Albert Einstein was an ageist. The journal Nature once quoted the physicist saying, “A person who has not yet made his great contribution to science by the age of 30 will never do so.” His Nobel Prize was for work he did during his 20s.
But if the Nobel is the barometer of greatness, greatness is getting older. A recent analysis of Nobelists in physics, chemistry, and medicine showed that before 1905, their prizeworthy work was done around age 36. But after 1985, the good stuff was done between ages 45 and 50 for all three fields.
“You’re unlikely to make breakthroughs in your 20s anymore,” said Benjamin F. Jones, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and a co-author of the analysis. “The high period of creativity has been moved later in the career.”
The change extends well beyond people with an invitation to Stockholm, into the general professoriate. The production of papers, and in many cases their impact, remains high through age 70. Why? As academic fields have grown, it takes professors more time to piece together knowledge into something meaningful. Some researchers argue that the end of mandatory retirement in 1994 has given more professors reasons to work hard later in their careers. Also, people are living longer and healthier lives.
And finally, there’s a social aspect. Research is more collaborative, and the variety “helps revive and sustain the creativity of the older members of the group,” Dean K. Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, wrote in an e-mail. (While most of this research has been done on scientists, work on painters and novelists—who are not necessarily academics—shows a similar shift toward later career achievement.)
There are still factors that can drag an older professor’s performance down, however. An institution that shoves one to the side as retirement approaches is the chief culprit. “If you lose access to a lab at age 60, 65, or 70, it’s not going to help you out any if you do lab research,” Mr. Simonton noted.
Bruce A. Weinberg, an associate professor of economics at Ohio State University and the other author of the Nobel analysis—which was published in the November 7 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—says it’s certainly possible to find examples of older faculty who “are dried up.” But, he says, “you can find a lot who are vibrant and doing a lot.”
That was clear in one of the largest studies of age and productivity, when researchers in 2008 looked at more than 6,000 professors from the sciences and the humanities at several universities in Quebec, Canada. The average annual number of published papers started at about 1.5 around age 30, peaked at just over 3 at age 50, and stayed that high through age 70.
The number of citations for these papers, a way to measure their impact in their fields, actually rose from age 40 to age 70. Another study, of several hundred faculty in the University of California system who were eligible for early retirement in the 1990s, found that people who did not take the offer did not tail off on their publications, either.
The end of mandatory retirement may explain a lot of this continuing activity, writes Wolfgang Stroebe, a professor of social and organizational psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In a 2010 paper in American Psychologist entitled “The Graying of Academia,” he pointed out that forcing people to retire at a particular age robbed them of motivation to continue to work hard. They would accrue no benefits from continued peer recognition, he said: no grants, no awards, no lab space, nothing of academic value. But letting 65-year-olds continue to work changes the game, he said.
Mr. Stroebe also noted that older professors seem to be up to the task cognitively. There is evidence of age-related mental decline on isolated psychological tests, but no evidence of overall deficits in IQ. A style of independent thought called “divergent thinking,” which is often associated with creativity, does not show much variance with age. Mr. Simonton added that “stigmas associated with being ‘over the hill’ have lessened, and ... even the ‘senior moment’ has become more of a self-deprecating joke.”
But the stereotype persists, and that’s a source of worry even for Mr. Simonton, an expert in the psychology of scientific achievement. He points out that his first publication on this topic was in 1975, and now at age 64 he frets: “Will the editors still love me, will they still need me?”
