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

This chapter offers guidance for making retirement an open topic for discussion, poses important questions prospective retirees should consider, and suggests a range of actions institutions can take to help academics make a successful transition into a fulfilling retirement.

This study centers on public policy concerning the retirement age in Israeli academia. The purpose of this study is to analyze the justification for the existing policy on this issue that allows academic institutions to end the employment of faculty when reaching the legal retirement age. The research method is based on analysis of the research…

CUPA-HR's survey of benefits for higher education employees has been conducted since 2003. Prior to 2020-21, data were collected on healthcare benefits in odd years and non-healthcare benefits in even years. This year, we collected data on all benefits: healthcare benefits, including healthcare plans and wellness programs; and non-healthcare…

Many people believe that U.S. higher education is at a crossroads as tuition costs soar, diversity of the student body grows, and the number of traditionally aged students enrolling in college continues to decline due to lower birth rates in the early 2000s. Today's societal, political, and cultural pressures are unique and thus put added pressure…

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…

Academic retirement is evolving in a larger context where coalescing demographic, economic, social, and policy trends are calling standard practice into question.

This concluding chapter reviews salient points raised in the volume. It considers what stakeholders should play a role in reinventing academic retirement. The chapter also identifies a number of issues each individual retiree must address in order to achieve a successful transition from work life to retirement.

Academic retirement no longer follows a consistent, predictable pattern. This trend demonstrates a need to rethink the nature of retirement in colleges and universities to better serve both individual professionals and their institutions.

Implementing retirement innovations requires careful attention to the organizational change process.

The fiscal crisis facing the economy has led to withdrawal of the state from major sectors of the economy including education. With the advent of the liberalized economic policy the private sector has been playing a pivotal role in the economic development. Higher education ceases to be the 'merit good' and the universities are encouraged to…

Currently, higher education is being roiled by class-action lawsuits filed against high-profile institutions, including MIT, Yale and New York University, over management of their retirement plans. As the lawyers are deployed and the billable hours accrue, it is timely to examine how those who have responsibility for retirement plan…

Samuel Schuman writes that in the year after the 1983 national conference in Philadelphia, he had a gripe, and was not hesitant to express it. He wondered why an organization like this one does not do a better job of welcoming and orienting newcomers to Honors. At that point one of the elders of the organization, Dr. John Portz, responded,…

The relationship between employer and employee has changed significantly over the past 40 years. One of the greatest changes in this relationship is in the nature of employee retirement. While pension reform at public and private colleges has helped ensure institutional financial viability, retirement security for employees has declined. With the…

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)…