1. Steady State Staff Planning: The Experience of a 'Mature' Liberal Arts College and Its Implications.
- Author
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Carleton Coll., Northfield, Minn., Lamson, George, Lamson, George, and Carleton Coll., Northfield, Minn.
- Abstract
The end of faculty growth in higher education has led to near panic predictions of aging, highly tenured, more costly, steady-state faculties as the "growth bulge" hired in the 1960's age. This study discusses two models for simulating the behavior over time of indices of faculty health such as average age and salary, annual new hires, and percent tenured. These models are then applied to a specific faculty to demonstrate their usefulness and to provide recommendations. Each school should explore the future implications of its current faculty distribution by age and tenure status and of current hiring and attrition behavior before accepting predictions based on national data. Schools should not overlook "natural" attrition which accounts for much of the difference between annual new hires and retirements. A time perspective is important, and the behavior of indices of faculty health is cyclical. The young, regularly rejuvenated faculty of the 1960's was somewhat artificial since it was based on permanent growth, and the current deterioration of faculty health indices is in part a return to pregrowth normalcy and will be eventually reversed. The study concludes with a discussion of options for avoiding the aging, more costly faculty approach to steady-state and experiment with the impact of variations in tenure standards on faculty health indices. (Author/JMF)
- Published
- 1974