On June 18, 2009, Marvin G. Carmichael will — somewhat reluctantly — retire after four decades at Clemson University. “I’ve talked to some people who can’t wait, who are counting the hours,” he says, with his departure date (required under his retirement plan) approaching. “I’m not.”
Mr. Carmichael stayed at Clemson after earning his undergraduate degree there in 1971, and has risen through the staff ranks to become director of financial aid, as well as assistant to the president and chief of staff.
He is not the only senior administrator who will soon depart from the South Carolina institution: Some 22 percent of Clemson’s employees are now or will become eligible to retire in the next five years, according to the South Carolina Budget & Control Board’s office of human resources.
Mr. Carmichael, 57, and many of his colleagues are baby boomers, the 78.2 million Americans alive today who were born between 1946 and 1964. The baby-boom generation, larger than those directly before or after it, has fueled the U.S. labor force for decades. But as the boomers age and begin to retire in the coming years, they will leave a sizable hole in the labor market. An estimated 6,000 jobs in postsecondary-education administration will have to be filled annually between 2004 and 2014, the result of the field’s growth and the retirement of current workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Crisis or ‘Red Herring’?
How the anticipated national recruitment squeeze will affect higher education is difficult to predict, but many colleges expect to lose large chunks of their senior faculty and staff over the next decade. Wary human-resources directors around the country are preparing to intensify recruiting efforts while they beef up their programs to develop talented administrators internally.
Observers say many institutions are largely unprepared for what lies ahead.
Alice Miller, a consultant with the executive-search firm Witt/Kieffer, predicts that there will be at least a 50-percent turnover among senior administrators in the next five to 10 years, an estimate that jibes with demographics at many institutions. At Montgomery College, a Maryland community college, 55 percent of administrators are older than 55, and 45 percent will be eligible to retire by 2010. At the University of Kansas, 61 percent of senior administrators are 55 or over. At the University of Arizona, the annual retirement rate of 2 percent is expected to double or triple in the next five to 10 years.
Still, those numbers may tell an incomplete story, say some recruiting experts. Most administrators do not enter senior positions until they are already in their 40s or 50s, says John M. Isaacson, managing director and founder of Isaacson, Miller, another executive-search firm. Because of rapid turnover as employees enter and leave those senior positions toward the end of their careers, administrative and staff ranks boast a much broader age distribution than the faculty.
“This one, I think, is a red herring,” asserts Mr. Isaacson, especially compared with the situation in the faculty, where, he said, professors are hired in waves and remain in their positions until retirement, creating a glut of open positions all at once.
The situation varies greatly from institution to institution. Corban College, in Salem, Ore., for example, has recently brought in younger faculty and staff members, and now “we have quite a broad selection of middle-aged, younger, and older faculty and staff,” says Reno R. Hoff, president of the small, Christian college. As a result, he said, the impact of retirements is less.
But many colleges grew tremendously as baby boomers began to attend college in record numbers in the 1960s, and must now deal with the aging of workers hired in those years of rapid expansion.
“There was such a significant amount of hiring in the late 60s and early 70s, when we were in a growth spurt,” says Kathleen McCluskey-Fawcett, senior vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Kansas. Now, she says, “most of us are getting old.”
The trend cuts across types of institutions: Two studies by the American Association of Community Colleges in 2001 showed that 79 percent of community-college presidents planned to retire within the next decade, and senior administrators who traditionally replaced them were aging as well. “We had our heyday in the 60s, and those individuals who came into the community-college movement at that time are leaving in large numbers,” says Norma G. Kent, vice president for communications at the organization.
Making Plans
Despite those warnings, some human-resources consultants say many colleges are poorly prepared to replace the administrators who will soon depart.
“We don’t do a very good job of planning for leadership successions” in higher education, says Ms. Miller, the search-firm consultant. That lack of preparation is a symptom of the culture of academic administration, which, she says, does not require leaders to develop their own successors.
With time to prepare, transitions run more smoothly, and colleges that plan out how (or if) they will replace a retiring worker will have a leg up in the tightening labor market.
South Carolina has taken a proactive role, in the form of the Teacher and Employee Retention Incentive, which was originally intended to help retain veteran teachers. State employees — including those at public colleges and universities — who are eligible for retirement can choose to “pre-retire,” remaining at their jobs for another five years while accumulating their retirement benefits in a sealed account.
At Clemson some 216 faculty and staff members are participating in the program, including Mr. Carmichael. “If all these people walk out the door at the same time, we’re in trouble,” says Lawrence Nichols II, Clemson’s chief human-resources officer. But “because you know who the people are, and you know the date they are leaving ... you have some time to prepare.”
With colleges looking to fill more posts in a tighter labor market, “the talent war that most institutions are fighting is going to get more intense,” said Ira W. Krinsky, a hiring consultant at Korn/Ferry International, another executive-search firm.
The crunch may have already begun: Andy Brantley, chief executive of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, notes that “search firms and universities are beginning to experience difficulty in finding qualified and prepared individuals for certain positions.”
