Creative approaches to academic retirement can yield benefits for retirees, their institutions, and society at large.

Academic retirement is evolving in a larger context where coalescing demographic, economic, social, and policy trends are calling standard practice into question.

This concluding chapter reviews salient points raised in the volume. It considers what stakeholders should play a role in reinventing academic retirement. The chapter also identifies a number of issues each individual retiree must address in order to achieve a successful transition from work life to retirement.

Academic retirement no longer follows a consistent, predictable pattern. This trend demonstrates a need to rethink the nature of retirement in colleges and universities to better serve both individual professionals and their institutions.