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American society is aging. In 1980, 11 percent of the U.S. population was over 65. In 2000, the figure was 12.6 percent, and by 2030, it is expected to be 20 percent. Faculty are no exception: their average age increased from 46 in 1988 to 50 in 2004. Because higher education combines no mandatory retirement age with a guarantee of lifetime employment to the tenured, this trend is likely to continue unabated. Nevertheless, higher education has begun to grapple with the likely retirement of a substantial number of faculty. Meanwhile, it has been widely reported that colleges and universities have become much more dependent on part-time and adjunct faculty members, the so-called “contingent faculty.”
It has been less widely considered that over the next 10 years these two trends are likely to converge, resulting in a faculty that looks quite different than the one we’ve become accustomed to over the last half century. Older faculty members came up through a system where tenure-track positions were the rule, rather than the exception. More recent cohorts of faculty have encountered a system where the reverse is true. When the current cohort of professors do retire, the percentage of faculty employed on a contingent basis is likely to balloon, resulting in a very different work environment for most academics.
The Aging Faculty
The basic trend in the distribution of faculty by age is shown in Figure 1. In 1988 approximately 20 percent of faculty members at public comprehensive institutions were aged 55-64, with 2 percent over age 65. By 2004, the percent of faculty aged 55-64 had increased to 29 percent. This represents a 45 percent increase in the share of employment for this age group in 16 years.
While constituting a smaller percentage of the professoriate, trends in the percent of academics over age 65 have been even more dramatic. As part of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act passed in 1986, Congress prohibited mandatory retirement based on age for most workers, with the notable exception of faculty. Instead, Congress specified that colleges and universities could continue the practice of mandatory retirement for faculty beginning at age 70 until 1993. It is likely that this change in the law accounts for the rapid increase in the share of faculty older than traditional retirement age. In 1988, roughly 3 percent of faculty at public comprehensives were older than 65. By 2004, that percentage had climbed to 9 percent, a 6 percentage point increase but a tripling of the share of employment for this group. As life expectancy continues to lengthen, it is likely that an increasingly large proportion of faculty will enter this group.
William R. Doyle is an assistant professor of higher education at Vanderbilt University. He previously served as a senior policy analyst at the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, where he was project manager for the center’s first publication of Measuring Up, a state-by-state report card on higher education.
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