This study examined the concepts of career preparation and the lives post-sport of retired former collegiate swimmers. Swimming is a sport that has next to no opportunities to compete professionally, meaning that all swimmers must undergo career preparation and transition into full-time careers once their eligibility has expired. This study was…

In this article, we theorize the disciplinary lifecycle as an alternative to the limited metaphor of the "career arc." We argue that theorizing career trajectories as lifecycles resonates more fully with the experiences that are common to careers in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies (RCWS), thereby providing more possibilities…

Veteran professors synthesize their combined 60+ years of expertise at primarily undergraduate, teaching-focused universities into easy-to-follow advice for graduate students and current faculty seeking to build thriving careers at similar institutions. Writing in a friendly tone that includes their personal reflections, the authors guide readers…

Receiving mentoring is associated with lasting career benefits ; however, less is known about long-term career gains for mentors. A national sample of retired academics were surveyed to examine associations between past mentoring behaviors and current evaluations of their careers. Participants (N = 277) were on average 73.6 (SD = 6.2) years old…

This policy brief is part of a series of thematic policy briefs prepared as part of the OECD's Resourcing Higher Education Project. It examines the frameworks that govern the employment of academic staff in publicly funded higher education institutions in Israel. It compares these frameworks to those in place in comparable OECD higher education…

The author believes her professional life can be divided into two parts--being a building-level school librarian and being retired, noting that few librarians she has met planned to enter the profession, and like them, she was an accidental librarian. Though trained to be a high school English teacher, she was offered a job after college as a…

The decades between tenure and retirement constitute the longest yet least understood period of a faculty member's career. Previous research depicts the midcareer as fraught with reduced job and career satisfaction, lowered productivity, and even stagnation. However, we suggest a reframing of this period. Drawing on data from surveys and…

This holistic single-case study reports on the benefits mentors derived from participating in the Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (IMPACT) mentoring program. The IMPACT program was sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office for Broadening Participation in Engineering 15-7680 (awards #1542728 and…

This study explored the topic of current women administrators and their mentorship experiences. The purpose is to examine if these individuals had a mentor at all and how that relationship evolved. There is a universal graying of administration in Higher Education Leadership and many institutions lack a long-term plan to mentor and replace the…

Community colleges are experiencing a retirement crisis. The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and the Association of Community College Trustees (2018) reported that as many as half of community college presidents presiding in 2016 were likely to retire by 2021. Many current community college vice presidents are not interested in…

The number of United States professors aged 65 years and older is growing. This older professor presents the stories of four teaching experiences which belong to the larger story of faculty longevity during the past five decades and its subsequent conflicts with retirement. The first was in the 1960s, when she was a new professor, not much older…

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…

The graying of community college leadership is an issue across the country. More than half of all community college presidents expect to retire in five years, according to data from the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). Succession planning is yet another opportunity for colleges already navigating a variety of reforms to innovate.…

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…