Colleges face growing costs from 'reluctant retirees'

Having worked 35 years at the University of Iowa, Betsy Altmaier was absolutely "ready for a new environment" on May 15, her last day as a professor.

With changes on the horizon in her field and college, Altmaier decided 2015 was as good a year as any to stop collecting a paycheck for her position in the Psychological and Quantitative Foundations Department. At age 63, however, she knows her decision to pursue a traditional retirement has become rather unusual among tenured professors.

A recent national survey by the TIAA-CREF Institute of 770 tenured faculty members age 50 or older found two out of three said they expect to work past normal retirement age or were already doing so.

If more of those reluctant retirees can't be persuaded to retire closer to the traditional age, higher education institutions will face a host of inevitable consequences — costing universities and taxpayers more, while potentially doing a disservice to younger faculty and students alike, said Paul Yakoboski, a senior economist at the TIAA-CREF Institute.

For "society at large," normal retirement age continues to cluster "around being eligible for Social Security benefits," Yakoboski said. "But what is 'normal' outside academia doesn't apply inside academia."

For example, this year's so-called "early retirement" program at UI included 89-year-old Wallace Tomasini, who had worked full-time in the UI School of Art and Art History since 1958.

Altmaier said the unwillingness of some of her peers to exit the stage more quickly and gracefully has disrupted what "used to be a healthy rhythm" of experience and change in the the academic world.

"I feel that we need to leave," Altmaier said. "It used to be that faculty left at 65, and you could count on that. ... I simply cannot believe that having a department (or a university) that is too top heavy with people over 65 is a good thing."

A 2012 TIAA-CREF Institute analysis of 17,695 tenured faculty found there was an age-associated trend in which productivity in terms of factors such as classes taught and published work steadily increased until age 40 and remained constant between 40 and 60. After that, there was a general downward turn, but one with increasing variability among the older faculty members.

Despite the variability in performance, faculty salaries overall continued to increase until age 75, according to the report.

'Oldest profession'

After earning her Ph.D. at 25 and spending three years on faculty at the University of Florida, Altmaier came to Iowa City in 1980 and worked her way up to associate and full professor in the UI College of Education — also doing stints as associate dean and associate provost.

When she arrived, Altmaier said, the majority of professors were expected to step down around the time they qualified for Social Security.

Yet over the course of her career, the median age for professors has climbed to 55 — higher than in any other profession in the nation. And the number of professors and senior staff over 65 nationwide doubled from 2000 to 2010, helping academia earn the tongue-in-cheek distinction of being the nation's "new oldest profession," said Brian Kaskie, an associate professor of Health Management and Policy in the UI College of Public Health.

"Tenure alone isn't the complicating feature," Yakoboski said. "It's tenure combined with the fact that, decades ago, institutions did away with mandatory retirement ages. While it's understood in some schools, departments, colleges and institutions that professors should give up their tenured lines when they reach between 65 and 70, there no longer is any legal requirement to do so."

The resulting higher financial and operational costs will continue to pile up as long as the number of tenured professors turning 65 each year exceeds the number of those retiring,

Kaskie estimates that, if current retirement rates continue at a large public university like UI, the annual salary payouts for all faculty and staff members over age 65 would rise from the $90 million range in 2015 to more than $240 million in 2023.

According to the studies cited by Kaskie and Yakoboski, these are additional likely institutional costs:

• Colleges and universities, to counteract growing salary and benefits costs, may need to increase tuition rates or request larger government subsidies.
• Colleges and universities will have fewer tenure lines available to offer younger faculty, requiring an expansion of less desirable, non-tenure adjunct positions.
• Under-performing older faculty members will continue in their classrooms or administrative posts because post-tenure evaluation policies have little effect on improving their performance.
• Students and younger faculty will butt heads with entrenched administrators who were trained in an era with vastly different gender and family expectations.

A new arrival

Altmaier said she turned in her paperwork to the College of Education long before the university started accepting applications to this year's early retirement program. She and her husband decided on their own that she could afford to retire, and as a professor emerita, she expects to have the time she needs to write the books she still wants to write.

For Altmaier, the title bestows her with perks like computer, office and parking privileges at the university — even though she doesn't draw a university salary.

In the meantime, Altmaier said she will continue to keep in close contact with her colleagues and students because she's still on committees for three dissertations that have yet to be completed.

"That'll take a few years," she said. "... (But) I won't charge the university for that."

The department already has hired her replacement: Martin Kivlighan, 32, who just completed his doctoral studies in counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"That's what's supposed to happen," Altmaier said. "Old people leaving, middle-career people energetically working hard, and new people infusing the whole process."

