A real-world colleague of mine used to ask “Where do old marketing people go? I never see any around …”
Hmmm.
Now, Bloomberg has broken the code and I can answer my former colleague:
“They go into teaching … and stay there.”
Now, it’s getting real personal.
A survey commissioned by Fidelity (who the heck knows why) reported in the journal Inside Higher Ed found that “some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at all.” Never retire at all?
Here’s what’s going on …
According to Bloomberg …
Another study cited in the article calculated that since the 1970s only 28 percent of higher education faculty had retired by age 65.
In the Fidelity survey, professors ranked personal reasons more often than financial concerns for continuing to work.
Only 55 percent declared that uncertainty over having enough money to retire comfortably was their main reason for staying, while 89 percent said they “want to stay busy and productive” and 64 percent said they “love the work too much to give it up.”
The phenomenon of the teacher who sticks around well past age 70 has been widely noted, yet colleges have had little success in mitigating its impact.
Why?
Most professors in slipping fields — don’t feel the effects much.
If a major was popular in the 1980s, and a school hired and tenured professors in response, the school keeps them regardless of how many majors the field has in 2010.
Tenure frees the profs from worrying about student interest.
They love having smaller classes and fewer papers to grade.
The college has no flexibility to shift the workforce when demand goes down — a professor of sociology can’t shift to chemistry.
In today’s economy, is there any worse policy than guaranteeing any employee the same job for 40-plus years, even if he or she meets few of the organization’s needs and costs a lot in the bargain?
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Tenure started 100 years ago as a way to protect academic freedom
In 1969, tenured and tenure-track faculty amounted to 78 percent of the higher education workforce.
By 2009, the tenure rate had slipped to 33 percent, .
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Bloomberg says: We need another incentive, and there is none more powerful among selective institutions than the U.S. News rankings, which scare administrators every year.
What if the rankings included another variable, “Percentage of professors over age 65”?
No university wants to top that list.
Like I said, it’s getting personal … not the tenure part, the too old part … some of us still have gas in our tanks !
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