Recruitment, Retention, and Retirement in Higher Education: Building and Managing the Faculty of the Future (review)

The massification of higher education during the 1960s and 1970s around the world opened enormous opportunities for academic careers. In most countries during that period, academic staff (the equivalent of the American "faculty") received permanent positions. Those academics who entered higher education 30 years ago are now approaching retirement age. In several countries, concerns have arisen about the future recruitment, retention, and retirement of academic staff. Is higher education still an attractive workplace for young graduates? Do they continue their career in higher education? In countries with mandatory retirement laws, are there enough young academics to fill vacancies and how do we keep productive and valuable staff past their retirement age? In countries without mandatory retirement how do we organize voluntary retirement to ensure a necessary staff turnover to renew staff structure?

Robert Clark and Jennifer Ma's Recruitment, Retention, and Retirement in Higher Education deals with these important questions in the American context. Based on a conference held in April 2004 and sponsored by the TIAA-CREF institute, the main perspective of the chapter authors is how American universities and colleges can manage current challenges such as aging academic staff, rising health care costs for retirees, and the stimulation of voluntary retirement. Although the title gives another impression, there are no chapters on how institutions can manage the recruitment or retention of academic staff. Institutional policies on health care and retirement benefits are instead seen as triggers to attract academic staff and retain them. Thus, this book provides the reader with insightful analyses and valuable descriptions of case-specific institutional policies in these areas, even as the authors pass over broader faculty management issues.

Health care benefits are good instruments with which to attract academic staff. But spiraling inflation in health costs makes the provision of health-care benefits a costly policy. Schieber (chap. 6) discusses the opportunities for universities and colleges to restructure their health care benefits for retirees but also for any staff member. He develops his description from a detailed analysis of developments in health-care benefits in the larger American society. Employers' main response to increases in health-care costs is a greater cost-sharing between employers and employees/retirees.

Rust (chap. 7) presents an adapted life-cycle model which he calls an "Academic Retirement Model" to evaluate, as his chapter title puts it, the "impact of retiree health plans on faculty retirement decisions." Rust argues that his model can help institutions model the effects of their benefit plans. I am rather skeptical of this claim. It is, at best, speculative to predict future rates of inflation and economic wealth and to forecast academics' decision-making on their retirement.

In a system without mandatory retirement, administrators have little control over the retirement age of staff. All of the chapters on retirement address this steering problem. Three basic types of retirement plans are described in more detail by various authors: basic retirement plans, phased retirement plans, and buy-out programs. In summarizing the findings, it is fair to conclude that planning voluntary retirement is a difficult business. Shoven (chap. 13) shows that basic retirement plans with simple monetary incentives might work adequately, as, for example, at Stanford University.

The responsiveness of faculty to monetary incentives is also proven by Pencavel's analysis (chap. 10) of the University of California's buy-out programs at the beginning of the 1990s. But Pencavel also shows that this responsiveness has its limits. Phased retirement plans seem effective in helping academics retire earlier and make smoother transitions into full retirement (Allen, chap. 9; Leslie & Janson, chap. 11; Switkes, chap. 12). Those plans may have severe effects for departments, especially in situation when phased-retirees are not adequately replaced. In general, the assessment of these plans shows that both teaching-active (faculty members focused on teaching rather than research) and less satisfied...