This grant produced a paper, "Did the Elimination of Mandatory Retirement Affect Faculty Retirement Flows?" available as National Bureau of Economic Research working paper No. 8378.
The researchers assembled a database – the Princeton Retirement Survey (PRS) – to analyze the effect of the elimination of mandatory retirement on faculty retirement patterns. The database is a longitudinal panel formed by merging payroll records from a sample of 104 colleges and universities with pension data provided by TIAA-CREF. The PRS database includes all regular faculty at sample institutions who were age 50 or older as of September 1, 1986. These individuals were followed over the subsequent 9-11 years, yielding extensive data on faculty retirement behavior in both the mandatory retirement (pre-1994) and post mandatory retirement eras.
The authors find a significant impact on faculty retirement after mandatory retirement ended in 1994. This impact is focused on faculty for which the mandatory retirement rules were a binding constraint. For faculty under the age of 70, they found no systematic changes in retirement patterns. They estimated that approximately 25 percent of 60 year old faculty will remain employed until age 70, and approximately 40 percent of those still active at age 65 will stay on the job until age 70. For faculty who continue until the age of 70, they found a very sharp drop in retirement rates at ages 70 and 71. Hence the cessation of mandatory retirement has led to a substantial increase in the fraction of faculty who remain employed into their seventies. The percentage of 70 year old faculty still employed three years later has risen to 50 percent, from 13 percent prior to 1994. Given the overall aging of college and university faculty, these findings suggest that many and perhaps most colleges and universities will see a rise in the proportion of elderly faculty over the next decade.
Related Reading
Read article entitled Keep Senior Faculty or Urge Them to Retire? , written by Robert L. Clark of North Carolina State University, which takes a closer look at the Ashenfelter and Card study.
This article appears in the November/December 2001 issue of Trusteeship. Copyright 2001 Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
