Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Men, women, and the end of mandatory retirement

Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post on the end of mandatory retirement for university professors. I quoted a number of men who argued that having a standard retirement age hurts women. Here's an extract from that original post:

Thomas Klassen and David Macgregor, writing in the CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers) Bulletin, challenged ageism in academy on the grounds that "Mandatory retirement at an arbitrary age is devastating for female faculty who often began their careers later than males and may have had interruptions to raise children."

Gender-equity is also the basis of Lloyd Spurrell and Ahmed Hussein's arguments against what they call "Rule 65":

Because of their longer life expectancy, women must contribute significantly more to their pension plan by the time they are 65, if they are to be as financially secure as a man in the same situation. Women have to contribute enough for 20 years while men have to contribute enough for only 15 years. Why should women be discriminated against in this manner?

Yes, there are older female academics who will enjoy greater financial security as a result being able to work past 65. But let's think not about anecdotes - the stories of particular men and particular women. Overall, how many of the beneficiaries from the end of mandatory retirement are men, and how many are women? Who bears the costs of the transition?

Almost 15 years after the end of mandatory retirement, evidence on who takes advantage of the opportunity to work longer is mounting up. Unsurprisingly, it's those who were advocating for the elimination of a standard retirement age - men.

The CAUT almanac, available here, gives the number of full-time university professors in Canada by age.  Here is the number of male and female full-time university teachers by in 2007-8, shortly after the standard retirement age was eliminated (rounded to the nearest 10), along with the percentage who are male:

Number of full-time university teachers by age, 2007-08
Rounded to nearest 10. Source: Calculated from 2010-11 CAUT Almanac, Table 2.10.
	50 to 54	55 to 59	60 to 64	65 to 69	70+
Male	4,060	3,950	3,880	1,180	210
Female	2,340	1,910	1,240	230	30
% male	63.4%	67.4%	75.8%	83.7%	87.5%

Unsurprisingly, in 2007-8, men pre-dominated in the oldest age groups - a legacy of the barriers women once faced in accessing full-time, tenure-track university positions.

But let's age these people 10 years, and see how many of them are still employed a decade later. If we take the 50 to 54 age cohort, and age them up 10 years, we actually have slightly more attrition among men than among female. This is not really surprising - the mortality  rate for men in their 50s is higher than the mortality rate for women. Moreover there is a big financial hit associated with retiring before 65 in a lot of pension plans, and women may not be able to afford to take that hit.

However if we look at the 55 to 59 cohort in 2007-8, and compare it to the 65 to 69 cohort in 2017-18, we see that it has become more male-dominated over time. The over-representation of men continues to increase as we move up the age distribution: in 2017-18 the 70+ cohort was 78.8% male. 

Number of full-time university teachers by age, 2017-18.
Source: CAUT Almanac
	60 to 64	65 to 69	70+
Male	3,060	1,815	1,113
Female	1,902	801	300
% male	61.7%	69.4%	78.8%

It's not hard to figure out what's going on here. People make retirement decisions by weighing up the costs and benefits of continuing to be employed. 

There are lots of reasons to expect that female academics typically benefit less than men do from continuing in academic employment past the age of 65: they're less likely to have young or university-aged children to support, they're less likely to have a younger spouse who is still working (couples tend to synchronize retirement decisions), and they're less likely to be respected by colleagues and students as wise experts and leaders. Our society doesn't value older women, and universities reflect the values held by society as a whole.

There are also reasons to expect that the costs of continuing in employment will be higher for female professors -- the opportunity cost of not being able to care for a parent, partner, or grandchild, and the costs of meeting students' expectations that their female professors will be helpful, caring and organized.

I'm pretty sure that, for me, the costs of continuing to work past 65 will far outweigh the benefits, and I'll be happy to retire. But even if I was still enjoying teaching, I still believe retiring at 65 is the right thing to do.

First, there are juniors out there who are as smart and capable as me, if not smarter. They deserve the opportunity to have an academic position, and make an impact on the world.

