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…

Teachers and other employees of the School District of Philadelphia receive their retirement benefits from the Pennsylvania state retirement plan for schools, which includes both a defined-benefit pension plan and a modest retiree health benefit. The cost of the former is expected to rise quite substantially and, as this technical analysis will…

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.

Public school teachers deserve a compensation system that puts them on a secure path toward retirement. The severely backloaded structure of today's public school teacher pension systems benefit only a small proportion of entering teachers while putting the rest on an insecure retirement path. But there is a cost-neutral solution to this problem…

The Cox proportional hazards model has been pervasively used in many social science areas to examine the effects of covariates on timing to an event. The standard Cox model is intended to study univariate survival data where there is a singular event of interest, which can only be experienced once. However, we may additionally wish to explore a…

This article argues the importance of teaching students about the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of Australia's superannuation system as an example of a real-world problem context. It also provides a rationale for teaching financial modelling and decision-making in ways that respect the diverse financial realities represented in…

Agricultural education's most pressing issue is a lack of qualified classroom teachers. In 2020-2021, 30 states reported the loss of over 70 agricultural education positions, with many schools closing these positions due to inadequate staffing. Furthermore, in 2021-2022, there were 1,680 agricultural education vacancies nationwide and only 789…

When policy advocates debate how best to ensure equity in public education funding, the topic of teacher pension reform rarely comes up. But, in fact, pensions represent a very large and fast-growing source of education spending, much of it distributed in ways that are, in a number of states, anything but equitable. When states subsidize teacher…

Over half a century after pay discrimination became illegal in the United States, a persistent pay gap between men and women continues to hurt our nation's workers and our national economy. Women working full time in the U.S. are paid 82 cents to every dollar earned by men -- but it doesn't stop there. The consequences?of this gap?affect?women…

The Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) was founded in 1975, when it replaced an outdated set of pension arrangements for university staff. The USS was stable for nearly four decades but, in recent years, it has undergone considerable turbulence. The causes include tighter pension regulations, growing life expectancy and lower financial…

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…

This dissertation provides empirical evidence on estimating the treatment effects of school choice programs using quasi-experimental data. Chapter 1 implements the new econometric method proposed by Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2017a) in the context of the magnet school program in Wake County, North Carolina. Chapter 2 gives an in-depth analysis of the…

Financial professionals involved in divorce proceedings, whether for a client or an attorney, often use software to project the ability of a dependent spouse to earn income off of her separate estate. These projections have historically relied on static inputs and use a Monte Carlo simulation to illustrate the paths a portfolio might take. Within…

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.