There's not a school business official in the country who isn't dealing with budget cuts and trying to do more with less. This article shares some proven strategies to help school districts reduce spending and address personnel issues associated with retirement plans. Because public education employers are exempt from the Employee Retirement…

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 labor supply and benefit claiming incentives provided by the early retirement rules of the Social Security Old Age benefits program are of growing importance as the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) increases to 67, the labor force participation of Older Americans rises, and a variety of reforms to the Social Security system are considered. Any…

Institutions must provide good counseling regarding retirement program benefits, since when in doubt about their financial position faculty members are inclined to remain employed. Colleges should consider offering nonfinancial incentives for early retirement as well as financial. (MLW)

Briefly outlines the reasons some school districts are withdrawing from the social security system. Also notes some advantages of the social security system over alternative plans. (IRT)

The social security commissioner argues that the system's varied protection--against loss of earnings due to death, disability, and even inflation--makes it a better deal than most private plans. (Author/IRT)

Shows the estimated comparisons between benefits five employees of the Dekalb (Georgia) school system would receive under social security and under the alternative plan the district has created. (IRT)

These authors argue that estimates of the net economic cost of suicide should go beyond accounting for direct medical costs and indirect costs from loss of earnings by those who commit suicide. There are potential savings from (a) not having to treat the depressive and other psychiatric disorders of those who kill themselves; (b) avoidance of…

Texarkana (Texas) Community College and Texarkana Independent School District left the federal Social Security System (SSS) and reallocated SSS funds to a self-administered fringe benefit program, while also returning employees' SSS contributions to them intact. Several safeguards for Texas employees were already in place through the Texas Teacher…

In this paper I will illustrate how to extend the capabilities of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with add-ins created by MATLAB. Excel provides a broad array of fundamental tools but often comes up short when more sophisticated scenarios are involved. To overcome this short-coming of Excel while retaining its ease of use, I will describe how…

The electoral victory of Lu?s In?cio "Lula" da Silva in the presidential elections of 2002 epitomized two decades of social and political transformations in Brazil. Nevertheless, instead of launching an alternative mode of doing politics, the program of the Workers' Party affirmed a state logic with a view to gradually updating the…

Discusses current and future economic issues and the need for an aging population to claim benefits from the income of younger workers. Highlights include pensions, social security, Medicare, and Medicaid; demographic trends and how markets and politics respond to change; and implications for the future. (LRW)

This paper looks at the three employee benefit items that are most costly for employers--retirement programs, Social Security/Medicare contributions, and major medical insurance coverage--to estimate the costs of these benefits in school districts in the 15 states of the Southern Regional Education Board (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia,…

Fifth in a series and the latest of several studies on employee benefits in higher education, this book constitutes a full-scale revision of the earlier "Benefit Plans in American Colleges" (1969). The principal benefit plans provided by U.S. colleges and universities are described, analyzed, and evaluated. Included are retirement…

A project was conducted in Iowa to develop educational programs for older adults who were not institutionalized. Focus of the activity was on sites that held community meals for the aging on a daily basis. Those who attended were targeted for after-dinner educational programs. A survey was taken of the interests of the senior citizens attending…