Second, mandatory retirement is a bulwark against the end of tenure. If universities can't get rid of professors when they're old, they'll start finding other means to shed unwanted professors - and that's unlikely to be pretty.

Thomas Klassen and David Macgregor, writing in the CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers) Bulletin, challenged ageism in academy on the grounds that "Mandatory retirement at an arbitrary age is devastating for female faculty who often began their careers later than males and may have had interruptions to raise children."

Gender-equity is also the basis of Lloyd Spurrell and Ahmed Hussein's arguments against what they call "Rule 65":

Because of their longer life expectancy, women must contribute significantly more to their pension plan by the time they are 65, if they are to be as financially secure as a man in the same situation. Women have to contribute enough for 20 years while men have to contribute enough for only 15 years. Why should women be discriminated against in this manner?

Yes, there are older female academics who will enjoy greater financial security as a result being able to work past 65. But let's think not about anecdotes - the stories of particular men and particular women. Overall, how many of the beneficiaries from the end of mandatory retirement are men, and how many are women? Who bears the costs of the transition?

Almost 15 years after the end of mandatory retirement, evidence on who takes advantage of the opportunity to work longer is mounting up. Unsurprisingly, it's those who were advocating for the elimination of a standard retirement age - men.

The CAUT almanac, available here, gives the number of full-time university professors in Canada by age.  Here is the number of male and female full-time university teachers by in 2007-8, shortly after the standard retirement age was eliminated (rounded to the nearest 10), along with the percentage who are male:

Number of full-time university teachers by age, 2007-08
Rounded to nearest 10. Source: Calculated from 2010-11 CAUT Almanac, Table 2.10.
	50 to 54	55 to 59	60 to 64	65 to 69	70+
Male	4,060	3,950	3,880	1,180	210
Female	2,340	1,910	1,240	230	30
% male	63.4%	67.4%	75.8%	83.7%	87.5%

Unsurprisingly, in 2007-8, men pre-dominated in the oldest age groups - a legacy of the barriers women once faced in accessing full-time, tenure-track university positions.

But let's age these people 10 years, and see how many of them are still employed a decade later. If we take the 50 to 54 age cohort, and age them up 10 years, we actually have slightly more attrition among men than among female. This is not really surprising - the mortality  rate for men in their 50s is higher than the mortality rate for women. Moreover there is a big financial hit associated with retiring before 65 in a lot of pension plans, and women may not be able to afford to take that hit.

However if we look at the 55 to 59 cohort in 2007-8, and compare it to the 65 to 69 cohort in 2017-18, we see that it has become more male-dominated over time. The over-representation of men continues to increase as we move up the age distribution: in 2017-18 the 70+ cohort was 78.8% male. 

Number of full-time university teachers by age, 2017-18.
Source: CAUT Almanac
	60 to 64	65 to 69	70+
Male	3,060	1,815	1,113
Female	1,902	801	300
% male	61.7%	69.4%	78.8%

It's not hard to figure out what's going on here. People make retirement decisions by weighing up the costs and benefits of continuing to be employed. 

There are lots of reasons to expect that female academics typically benefit less than men do from continuing in academic employment past the age of 65: they're less likely to have young or university-aged children to support, they're less likely to have a younger spouse who is still working (couples tend to synchronize retirement decisions), and they're less likely to be respected by colleagues and students as wise experts and leaders. Our society doesn't value older women, and universities reflect the values held by society as a whole.

There are also reasons to expect that the costs of continuing in employment will be higher for female professors -- the opportunity cost of not being able to care for a parent, partner, or grandchild, and the costs of meeting students' expectations that their female professors will be helpful, caring and organized.

I'm pretty sure that, for me, the costs of continuing to work past 65 will far outweigh the benefits, and I'll be happy to retire. But even if I was still enjoying teaching, I still believe retiring at 65 is the right thing to do.