More money, energy, and time must be spent recruiting from a smaller pool of candidates who may be looking for higher pay and more benefits, an investment only wealthy institutions may be comfortable making. “We are after the best and the brightest, and that is getting to be costly for public institutions,” says Steve Lustig, the University of California at Berkeley’s associate vice chancellor for health and human services. It may be costly for Berkeley, where 42 percent of the work force is currently eligible to retire.
Recruiters say institutions should play to their strengths as well as their pocketbooks. For example, Mr. Nichols says that, instead of dwelling on Clemson’s rural location, he promotes the area’s natural beauty, low tax and crime rates, and South Carolina’s status as “the golf capital of the United States.”
Universities must also re-examine the benefits they offer: Younger workers are often more interested in how a nonprofit organization helps its employees balance work and life than they are in traditional benefits like a pension plan, according to a 2005 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
The New (and Old) Recruits
Steven J. Nelson, associate vice president for human resources and payroll at the University of Detroit Mercy, figures that, in the near future, he will find new hires the way he always has.
“We will probably fill our vacancies in the traditional manners that universities do — recruiting, advertising — and I don’t anticipate that’s going to be any more difficult than it has been,” he says.
But even expanded recruiting efforts may not be enough. “There’s no organization that’s just going to be able to go out and hire all the talent it needs. The market just isn’t there,” says Inette Dishler, who runs a staff-development program at Berkeley.
Three different searches for a director of nursing at Montgomery College have come up empty, according to Vivian M. Lawyer, chief human-resources officer there. With the recruiting squeeze expected to worsen, Ms. Lawyer said, colleges may need to settle for less-qualified candidates than institutions had come to expect. “We may need to be satisfied with a less-experienced person who we can then develop and grow,” she said.
Colleges may count on employees staying at work for longer to help close the gap. Boomers born after 1960 will have to work until they are 67 to qualify for full Social Security retirement benefits — a year longer than those born before 1954 — buying colleges some time. The last of the boomers won’t reach full eligibility until 2031, and many will most likely decide to stay at work past their retirement date.
Some institutions may look to turn to a less-than-obvious source to help replace retiring baby boomers: retired baby boomers.
“Not only are we going to be recruiting people in the traditional manner, we’re also going to be recruiting retirees,” says John J. Heuer, vice president for human resources at the University of Pennsylvania.
Demographics may lend a helping hand. With Americans living longer than ever, many may decide to return to work after retirement. Bringing experienced administrators back to work in part-time or consulting roles to bridge the gap until more permanent replacements can be found is not a new concept. It was practiced at colleges during World War II, according to Mr. Krinsky, when many younger professors and administrators were conscripted into the military.
Growing Leaders
At the same time, colleges and universities are looking to beef up their efforts to find mentors for younger staff members already working at the institution, to prepare them to take on senior roles.
“The irony,” says Ms. Miller of Witt/Kieffer, “is that many universities behave similar to the shoemaker whose children have no shoes,” offering management training to outside clients but not using those skills internally.
That is not the case everywhere, however. At the University of Arizona, the median age of senior administrators is 56. But officials do not anticipate any problems replacing those senior staff members, thanks to efforts to develop young talent within the university.
“I don’t know that we’ve been incredibly deliberate about this, but it’s something we’ve done — looking constantly for ways to grow internal leaders,” says Allison Vaillancourt, associate vice president for human resources at Arizona and president-elect of CUPA-HR. Promising young staff members are rotated onto committees or given ambitious projects to complete in order to “help them get some experience,” she said.
The result, Ms. Vaillancourt says, is that Arizona will not be forced to hire candidates from outside the organization, even if the university does decide to conduct a national search for senior positions to “look at what’s out there.”
At the University of Kansas, most senior administration posts are filled by faculty members, and five or six professors participate in a formal fellowship program each year to gain experience in leadership posts.
Current administrators hope that “some of these people will be interested in replacing my generation,” said Ms. McCluskey-Fawcett of KU. But it isn’t always easy, she said. Many professors refer to joining the ranks of senior administrators as “going over to the dark side.”
Still, those “institutions that are being intentional about identifying those emerging leaders,” says Mr. Brantley of CUPA-HR, “are going to come out ahead of the curve.”
LOOMING RETIREMENTS AT 3 INSTITUTIONS
- U. of Kansas
-
Percentage of workers who are 55 or older:
Full-time faculty: 36%
Deans: 54%
Academic department chairs: 60%
Vice provosts, provost, and chancellor: 75%
- Montgomery College (Md.)
-
Percentage of workers who are older than 55:
Full-time faculty: 65%
Associate faculty: 42%
Administrators: 55%
- Clemson U.
-
Employees eligible to retire now: 280
Employees who will become eligible to retire over the next five years (2006-11): 558
Percentage of total work force eligible to retire in next five years: 22%
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 53, Issue 2, Page A51