Education Watch: Take It or Leave It
by Jeffrey Selingo
The stock-market boom of the late 1990s ballooned college faculty retirement accounts. Now, that boom is enabling many faculty to take advantage of early-retirement programs. Such incentives are increasingly being offered to faculty these days by states and universities looking to relieve the budget squeeze caused by the current recession.
At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 117 professors signed up for two early-retirement offers last year. At the University of Idaho, 76 faculty took advantage of an incentive program. And 81 professors decided to retire early at Rutgers University last year.
There's another reason early-retirement programs at colleges have mushroomed in the last decade. After a 1994 change in federal law eliminated mandatory retirement for faculty at age 70, nearly half of all major colleges have offered financial incentives to encourage professors to retire early, according to a survey by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
"There was a concern after the end of mandatory retirement that people would just continue working past 70," says Susan Eklund, the Byron A. Root Professor of Aging at Indiana University. "But that's not happening. We have these incentive programs and they're feasible for faculty who have accumulated lots of assets."
Early retirement in higher education, of course, means something different than it does in many other professions, where employees may be able retire in their 50s, Eklund notes. In academia, leaving early is often characterized as getting out before you turn 70.
That was the case for Larry Klar, 60, who retired last year from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He had planned to retire at age 62, but then the state offered a plan he didn't think would come along again: It added five years of service or age, or a combination of both, to professors who were eligible to retire. "People define others by their work, and I was prepared to no longer be defined that way," says Klar, who was a professor of hospitality and tourism management. "I feel fulfilled with my career as a professor for 28 years at the university."
In fact, few professors seem to regret their decision to retire, says Eklund. In an annual survey she conducts among faculty who retire early from Indiana University, only about 3 percent usually say they would have stayed on if they had to make the choice again. Most professors like the freedom that retirement offers, Eklund has found; others reject the direction in which they believe higher education is headed. "They're distressed with the shift toward the corporate mentality or the fact that we get very few dollars from the state these days," she says.
Deciding to leave academia earlier than you intended, of course, is not an easy decision. Besides the financial considerations, there's the big question of what you're going to do with the hours you had planned to use teaching or advising students. Yet, when faculty contemplating retirement visit Todd Hunt, the executive director of the Retired Faculty Association at Rutgers, most of the questions center around money and benefits, and not what's next in their lives.
"You have to figure out how you're going to structure your time," says Hunt, who retired four and a half years ago at age 60. "I spent the first two months of my retirement staring at my briefcase."
Ronald G. Ehrenberg, the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and director of the AAUP study notes that many retired professors still have much to offer to institutions. "Colleges should be finding ways to encourage retired faculty to stay," says Ehrenberg. "Most good teachers are always good teachers."
Many professors do look for ways to return to work in some capacity-some for the money, but most to focus on a particular interest. In some cases, the colleges themselves are welcoming back retired faculty. The AAUP found that 27 percent of the 608 colleges it surveyed have formal programs that allow tenured faculty to gradually ease into retirement, by teaching part-time.
After taking early retirement last year, Carlie C. Tartakov returned part-time to Iowa State University, to continue running a university-wide diversity program she had developed. "I love teaching about diversity, and as a returning retiree, I'm not encumbered by all the meetings and other responsibilities you have as a faculty member," Tartakov says.