First, there are juniors out there who are as smart and capable as me, if not smarter. They deserve the opportunity to have an academic position, and make an impact on the world.

Second, mandatory retirement is a bulwark against the end of tenure. If universities can't get rid of professors when they're old, they'll start finding other means to shed unwanted professors - and that's unlikely to be pretty.

Why do I have to collect my pension already?

Ontario's Ford government has a plan to induce professors over 71 to retire. I wrote a column in the Globe and Mail about it. Here's a sneak peak:

Nearly one in 10 Ontario university professors is over the age of 65. As of 2016, these professors were earning, on average, $184,947 a year. Moreover, because federal legislation requires all taxpayers to start drawing down their retirement savings at the age of 71, septuagenarian professors can collect a six-figure pension on top of a six-figure salary.

It sounds expensive – and it is. A report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario on universities’ fiscal sustainability estimated that, if mandatory retirement was still in place, and Ontario universities had been able to replace all of their professors over 65 with junior scholars, their annual salary costs would be $89-million lower, and more than 1,200 new PhDs could have been hired.

In its April budget, the Ontario government committed itself to ensuring “a more sustainable postsecondary sector” and “employee renewal.” The details of the government’s plans are not yet known. However, a discussion paper released earlier this year reported that “the ministry is giving consideration to a policy that would … require institutions to reduce salary payments so that salary and pension payments combined are not greater than the employee’s salary prior to pension payments commencing.” Professors aged 71 and older would have their salary clawed back, giving them every incentive to retire.

The rest of the article is here. In it I talk about the various objections to the Ford government's plan, and what I see as a reasonable alternative. One thing I couldn't fit within the 800 word limit, however, is the answer to the question, "Why do I have to collect my pension already?" Why couldn't the problem of double-dipping be solved by allowing septuagenarian professors to defer their pensions. Here I explain why this will not, and should not, be an option.

Guest Post: Comparing Technological Change in the Health and Taxi Industries

Well, here is a guest post forwarded to me by Ruolz Ariste - a colleague whom I originally met during my annual interactions with the CIHI and with whom I have co-authored.  Ruolz Ariste is currently pursuing a PhD in Industrial Relations in a program run by run jointly by Université Laval and Université du Québec en Outaouais.  Enjoy.

Breaking up the quarter million dollar club

Ontario eliminated mandatory retirement in 2006. Six years later, professors started to enter the quarter million dollar dollar club. This exclusive group is comprised of university professors aged 71 or older who, due to the curious interaction of federal pension legislation and academic collective agreements, are able to collect a full pension and a full salary.

The average salary of a full professor in Canada is around $166,000 per year (calculations available here:  Download Average salary of full profs in Canada). Suppose we assume (a) that the typical university pension replaces 2/3 of a professor's salary and (b) that the typical professor working at age 71 or more is earning at least an average full professor's salary. That puts the total salary plus pension income of most professors over the age of 71 well above $250,000, granting them membership in the quarter million dollar club.

Are education attainment levels the root cause of all good earnings news?

An earlier post noted that the real earnings gains over the past 20 years were as clean an example of a composition effect as you're likely to see. Earnings among full-time workers with a given level of education have shown some modest growth over time, but average earnings growth for all full-time workers has been stronger than it has been for each of its components:

Learning outcomes: potential game-changer, or worthless bean-counting and cataloguing exercise?

Summary: Harvey Weingarten, President of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, describes learning outcomes as a "game-changer." A report by Richard Shireman argues that setting out learning outcomes has become, in some cases, nothing more than "worthless bean-counting and cataloging." In this extract from the draft version of my CEA Presidential Address, I talk about how, in theory, learning outcomes are supposed to improve university education, and why professors might rationally resist their imposition.  I argue that the keys to using learning outcomes to improve university teaching are

•  persuading faculty members to sit down and have conversations about curriculum, teaching, and student assessment. This may require good management and leadership
• giving instructors regular and collegial feedback on their teaching performance and methods and
• mandating the teaching of core skills.

