The Coming Wave of Retirements

With the first round of baby boomers reaching 62 this year, TIAA-CREF has been making changes to prepare for the “academic-retirement parade,” The Chronicle reports.

“Over the last three years, the company has tripled its number of regional offices, to 61, and opened a third site where customer-service representatives take telephone calls. This year, the company increased its number of financial-planning advisers to 1,000.”

At the same time, many colleges and universities “are using managerial tools such as buyouts and ‘phased retirement.’” The Chronicle’s report on retirement trends in academe includes a look at how the University of North Carolina allows faculty members to ease into retirement and a report on how community colleges hope to retain aging professors.

Professors, on average, retire at 66, but that age is “drifting upward,” according to the story. Many faculty members are in no hurry to leave their jobs.

“A TIAA-CREF telephone survey last August of 300 full-time faculty members at four-year institutions, for example, found that 53 percent of professors were ‘very satisfied’ with their jobs, compared with 42 percent of all workers.”

No one is foolish enough to predict that the retirements will lead to lots of new tenure-track openings in academe. But the fact that so many faculty members will be entering retirement age en masse does raise questions about how institutions will deal with the shift.