarily brings with it declining productivity. The disastrous effect on young scholars surely needs no elaboration. If ever mandatory university retirement is deemed to be age discrimination, an alternative mechanism will have to be found to accomplish the same purpose. The introduction of term contracts and periodic tests of competence and performance seems logical. None of mis is horrible in theory, but the practice would either be hellish or inefficient.... Older professors could increasingly keep out the young, and that is bad. Lesser opportunities could lead the young to be ever less interested in academic careers—a sad picture. (Rosovsky 1990,211–12)
The concerns of administrators can be grouped into four main categories. The first, as in 1978, is the concern that delayed retirements will result in a shortage of job opportunities for new entrants to college and university faculties. This concern has been diminished by recent research that projects a shortage of faculty by the mid-1990s. A second, closely related concern is that delayed retirement will harm affirmative action programs by reducing the number of openings for minorities and women. Most senior faculty are white males, so their retirement tends to increase the representation of other groups. A third concern is that delayed retirement will have an adverse impact on the budgets of colleges and universities. This concern arises because a retiring full professor is usually replaced by an assistant professor or an instructor at roughly half the salary of the retiree. The last and most important concern is simply that in the absence of mandatory retirement, some faculty members will continue to teach longer than they are competent to do so—that classes will be conducted by professors who have not kept up with their fields.
The concerns just enumerated have already led to a variety of policy proposals, of which the simplest is simply to urge Congress to make permanent the current exemption for tenured faculty. Another possibility is for more academic institutions to offer incentive early retirement plans. These, however, can be very expensive, and the faculty members they encourage to retire early may not be the ones the institution would prefer to see do so. Complex questions have also been raised about the legality of some of these plans. A much more radical proposal is to replace academic tenure with a system of renewable contracts for shorter terms or to institute a system of formal posttenure review. Still another possibility is to change the defined-contribution pension plans now widely used in higher education, which generally give stronger financial incentives to delay retirement than do the type of defined-benefit pension plans used in private industry.
This study starts from the presumption that any policy recommendations need to be informed by more knowledge about the actual patterns of retirement in higher education and about the relationships between age and faculty performance. Such knowledge will help policymakers in higher education to decide whether the 1986 amendments to ADEA require far-reaching policy responses, such as modifying academic tenure, or whether more modest adjustments will be sufficient.
To keep this study manageable in scope, it has been confined to the arts and sciences; this is also the principal area of interest of our lead hinder, the Mellon Foundation. Faculty members in the arts and sciences are less likely than those in most professional fields to have their retirement plans influenced by the possibility of a second career as a practitioner or consultant. Some of the associations of professional schools have done or are doing their own studies of the effect of the end of mandatory retirement on professional schools in their fields, and in one case we have drawn on such a study.
Our study consists of two rather different parts. The first is based on a set of data on the age distribution of the tenured faculty in the arts and sciences and flows into and out of this faculty from a set of thirty-three cooperating institutions. A list of these institutions is given in Appendix B. The results of this part of the study will be presented in Chapters Two and Three. The second part consists of a set of special studies and surveys done at a much smaller number of institutions, together with some analysis based on surveys conducted by other organizations. The special studies of the relationship between age and faculty productivity are discussed in Chapter Four. Survey data based on surveys of retirees and senior faculty are discussed in Chapter Five. These deal with such matters as the satisfaction of former faculty members with retirement and the plans of faculty approaching retirement age.
We should make clear at the outset that our sample of institutions is not and was never intended to be a random sample of institutions of higher education in the United States. This distinguishes this study from some other recent studies. In particular, we have confined our study to research and doctorate-granting universities and selective liberal arts colleges. This decision was based in part on the advice of our advisory committee as to where the most severe potential problems of delayed retirement might be expected to occur, and in part on examination of data from some earlier studies that showed a strong positive relationship between the selectivity of the institution in admissions and the average retirement age of its faculty.
We also decided to take advantage of the fact that several states have already abolished mandatory retirement of tenured faculty by state law; in some cases, these laws have been in effect for a number of years. At the end of 1989, the states with such laws were Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin. Two additional states, Connecticut and Virginia, had abolished mandatory retirement in their state university systems without doing so for private institutions. New York abolished mandatory retirement in public higher education in 1990.
These state laws create a kind of natural experiment, whose results we were eager to observe. We have therefore included as many universities and liberal arts colleges as we could find that are already "uncapped"—that is, have no mandatory retirement age. We have also tried to include some "capped" institutions that were similar in size, type, and geographical location to these uncapped institutions. Finally, because we were dependent on the goodwill of the cooperating institutions in furnishing data that were often difficult to provide, we have included many of the institutions represented on our advisory committee.
A total of forty-two institutions agreed to provide data for this study. Eight of these were unable to provide the data that we requested or provided data that were not usable. One institution that provided good data has been omitted from the analysis because it is in a class by itself. This is Johns Hopkins University, which is the only private university in the original sample that does not enforce mandatory retirement at age 70, and is thus de facto uncapped. This leaves us with a final sample of thirty-three institutions. Of these, fourteen are liberal arts colleges and nineteen are universities. The universities, however, provide many more observations on individual faculty members because of their larger size. The fourteen liberal arts colleges had a total of 1,311 tenured faculty members in the arts and sciences in the academic year 1988–1989; the nineteen universities had a total of 6,412. We requested that institutions omit observations for librarians and athletic coaches even if they had faculty status, and almost all institutions were able to do so.