Learning outcomes may facilitate getting faculty members to think carefully about curriculum design, or giving instructors feedback on their teaching - but are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for these things to happen.

A gnomic theory of higher education

Here are the powerpoint slides (.pdf format) for my CEA Presidential Address "The Political Economy of University Education in Canada":

DOWNLOAD WOOLLEY PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SLIDES HERE. 

The talk will be written up for the November issue of Canadian Journal of Economics, and I'll sketch out some of the main ideas here. Universities do two things. First, they produce knowledge. I say "knowledge" rather than "research" because some things that don't count as "research", such as blog posts,  still add to what is known about the world, while some things that do count as "research" add little to knowledge. Second, universities do something to students that usually generates higher earnings - call it learning, sorting, teaching, whatever.

 

I argue that the university sector is, at present, characterized by x-inefficiency, that is, resources are not used as effectively as possible, and also by allocative inefficiency, that is, the mix between knowledge and learning/sorting does not maximize social welfare. But this present state of affairs is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Demographics, technological change, and other factors (such as the feminization and politicization of university education) are creating momentum for change. But will change be for the better? There are reforms that might do some good, and there are reform that are possible to implement, but it is not clear that there are a lot of reforms that are both effective and also have low barriers to implementation.

Are the returns to university education falling?

[Updated to fix coding errors in some of my graphs.]

Prices are determined by supply and demand. The supply of university-educated Canadians, relative to the supply of college or high school graduates, is increasing. University participation rates have been climbing for decades (Source: CAUT):

Canada's points based immigration system, which prioritizes those with valuable skills, further increases the supply of highly educated Canadians. Unless the demand for university graduates rises along with the supply, ECON 1000 reasoning suggests that rising education levels will, eventually, erode educated workers' earnings advantage.

In the war between generations, will universities get caught in the cross-fire?

Canada's baby boomers are now in their late 50s and 60s. They're done with university. Their kids, for the most part, are done with university. Sure, at some point the boomers' grandchildren might want a university education, but that is not an immediate or pressing concern. More urgent, from the baby boomer's point of view, are policies that benefit them directly, such as good health care, or tax/benefit policies that leave them with more money their pockets at the end of the day.

This line of reasoning suggests that, if older generations are motivated by narrow self-interest, population aging will cause public support for education spending to fall.  Poterba 1997 gives one of the classic articulations of this argument, and also sets out some countervailing forces. For example, older people might support education because they believe that education increases productivity, and they expect to benefit from economic growth, or because they care about future generations.

The evolving gender gap in student satisfaction

For 30 years, Canada's National Graduates Survey (NGS) has asking college and university graduates, "If you could choose again, would you select the same field of study or specialization that you completed?"

As I explain here, the precise wording of the "would you do it again" question has changed over time, as has the placement of the question on the survey, the way graduates are categorized into "university" and "college" students, and how long after graduation the NGS is administered. These changes mean that the NGS cannot say anything meaningful about how graduates' satisfaction with their university experience has changed over time.

Yet as long as changes to the NGS affect women's and men's responses equally, the NGS can tell us something about how the gender gap in university graduates' satisfaction with their education is evolving. Here is a picture:

 

The National Graduates Survey, student satisfaction, and the politics of statistics

One way to measure students' satisfaction with their educational experiences is to ask graduates, if they could choose again, if they would select the same program.

Canada's National Graduates Survey (NGS) has been asking some variation on that question since 1982. The questions asked, and the percentage of students saying that they would select the same field of study again, are shown in the table below. Although the NGS includes both college and university graduates, for ease of interpretation the table below shows results for university graduates only. 

Could you pass a 1950s Econ 1000 exam?

Principles of economics final exams set out, implicitly, the core of the discipline. Their questions are designed to test understanding of fundamental economics concepts; the ideas that are the foundation of economic analysis.

