Washington, D.C.
October 18-20, 1995

Building Partnerships that Shape the Future

The Changing Face of The Academic Librarian: A Reaction and A Context

Jay L. Chronister, Professor
and Steven E. Titus, Doctoral Fellow
Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
University of Virginia

The Reaction

I have enjoyed reading Stanley’s manuscript and feel that it represents a good analysis of selected demographic aspects of the changing characteristics of the ARL library staff population. His analysis of the age profile of librarians, and the age distribution of individuals preparing for the profession appears to be an important contribution to manpower planning for future years. The comparisons he makes to the aging of the population in general and to selected occupational groups who have similar preparation requirements provides an interesting context from which to review his findings.

What I would like to do very briefly is to give you some other factors that I feel would provide further meaningful topics to evaluate in terms of developing an expanded understanding of ARL personnel. As part of my presentation I will also describe some findings from a study that Roger Baldwin, Associate Professor from the College of William and Mary, and I are completing regarding full-time instructional faculty and staff, on some of the same variables that Stanley presented. Our data comes from the 1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.

In presenting my remarks I will attempt to adhere to Henry VIII’s comments to his six wives “I’ll not keep you long.”

Some additional areas that I believe might prove to be interesting to investigate in regard to Stanley’s study are differences in aging and retirement trends by:

1. Public vs. private institution classification (Baldwin and I found that faculty at private institutions planned later retirement ages and slightly larger percentages of them were not sure when they would retire).

2. Librarians with faculty rank vs. those with no faculty rank (Does possessing faculty rank have any impact on the career patterns of ARL librarians?).

3. Type of pension plan (Does the participation in a defined benefit vs. defined contribution pension plan appear to make a difference in the retirement ages of librarians?).

4. Gender (Baldwin and I have found that women faculty, in general, plan earlier retirement ages and are on average a younger cohort of faculty than are male faculty).

5. Job satisfaction variables (What job variables are the most problematic for librarians and do any of them relate to early or late retirement ages? Among faculty we found a high degree of job satisfaction, but among faculty planning for retiring between 1992-93 and 1994-95 the four variables most likely to be rated as “dissatisfiers” were: 1) time to keep current in their field [42.9%]; 2) salary [38.3%]; 3) opportunity for advancement at institution [28.6]; and 4) workload [24.6%]).

These items, or variables, are just a few that we have found helpful in our study of faculty career patterns and retirement decisions that may prove informative in studying your profession. They may already have been considered for inclusion in the Wilder study.

The Context

What I would like to do at this time is to provide you with some findings from the study of full-time faculty in which I am involved, since these faculty are members of the same academic community in which you function.

This section is designed to be the context perspective from which to view the report on ARL librarians. The data for this context is derived primarily from the 1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF). Reference may also be made at times to the 1988 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty for comparative purposes.

Faculty Age

A major aging trend is one of the important characteristics of the contemporary cadre of full-time faculty. There were 5% fewer full-time instructional faculty aged 44 or younger in 1992 than in 1987, and there were 2% more full-time instructional faculty aged 55 and older in 1992 than in 1987 (Figure 1).

Twenty-six percent of the full-time instructional faculty and staff were age 55 or older in the NSOPF-93 study compared to 24 percent in that age range in NSOPF-88. As a point of comparison, in 1977-78, 17 percent of the full-time professorate was age 55 or older.

One of the major questions that arose at the time of the passage of the 1986 Amendments to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act was whether the abolition of mandatory retirement would have a different effect by type of institution. The projection made by the National Research Council (NRC) in 1991 was that the effect would be primarily on research universities in terms of faculty continuing employment beyond age 70. Our data confirm that this may happen, especially if we look at the percent of faculty age 55 or older by type and control of institution (Table 1).

As I interviewed some faculty as part of the NRC study cited above, I spoke with a senior faculty member from an Ivy League research university about retirement. He said to me “Why should I retire? I’m 70. I only teach one class a year now. I have my laboratory, and if I retire I lose all of that. I’m not interested in the money; I’m interested in having the facilities available to carry on my career.” This is an important factor for many faculty members, especially those in the sciences.

One of the things we find is that at two-year public institutions, only 24 percent of the faculty there are 55 or older. Many of these faculty are in defined benefit retirement plans where, in order to encourage “early” retirement, years of unearned service credit can be awarded to maintain the amount of pension annuity.

In preparation for this presentation we superimposed the age distribution of full-time instructional faculty on the figures that Stanley had given me for the ARL librarians (Figure 2). It’s a pretty similar pattern on the left side of the chart, but significantly different on the right side. Noticeably, however, there were nearly 8% more 1992 faculty between ages 55-64 than 1994 ARL librarians.

One of the other things we found when we looked at full-time instructional faculty age 55 or older in 1992-93 was that a larger proportion of males (30%) were in that category than were females (17%).

Faculty Retirement and Separation Plans

We are interested not only in when faculty plan to retire but what their other separation or mobility plans may be. As you know, one of the concerns we have in higher education in looking at faculty is what the supply/demand may be in the face of an increase in retirements. So retirement is only one part of the picture.

