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

Most private sector employees have access to defined contribution retirement plans while public sector employees often may choose defined benefit or defined contribution plans. This research utilized a survey of faculty to analyze retirement plan satisfaction. Advice from a financial planner was positively associated with satisfaction with…

The silver tide of faculty retirement continues to ebb and flow. While much of today's scholarship on faculty retirement focuses on the financial implications for colleges and universities, arguing that older faculty members clog up the faculty pipeline, cost more in salary and benefits, and are ineffective teachers who fear technology, little…

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…

At colleges, presidents, provosts, and even faculty senates are taking a fresh look at how to manage professors' retirements. A few institutions that have sought to trim their tenured-faculty ranks for other reasons offer early lessons for those institutions that want to encourage retirements. Many institutions are doing just that, using…

Little is known about the impact of the end of mandatory retirement on professors over the long term. This follow-up study investigated the ten-year experience of professors who chose not to retire from a major research university after the elimination of the age 70 mandatory retirement in 1994. The initial interview study was conducted in 1998…

Many college and university faculty members work on nine-month contracts and, as such, are given the option of receiving their pay either over nine months or over the entire calendar year. Although many choose the latter, the authors of this article explain how opting for a nine-month pay period can significantly boost the size of a retirement…

In the late 1990s, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made grants to study people's attitudes toward retirement and to determine what factors influenced their decisions to retire. Although faculty were not talking to college administrators or human-resources departments about health care, the researchers found to their surprise that when they…

Between 1965 and 1975, over 500 community colleges opened across the United States. Thirty-five years later, the founding faculty has begun to retire. This study was designed to reveal the experiences of veteran community college faculty as they left their teaching role. The study examined the role exit experience of faculty, comparing the…

Greater attention has been focused on the role that employer-sponsored retirement plans and individual savings must play in ensuring retirement income security. Alternative tax retirement planning opportunities currently available to college personnel are explored. (MLW)

A policy statement on retirement and insurance plans formulated by the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges is presented. Retirement plans are seen to attract individuals, permit them to devote their energies to the profession, and to provide for an orderly retirement. (MLW)

A bridge benefit plan designed to provide an adequate income at age 65 so that faculty and senior administrators at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, can choose to retire at an early age, while deferring receipt of their TIAA-CREF annuity benefits during the bridge period, is described. (MLW)

Two proposals before Congress threaten to offset the delicate balance in pension plan design. The significance of the normal retirement feature in plan design, some possible program design changes, and how the pension arrangements of higher education institutions would be affected are discussed. (MLW)

An article based on a speech to the 24th National Conference on Higher Education of the American Association for Higher Education, Chicago, March 3, 1969. (AP)

Faculty members of America's universities and colleges, it is suggested, are finding the real world of academic life increasingly out of tune with the careers they prepared for. Seven faculty members are profiled whose careers illustrate difficulties academics may face at several stages of their lives. (MLW)