So when I came across Clifford L. James's Principles of Economics (first published in 1934; ninth edition in 1956), complete with final examination and answers, I scanned the exam. Download it here.  I wanted to know what the foundations of the discipline were 60 years ago, and how have they changed.

Is the war over higher education spreading north?

In the US, higher education has become a partisan issue. While Democrats view colleges and universities as having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, a majority of Republicans now view colleges and universities as a negative influence (see this Pew survey). There is also a partisan divide in the US over the fundamental purpose of university.  According to Pew survey data, Democrats, particularly educated ones, see the primary purpose of university as personal growth, whereas Republicans consider specific skills of more importance. Is there a similar partisan split in attitudes towards higher education in this country?

The only Canadian data I could find that gathered information about both attitudes towards university education and political leanings was the September, 2016 Forum Poll for Ontario, conduced by the company Forum Research. Two questions from the poll that ask about the purpose of university education are:

How important is it to you that Ontario´s universities excel at instilling a passion for lifelong learning in students?

and

    How important is it to you that Ontario´s universities excel at teaching soft skills?

To each of these questions, respondents could answer very important, somewhat important, not very important, not important at all, or don't know. For each question, the most common answer was "very important". So, for example, 66 percent of respondents who had an opinion on the matter said that it was very important to them that Ontario universities excel at instilling a passion for life-long learning in students.

In what follows, I try to understand people's attitudes towards universities relate to their political leanings. I have information about voting intentions from this Forum poll question:

"If a provincial election were held today, which party are you most likely to vote for?" 

Here is how the results to the "passion for learning" question differ by voting intentions. The dot represents the group average; the whiskers represent a 95% confidence interval. PC stands for "Progressive Conservative", the party associated with the right in Ontario politics. Undecided voters were dropped from the analysis. 

Why don't more economics students get SSHRC doctoral fellowships?

In 2017*, just seven economics PhD students were awarded SSHRC doctoral fellowships, according to data provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to the Canadian Economics Association. Put another way, only 1.6 percent of the 430 new SSHRC doctoral fellowships awarded that year went to students studying economics. 

The immediate cause of this lack of awards is a lack of economics PhD students applying for SSHRC funding. In the 2017* competition only 84 of the 4,141 people applying for doctoral fellowships were economics students. It is true that the economics applicants' success rate was slightly lower than average - 8.3% as compared to 10.4%. However bringing the economics success rate up to the overall average would only have resulted in another two awards.

The question then is, why don't more economics students apply? I can only speculate, but here are a few possibilities:

The gendered impact of eliminating mandatory retirement

On March 6th, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario released a report on the sustainability of university expenditures. One of the issues highlighted in the report was financial cost of eliminating standard retirement at age 65. As Simona Chiose reported in the Globe, Ontario professors "who are 66 and older have an average salary of $185,000, compared with $113,000 for the youngest cohorts." Hence retaining older profs instead of hiring younger ones is expensive.

One thing the HEQCO report did not discuss, however, was the gendered impact of removing the standard retirement age. During the debate over mandatory retirement, many of those in favour of eliminating the standard retirement age, such as Rhys Kesselman, made the argument that:

...women who have entered the labour force relatively late, after raising children or marriage breakdown, as well as recent immigrants may wish to work until later ages than typical non-immigrant male workers. These groups may have to work until a later age to qualify for larger pension benefits based on years of service, or they may need additional work years to save for their retirement. These concerns are of particular salience to women workers with their longer life expectancies.

Three years ago I wrote a post arguing that those "who thought the end of mandatory retirement would disproportionately benefit women and promote gender equity were mistaken." Now, ten years into the no-mandatory-retirement experiment, it is time to revisit the evidence, and see if that conclusion still stands.

Looking for a University President

“Some people think that a college president’s life is full of joys and a host of friends. I know that he frequently walks in sorrow and alone because of the times he must do what seems impossible.” Paul V. Sangren (1948) “What a President Learns” Journal of Higher Education, 19, 6, 287-288.

