To Retire or Not?

by Clark, Robert L.; Hammond, P. Brett; Wharton School Pension Research Council

• ISBN13: 9780812235722
• ISBN10: 081223572X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-10-18
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

Colleges and universities across the country face huge challenges as their faculties age, their budgets stagnate, and mandatory retirement becomes a thing of the past. InTo Retire or Not?the nation's foremost authorities on retirement policy and practice provide a critical assessment of academic labor markets and retirement patterns, explaining how to adjust pension and other incentive programs to ensure proper replenishment of intellectual and human capital. Case studies vividly illustrate how to predict the need for special retirement programs, how to structure voluntary early-out benefit plans, and how age-based retirement incentives work in practice. Recent legal decisions are assessed and critiqued. A recent amendment to the U.S. Age Discrimination in Employment Act ended mandatory retirement for tenured faculty at colleges and universities across the country. This law let individual faculty members enjoy an economic benefit enjoyed by almost all other American workers: they could choose to continue working past age 70 or "sell" the benefit back to their universities in exchange for earlier retirement. At the same time, however, educational administrators were faced with a faculty bulge created by the expansion of the professorate in the 1960s and early '70s, and the so-called "surplus army" of Ph.D.s of the 1980s. Colleges and universities everywhere are now faced with the higher costs of retaining senior professors instead of hiring entry-level replacements at lower salaries.

Author Biography

Robert L. Clark is Professor of Economics and Business at North Carolina State University. P. Brett Hammond is Director of Corporate Projects at the Teachers Insurance Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF).

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Introduction: Changing Retirement Policies and Patterns in Higher Education	1	(20)
Robert L. Clark
P. Brett Hammond
Faculty Retirement at Three North Carolina Universities	21	(18)
Robert L. Clark
Linda S. Ghent
Juanita Kreps
Age-Based Retirement Incentives for Tenured Faculty Members: Satisfying the Legal Requirements	39	(26)
David L. Raish
Survey of Early Retirement Practices in Higher Education	65	(16)
John Keefe
Cornell Confronts the End of Mandatory Retirement	81	(25)
Ronald G. Ehrenberg
Michael W. Matier
David Fontanella
The University of California Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Programs	106	(16)
Ellen Switkes
Ending Mandatory Retirement in Two State Universities	122	(6)
Robert M. O'Neil
Intangible and Tangible Retirement Incentives	128	(10)
John Keefe
Faculty Retirement: Reflections on Experience in an Uncapped Environment	138	(10)
Sharon P. Smith
Reflections on an Earlier Study of Mandatory Retirement: What Came True and What We Can Still Learn	148	(19)
Karen C. Holden
W. Lee Hansen
List of Contributors	167	(4)
Index	171