For institutions having more than one campus with programs in the arts and sciences, we have used data only from the "flagship" campus, the one with the largest number of doctoral programs. For example, our data for the University of Wisconsin are for the Madison campus, and not for the other campuses of the university.
Each institution in the sample was asked to provide the age distribution of its tenured faculty in the arts and sciences for a recent year, divided into three broad categories: humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. A listing of the departments included in each of these categories is given in Appendix C. For each of these categories, the institution was requested to provide ten or more years of flow data on entries to and exits from the tenured faculty by exact age at the time of the flow. Inflow data were divided into hires with tenure and promotions to tenure, and outflow data were divided into resignations, retirements, and deaths. If an institution was unable to provide ten years of flow data, but could provide at least five, it was kept in the sample. If it could provide data on retirement, but not on other flows, it was also kept in the sample. Some institutions were unable to provide any flow data by exact age, and were dropped from the sample for this reason. Each institution in the sample was also asked to provide copies of its retirement plan documents, of its early or phased retirement plan if it had one, and of policies relating to the benefits and privileges of emeritus faculty.
There is a substantial literature on faculty retirement that predates our study (see Selected References). We shall not attempt to summarize it here. Rather, we shall refer to it throughout the study where it is most relevant. Readers interested in a summary of this literature should consult two recent books: Karen C. Holden and W. Lee Hansen, editors, The End of Mandatory Retirement in Higher Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989); and The Commission on College Retirement, Pension and Retirement Policies in Colleges and Universities (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990).
CHAPTER 2Analysis of Flow Data
In this chapter, we analyze our data on flows into and out of the tenured faculty of arts and sciences. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, we give an overview of the flow data. The second uses flow data on retirements to explore the effects of changes in the mandatory retirement age. The third uses the retirement data to examine the effects on retirement age of differences in types of pension plans.
An Overview of the Flow Data
Our data distinguish two kinds of inflows, hires and promotions, and three kinds of outflows, resignations, retirements, and deaths. In this analysis, a hire means that a faculty member was hired with tenure, and a promotion means that a faculty member received tenure after previously serving in a nontenured position. Such promotions may involve promotions in rank, but need not. A promotion in rank that does not involve receiving tenure, say, from associate to full professor, is not counted. A few institutions in our sample never hired with tenure; faculty members hired at the rank of full professor received an initial term appointment. All of the inflows into the tenured faculty at these institutions are therefore promotions.
We should emphasize that all our flows are flows into and out of individual institutions and not classes of institutions or the higher education system as a whole. When we report a faculty member as hired with tenure, we do not know whether his or her previous position was at another academic institution or with some other kind of employer. We similarly do not know whether those who resigned did so to join some other faculty or to leave academic employment altogether. For retirees, we are unable to tell which, if any, took postretirement positions at other institutions.
A few of the institutions provided data on separations resulting from disability. Because these were not distinguished from other separations by most of our sample, we have combined them with resignations unless they were explicitly reported as retirements.
We count a person as retired when the employing institution does, although we are aware that in some cases retirement is followed by part-time or occasional teaching. This is usually at the discretion of the institution.
Of the thirty-three institutions in the sample, twenty-five provided data for at least five years on all five types of flows; most of the rest provided data on retirements only. Table 2-1 shows the size of the data base for the five most recent academic years for the twenty-five institutions providing full flow data. The first line in each pair is the number of persons; the second is the percentage of total inflows or total outflows.
It should be noted first that for each class of institution, the number of additions to the tenured faculty exceeds the number of people who left it. We cannot tell from our data whether this represents growth of the total faculty of arts and sciences, an increase in the proportion of the total with tenure, or some combination of the two.
The percentages in Table 2-1 show that different types of institutions have very different patterns of inflows and outflows. The private universities make 41 percent of their additions to the tenured faculty through hires with tenure; the liberal arts colleges make less than 15 percent of their additions in this way, with the public universities falling between these extremes. Differences in the pattern of outflows are less pronounced, but the liberal arts colleges have a smaller proportion of resignations and a higher proportion of retirements than do the universities.
There are also conspicuous differences among institutions within a given class. Among private universities, the proportion of additions made through hires varied from a low of 21 percent to a high of 70 percent (excluding one institution with a policy of not giving tenure to new hires). The proportion of outflows resulting from resignations varied from a low of 26 percent to a high of 48 percent.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Faculty Retirement in the Arts and Sciences by Albert Rees, Sharon P. Smith. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- List of Figures and Tables, pg. vii
- Acknowledgment, pg. xi
- CHAPTER ONE. Background and Plan of Study, pg. 3
- CHAPTER Two. Analysis of Flow Data, pg. 9
- CHAPTER THREE. Age Distributions of the Tenured Faculty, pg. 30
- CHAPTER FOUR. Age and Faculty Productivity, pg. 53
- CHAPTER FIVE. Survey Results, pg. 79
- CHAPTER Six. Conclusions, pg. 90
- APPENDIX A. Advisory Committee to the Project on Faculty Retirement, pg. 97
- APPENDIX B. Institutions Included in the Final Sample, pg. 99
- APPENDIX C Broad Discipline Categories Used in This Study, pg. 101
- Selected References, pg. 103