Well, my university is looking for a new President and Vice-Chancellor and the process of consultation has begun in terms of establishing what opportunities, issues and challenges awaits the new President as well as what characteristics and experience they should possess. A search company has been selected so if you are interested feel free to contact Laverne Smith and Associates Inc. at [email protected]. In the interim, a few thoughts come to mind about what being a university president might entail these days.

A composition effect in earnings growth and education attainment levels in Canada

I came across this post by Mickey Kaus a while ago, on trends in US earnings broken down by education attainment levels. From about the mid-70s to the mid-90s, earnings growth diverged sharply: increasing strongly for those with high levels of education, and falling for people with lower levels of education. Earnings growth has been more balanced since then, but the gaps carved out by this divergence have not been filled in.

This isn't an exercise we can repeat for Canada; this kind of earnings data only start in 1997. But I was curious to see what it would look like, and I found as neat an example of composition effects as you'll ever see.

PhD Vouchers

Canadian universities have strong incentives to create PhD programs, and admit students into those programs. This is because provincial governments typically provide generous funds for each PhD student a university takes in. Also, PhD students are useful and cheap workers. Moreover, having a PhD program raises an academic unit's status, by signalling that it is a "research" unit  rather than a "teaching" unit. For individual faculty members, having a stable of PhD students makes it easier to get research grant funding, partly because the faculty member can show that they are active in "training", and partly because PhD students can be used as co-authors.

This incentive structure means that it can be in a department's interest to create a PhD program, even if the job prospects for their PhD students are mediocre, or only half the students they admit graduate. It can even be in a department's interests to admit PhD students that no faculty member wants to supervise. For example, if the university rewards units for admitting some target number of PhD students, or if the university threatens to close the PhD program if not enough students are admitted, there are strong incentives to take a chance on a student with poor prospects for success.

It's cruel. Students suffer. They sacrifice years of their lives, and tens of thousands of dollars, in the pursuit of a PhD, and too often end up with shattered self confidence, no degree and/or no improvement in their job prospects. (I've not given you numbers are on PhD completion rates because, to the best of my knowledge, no published data is available.)

Should professors tell students exactly what they expect?

Imagine, for a moment, that students acquire valuable human capital during their time at university. Imagine that the grades on a student's transcript reflect his or her level of human capital. Imagine that, every term, a professor uses examinations, term papers, and other assignments, to measure how much human capital each student has acquired over the course of a term.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the best way to go about that assessment is to have clear expectations. See, for example, these helpful suggestions from University of Waterloo's Centre for Teaching Excellence:

Transparent marking criteria. Students should know what is expected of them. They should be able to identify the characteristics of a satisfactory answer and understand the relative importance of those characteristics. This can be achieved in many ways; you can provide feedback on assignments, describe your expectations in class, or post model solutions on a course website.

This sounds eminently reasonable. If professors expects answers to true/false/uncertain questions to contain a diagram, they should say so. If they expect students be familiar with IS/LM analysis, they should say so. If they expect term papers to be a certain length, or use a certain referencing format, they should say so. Clear expectations mean that students are evaluated on what they actually know, rather than on how well they anticipate the whims and idiosyncrasies of their professors' marking schemes.

Economists don't get SSHRC money, grad student edition

The other day a colleague was explaining how SSHRC-funded Canada Graduate Scholarships are awarded at my university. "It's mostly driven by GPA," he said. "Grades in economics are so low that your students don't get a look in." 

I spent some time messing around with the SSHRC awards engine. His suspicion that relatively few Canada Graduate Scholarships go to economists is well-founded. Taking all masters and doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarships together, and looking at the total awards over the past three years, fewer than two percent of scholarships went to economics students. SSHRC funded twice as many philosophy students as it did economics ones. Three and a half times as many political scientists. There are almost ten times as many psychology students receiving Canada Graduate Scholarships as there are economics students.

Moreover, it's getting worse. There is a gradual downwards trend in the number of Canada Graduate Scholarships going to students studying economics.