Participants in the 1993 study were asked what their retirement or separation/mobility plans were for the next three years (Table 2). A little over seven percent planned to retire, three percent planned to accept a part-time job at another postsecondary institution, and 10.5 percent think they may accept a full-time job at another postsecondary institution. The moves to other institutions are not a loss to higher education, but are a loss to their current institution.

The next two figures on Table 2, fortunately, are not any higher; 2.7 percent plan to leave and take a part-time job outside of higher education. Some of these faculty may actually be retiring and the part-time job is a retirement activity. The next group is the 5.7 percent who anticipate accepting a full-time job out of higher education. These last two groups, when added to the retirement group, represent the attrition we worry about in terms of a supply to replace them.

It is interesting that 22.3 percent of the faculty surveyed said that it was very likely they would do one of the things shown in Table 2 in the next three years. What we are dealing with is what faculty say they may do; we don’t quite know what will actually happen.

Another set of data that we have, but which we have not analyzed yet, are the actual retirements from a large sample of institutions. The data includes actual retirements in 1991-92, how many were tenured faculty, how many were faculty without tenure, etc. We will have that data, but it’s not quite ready for analysis.

We broke out the plans of “very likely” to retire during the next three years by age category. As you might expect, the older you get, the more chance there is that you are going to retire in the next three years. Table 3 shows that that assumption holds and the likelihood increased for each successive age group except for the over-70 category. The group that intrigues us — really two groups — are the faculty who are age 70, where 75 percent say, “Yes, we are going to retire in the next three years,” and the group who are over 70. We don’t know what happens when you become 71 or 72 or 73, when only a third of them said they are going to retire. What’s magic about the age 70? In the past, more of the over-age-70 group were unsure about what they were going to do.

Determining faculty interest in early retirement options is also a goal of our study. Faculty were asked whether they would be willing to take an incentive retirement option, if it were offered. Twenty-eight percent of full-time faculty and staff indicated they were willing to take an early retirement option if their institutions offered it. This is a large percentage of faculty willing to consider such an opportunity. An additional 25 percent stated they weren’t quite sure whether they would accept. We have that data broken down by age, but I don’t have the information with me.

Interest in early retirement options was greater at public than at private higher education institutions. Here again we are looking at the difference in response between public and private institutions. We also differentiate faculty based on gender, race/ethnicity, and discipline. We find significant differences by discipline for faculty 55 or older.

Faculty Supply

One issue that comes up, and it’s not part of our study, but it is included here because of a question that was raised during the telephone conference planning for this session, is: Where are replacements for retiring and separating faculty going to come from?

What we did was go back and pull out the 1995 report from the National Academy Press (NAP) to gather information on where we were going to get replacements for retiring faculty. Figure 3 reflects employment plans of doctoral recipients from United States Universities.

From 1973 to 1988 there was a 14 percent decrease in the number of doctorate recipients entering academe. In 1973, 64 percent of doctorate recipients entered academe, 12.5 percent entered other, 11.5 percent entered industry, and 11.6 percent entered government. In 1993, 52.5 percent of new recipients planned to enter academe, 18.8 percent cited “other employment, 18.7 percent entered industry/self-employment, and 10 percent entered government. These data reveal a 13 percent increase in “other” and industry/self-employment, and a 14 percent decrease in academe and government. However, from 1988 to 1993, there was an increase of three percent planning to enter academe. This reflects 12 percent fewer entering academe in 1993 (52 percent) than in 1973 (64 percent).

What was bad back in the early years (1973 to 1983) was that there was a plateau in the number of doctorates awarded and a decline in the percent who said they were going into academe. Figures in the NAP report show that for 1993 there were 26,386 doctorates awarded to US citizens and permanent residents. The 1993 figure was an increase, so there was a rebound increase for several years after several of years of real decline. During the years when there was a plateau in doctorates awarded, the plateau was maintained because U.S. institutions were awarding doctorates to an increasing number of individuals who were in the country on temporary visas. During the plateau years there was an actual decline in those awarded to U.S. citizens.

The part of the question that Roger Baldwin and I are not looking at is where we will get replacements for the retiring faculty he and I are studying. Will they come from new doctoral recipients or from other sources? Other researchers are doing the supply study. It is a major concern and it is very critical in some of the disciplines.

I hope the information I have presented sets the context for Stanley’s report. Thank you for letting me join you today.

Table 1

PERCENTAGE OF FULL-TIME INSTRUCTIONAL FACULTY AND STAFF AGED 55 OR OLDER BY TYPE AND CONTROL OF INSTITUTION: FALL 1992

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, NSOPF-93, faculty survey.

Table 2

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty.”

Table 3

PERCENTAGE OF FULL-TIME INSTRUCTIONAL FACULTY REPORTING THEY WERE “VERY LIKELY” TO RETIRE IN THE NEXT THREE YEARS BY CURRENT AGE: FALL 1992

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty.”