Do employees at public colleges and universities have better retirement benefits than K-12 employees? This is the central question in the new report "Choice and Quality Among Retirement Plans for Educators." To answer this question, we evaluate the quality of higher education and K-12 retirement plans using five key variables: (1)…

This issue of "Research Library Issues" ("RLI") presents three articles by Stanley Wilder in which he explores a series of trends shaping the professional population of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions. Wilder's articles serve as a powerful illumination of the demographic shifts taking place in the…

The purpose of this paper is to find out what academics do when approaching retirement, and why; as well as to reflect on the process and consequences of reaching a retirement decision -- for themselves, the university system, and the wider community. Our study concentrates on baby boomers, as this large cohort starts to retire or become eligible…

In 2015, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) conducted a survey of community college chief executive officers (CEOs) to collect their opinions on current issues, and gather information on their compensation. This report provides the results from this survey. The AACC CEO Survey was sent to 960 public community college presidents.…

The "2016 National Profile of Higher Education Chief Business Officers" is a triennial report that tracks changes in the demographic characteristics, job duties, and plans for career transitions and retirements of business office chief executives at colleges and universities in 2010, 2013, and 2016. The 2016 study also provides a…

Over the past 70 years, the American university has become the global gold standard of excellence in research and graduate education. The unprecedented surge of federal research support of the post-World War II American university paralleled the steady strengthening of the American academic profession itself, which managed to attract the best and…

The impending retirement of the baby boom cohort represents the first time in the history of the United States that such a large and well-educated group of workers will exit the labor force. This could imply skill shortages in the U.S. economy. We develop near-term labor force projections of the educational demands on the workforce and the supply…

This is an interpretive-descriptive analysis of responses to 41 open ended questionnaires returned by academics working beyond normal retirement age. The sample consisted mainly of academics from the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The research addressed the question of what motivates some academics to continue working beyond the…

In the past few decades, especially since the 2008-09 economic downturn, the faculty of American colleges and universities has undergone a far-reaching transformation. Multiple factors, mainly extraneous to the campus itself, are reshaping higher education, and as a result a reprioritizing of the internal allocation of resources is occurring. The…

About 25 percent of faculty working in the United States will reportedly consider retiring in the next five to seven years. As one of this 25 percent, the author has been researching what she needs to know to retire. What she found initially was a lot of misinformation. To complicate matters, the world has changed over the past year, causing those…

Colleges, universities, and the communities they serve have always been concerned about students' abilities to pay and the systems of aid to support students' learning. This article reviews the history of aiding student in higher education. Early student- and institutionally-led programs are discussed along with initial philanthropic and…

The basic currency of higher education--the credit hour--represents the root of many problems plaguing America's higher education system: the practice of measuring time rather than learning. "Cracking the Credit Hour" traces the history of this time-based unit, from the days of Andrew Carnegie to recent federal efforts to define a credit…

What is an emeritus professor? The emeritus role means different things at different colleges and universities, but generally it has an elusive, ambiguous quality. It may simply mean that a professor has retired with an honorific title acknowledging many years of service to an institution. Or it may mean that a senior professor has transitioned to…

Over the past decade, policymakers and business leaders across New England have been concerned that the region's slower population growth and loss of residents to other parts of the country will lead to a shortage of skilled labor--particularly when the baby boom generation retires. Prior to the Great Recession, the concern was that an inadequate…

This paper presents the annual report of the American Association of University Professors on the economic status of the profession for 2010-2011. This analysis of the economic status of the faculty begins with results from this year's annual survey of full-time faculty compensation. Survey report table 1 presents the most basic results, while…