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)…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This study focuses on aspects of the Changing Academic Profession survey of 2007-08 that describe the place of faculty in their institutions. The authors examine the following aspects of institutional life: (1) the faculty role in institutional governance; (2) who evaluates their teaching and research; (3) the locus of their loyalties as between…

This article examines the trend of faculty retirement in the United States. Much of the concern about aging faculty has centered on the twin concerns of lifetime employment in the form of tenure and the lack of a mandatory retirement age. However, as analysis shows, more attention should be paid to what will happen when older faculty…

The concern that doctoral programs in the arts and sciences do not adequately prepare students for careers as faculty members is hardly a new one, but it has become urgent. Colleges and universities in United States are facing the impending retirement of large numbers of faculty members and need to replace them with qualified professionals, on or…

Community colleges are facing difficult times. Resources are becoming increasingly scarce, enrollments are growing to unprecedented numbers, the student body is becoming increasingly diverse, the economic downturn continues to have an effect on curriculum and mission, increased demands for accountability are driving decisions, and faculty turnover…

The Committee on Retirement of the American Association of University Professors initiated its first retirement policies survey in 2000 to address a lack of reliable and systematically collected information on retirement policies and practices across U.S. institutions of higher education. At the end of the 1990s, there was a sense that…

The current downturn has the potential to be more severe and longer lasting than the recessions of the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and early 2000s. By now, rivers of ink have been spilled documenting the financial and economic crisis afflicting the United States and much of the globe. While numerous articles have examined the impact on higher-education…