Kivlighan said "so much of my efforts have been poured into obtaining a job" that, not surprisingly, he hasn't given a great deal of thought to when he might eventually retire from a job he has yet to begin.

"I guess I assumed that ... full professors wouldn't retire until much later into their career," Kivlighan said. "Part of that assumption comes from my experience being able to witness so many older faculty members thoroughly enjoying this line of work. It's what really made me interested in being a professor."

Kivlighan, who is moving to Iowa this summer with his wife and infant son, said he knows he is very fortunate to have found a tenure-track position in today's academic climate, but he also noticed that "there were a lot of positions announced this year."

Perhaps, he said, "we are catching the first wave of that older generation starting to retire."

Reach Jeff Charis-Carlson at 319-887-5435 or jcharisc@press-citizen.com. Follow him at @jeffcharis

The graying/silvering of academia

Over the past few decades, the academic workforce has aged more rapidly than the rest of the nation due to a number of factors:

• Life expectancy has increased significantly.
• Because academic jobs are less physically demanding, many faculty and staff enter older age with better health and are less likely to stop working because of disease or disability.
• Academic jobs correspond with higher levels of personal satisfaction and a greater sense of purpose.
• Personal finances, including the need to maintain eligibility for health insurance and other benefits, often necessitate working well beyond the "normal" retirement age.

— Source: Brian Kaskie, associate professor of Health Management and Policy in the UI College of Public Health

Grinnell develops a culture of retirement

Long before the lifting of the mandatory retirement age for faculty nationwide, faculty at Grinnell College were willingly signing up for a senior faculty status track that, in addition to reducing their salary and teaching responsibilities, offers them specific duties in which they can continue to serve their students and their colleagues.

"Over the past 10 years," said James Mulholland, director of compensation and assistant treasurer for Grinnell, "we've seen a significant influx of tenure-track faculty, not because we are adding a bunch of positions, but because a significant number of our faculty retire."

Mulholland said Grinnell has 24 faculty members who are 65 or older. Of those, 13 are on senior faculty status. Of the faculty members who are 70 or older, all but one are senior faculty status.

University of Iowa public health professor Brian Kaskie listed Grinnell as one of the schools on the forefront of finding creative ways to address the challenges of an aging academic workforce.

"(They facilitate) this cross-communication that you don't see at a lot of large universities," Kaskie said. "That's the kind of good, healthy environment you want to see on a campus that's interested in their aging workforce."

Officials at the University of Northern Iowa likewise say their university already has a healthy rate of retirement-eligible faculty turning in their paperwork. That is one of the reasons the university decided against offering an early retirement program this year.

"We have chosen not to simply because we are seeing a constant exodus of individuals who are retirement-eligible," said Michelle Byers, who has served as UNI's director of human resources for 15 years. "We haven't felt the need to incent them to go."

Byers also agreed with concerns that, "with a widespread early retirement incentive, it's hit or miss as to who would take advantage of (it)."

Employment-related decisions, she said, "need to be focused solely on performance-related issues."

— Jeff Charis-Carlson

Approaches to reduce reluctance to retire

Paul Yakoboski, a senior economist at the TIAA-CREF Institute, said it is often an inability to imagine life post-retirement that has made faculty members reluctant to even consider the option.

Moreover, his recent study noted, only half of the reluctant retirees said they have sat down with a financial adviser to evaluate whether they were in a position to retire.

Even when finances were not a problem, the "reluctant by choice" faculty members still needed more help imagining what life would be like without coming to campus on a regular basis.

University of Iowa public health professor Brian Kaskie said by pointing out the financial and institutional consequences of a rapidly aging academic workforce, he and other scholars aren't calling on institutions to force anyone into retirement.

"It's not about just getting those old guys out of here," Kaskie said. "There are some of them who are terrific people who want to stay here. They maintain their productivity, so the question becomes how do we keep them happy and healthy?"

Faculty members respond better, Yakoboski said, when they feel the "pull" of retirement rather a "push" into it.

"My reasons for deciding to retire now have nothing to do with the early retirement program offered by UI," said Steven Vincent, a recently retired professor and former head of Oral Pathology, Radiology and Medicine in the UI College of Dentistry.

"I have worked here for almost 35 years, and I still feel very effective in providing specialty patient care, and my student evaluations continue to be very good," Vincent said. "So rather than wait until one or both start to inevitably decline, even a little, I decided to leave. My plan had always been to retire 'one day' before I noticed my skills declining, or hopefully before anyone else noticed."

— Jeff Charis-Carlson