This grant produced a paper, "Coming of Age in Academia: A Study of Retired Faculty in the United Kingdom and the United States, " which was published as Issue Number 62 of Research Dialogue.
The paper is based on a survey of faculty who retired from two universities in the United Kingdom and two in the United States. The survey was conducted in the spring of 1998. The results were quite encouraging in terms of overall satisfaction with life in retirement. The researcher found that in general retired faculty have adequate financial resources, adequate health care, and a host of enjoyable career-related and leisure pursuits.
The survey clearly showed that faculty have adequate, if not more than adequate, retirement incomes. For example, at the University of Rhode Island, where TIAA-CREF is the dominant pension provider, 48 percent of retirees reported that they were doing "very well" in retirement, with an additional 35 percent reporting "adequate" financial status in retirement. No survey respondent from the University of Rhode Island reported poor financial status in retirement. Indeed, approximately two-thirds of these retirees reported that their income in retirement was greater than or equal to their pre-retirement income.
