A recent New York Times article indicated that the fraction of full-time faculty members in the United States older than age 50 more than doubled between 1969 and 2005, increasing from 23 percent to over 50 percent. We explore why this graying of American academia occurred, and some of its consequences.
Most of the professors who have been retiring in recent years took their first academic jobs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Colleges and universities were expanding rapidly during those years, which meant that job opportunities were abundant and many young faculty members were added. New hiring slowed as the rate of growth of higher education slowed down in the 1990s and afterwards, which decreased the ratio of younger to older faculty.
Congress passed a law in the early 1990s that made it illegal for colleges to force faculty members to retire unless the schools clearly demonstrated that a professor could not teach or do research at a modestly high level. Prior to that law, colleges forced their faculties to retire at a given age, usually 65, and made exceptions for those members they considered special in their teaching, research, or other contributions. Two former colleagues of mine, the Nobel Prize-winning economists George Stigler and T. W. Schultz, were kept on for this reason- in Stigler's case until he died at age 81, while Schultz did not fully retire until he was in his mid-eighties.
This is a bad law because colleges now cannot force less competent or less energetic older faculty to retire while keeping the more productive faculty members since they are required by law to offer the same retirement terms to their entire faculty. The older system allowed schools to undo some of the harmful effects of the faculty tenure system by eventually retiring faculty that they should never have appointed. to be sure, given the strong competition among schools of higher education in the United States, the growing physical and mental health of older faculty might anyway have led colleges to raise the general retirement age.
Colleges have tried to cope with their inability to force retirement by offering a variety of bonuses to all faculty members who agree to retire voluntarily or go from full time to part time. However, if older members of a faculty like their jobs, optimal buyout plans that try to induce voluntary retirement would generally lead to later retirements than under a compulsory system that is flexible enough to allow for treating different faculty differently. As a result, these buyout plans have not prevented faculties from aging, although they have slowed that down since about a third of eligible older faculty members usually agree to be bought out. Unfortunately, these plans often have an adverse selection effect since the more capable faculty are the ones who frequently accept a buyout. They may not retire but instead take a job elsewhere, often outside of academia.
The sharply improved healthiness of older Americans has led many of them to continue working at later ages than did earlier generations. This is true for all types of jobs, but the effect is especially important in occupations requiring intellectual and other mental skills, such as teaching and research at colleges. These skills now usually last until men and women are in their seventies, whereas physical skills, say those required in masonry or assembly line work, tend to decline rapidly as workers get into their fifties.
It is more difficult to understand the consequences than the causes of the aging of academic faculties, although one obvious effect is that opportunities for young PhDs have deteriorated. The slowdown in the expansion of institutions of higher learning in the past couple of decades has increased the scarcity of academic positions for younger PhDs. As a result, young academics have to concentrate more on doing good enough teaching and producing enough research to merit tenure in this tougher environment. Adding to this job pressure for American academics is that the market for faculty, along with that of many other services, has gone global since students from all over the world come in large numbers to get their graduate education at American universities, especially in the sciences, economics, and a few of the more humanistic fields. Many of the best of the foreign students stay on to teach and do research. They compete against Americans looking for academic positions, and hence narrow the market for Americans. Indeed, their competition partly explains why in many fields fewer Americans are getting their PhDs, and instead are taking MBAs, law degrees, and other advanced degrees where competition from foreigners has so far been less severe.
One might think that aging faculties would tilt toward a more politically conservative faculty since older persons tend to be more conservative. However, as the Times article indicates, this does not appear to be true with regard to the faculty aging that is occurring now. Many older faculty members, especially in the humanities and social sciences, were active in the student and civil rights movements of the 1960s and '70s, and have maintained a radical, often Marxist, orientation toward events and history. The tough competition for academic jobs gives younger faculty much less time for radical and other political causes. Moreover, younger faculty went to school after many of these cultural wars were over, and they have more moderate views, although most still consider themselves Democrats, and are usually anti-markets and anti-business.
Important new ideas in different fields come disproportionately from younger persons, and academic research is no exception. Significant advances not only in mathematics, but also in biology (such as Crick and Watson), in economics, and even in the humanities have typically been made by younger rather than older persons. This means that while the aging of faculties at American universities adds greater experience, faculties have lost some freshness of approach that comes from having younger faculty. Of course, it is possible, and perhaps even probable, that growing life expectancy and healthiness of older persons will shift ages of peak creativity toward older ages as well.
The one recommendation from my analysis that would slow down the aging of college faculties is to abolish the federal law that prevents colleges from having compulsory retirement ages for most faculty members. The strong competition among these schools would lead to more effective utilization of older teachers and researchers than would result from legislation and regulations.