Young teachers and the rising age of new hires

Day three of the cleanse begins, and I feel quite lethargic.  I'm told that around day five or so, one's energy starts to pick up as the toxins leave the system.  But it ain't a lot of fun right now,

By tonight, I hope to have the bulk of my grading finished.  My eleventh year of full-time teaching has come to an end.  Despite the frustration at the plagiarizers, I'm always filled this time of year with a powerful sense of warmth towards my students.  I've been fortunate to have a few students take several of my classes, and I've come to admire and cherish them and think of them, in a real sense, as friends.  Now they are headed off, and if past behavior is an accurate predictor of the future, very few will keep in touch.  It's perhaps selfish of me, but I do like hearing from former students very, very much.  The few who do write notes or drop by my office, often years later, make me very happy.

Despite the poor outlook for the California budget, the social sciences division (which includes History) has done quite a bit of hiring for tenure-track teaching jobs in the last few years.  I've sat on a couple of hiring committees myself.  This year alone,my division has hired two new sociologists, a political scientist, a psychologist and a child development instructor.   I haven't met all of our new hires, but I notice one thing about those whom I have seen join our faculty in recent years: they are almost always over thirty, and many are in their forties and fifties.  Indeed, though in terms of seniority, I am in the "middle" of the division, in terms of age, I am still -- at 38 -- one of our youngest tenured faculty.

Since I was hired in 1994 at the age of twenty-seven, our division has not hired anyone under thirty for a full-time post.  (Gosh, I wonder if my youthful indiscretions sent a message!)  At the same time, I can think of several professors, junior to me in seniority, who were hired after reaching the age of forty.  Mind you, I have no objection to hiring older faculty, many of whom have spent years and years as "freeway fliers" or "roads scholars".  (One of my newly hired tenure-track colleagues taught as an adjunct for almost twenty years at, by her estimation, eleven different Southern California community colleges and two Cal State campuses!)  These new hires bring years and years of experience to the classroom, and I suspect that their students benefit.

But it was not always so.  Many of our most senior faculty (those who are in their late fifties and sixties) have been here for thirty years or more.  Among the "old guard", we have a number of folks who started teaching full-time at the community college while in their mid-twenties.  Of course, thirty or forty years ago, it was rare for a community college to expect a prospective hire to have anything more than a master's degree.  Today, Ph.Ds are expected, and at the least, one ought to be working towards a doctorate in order to be hired.  That expectation has driven up the average age of our hires considerably.   On the other hand, speaking as one who does have a Ph.D., I can't say that those of us in the department with that degree are generally better teachers than our colleagues who have only the M.A.! (And I hate the fact that on all official college documents, those of us with Ph.D.s are always called "Dr", while those with MAs are called Mr. or Mrs. or Ms.  It grates.)

I'm so grateful that I was hired at such a relatively young age.  Yes, I do think younger professors can "relate" to their students in ways that more senior faculty cannot.  Ten years ago, I listened to the same music my students did and had a great many of the same interests.  As I've aged, the gap between myself and the average age of "the kids" has more than doubled, and with it, I've lost some sense of where "young people are at" right now.  But I do think that students need to experience younger faculty members, especially when those professors are passionate and engaged and can connect with those whom they are teaching on a personal level.  That doesn't mean that those of us who are getting older have any less to offer; indeed, our experience and our wisdom means that we will be able to give to our students a view of the world that a younger person might not have yet developed.  Still, having at least some "young guns" in the department helps keep everyone on their toes.  (Lord knows, I was far more of a troublemaker in 1995 than in 2005!)

Another, purely practical concern:  retirement pensions.  If you hire someone for a tenure track job in her twenties, and that person teaches for thirty-five years, she can retire (thanks to CalSTRS) at about eighty percent of her final salary, if not more.  Pensions are generally based on years of service, which gives a huge advantage to those of us hired young enough to have careers lasting three decades or more.  My new colleagues will likely not spend thirty years building up pension credit, unless they plan to teach until they are seventy!  And while some may have IRAs or other savings, it's unlikely that someone who has waited years for a tenure-track teaching job will have a substantial nest egg.  Given that local community college districts and the state share the burden of pensions with their employees, it makes sense that administrators would want to hire older faculty who will retire with less generous compensation packages.  That bothers me, even as it makes me grateful once again to have had job security at such a young age.

I'm not a proponent of ageism. I would never urge someone be hired merely because they are young.  But I do think that we need "age diversity" as much as we need ethnic diversity.  When the majority of our hires are old enough to be at least the biological parents of those whom they teach, I think that's unfortunate.

Comments

[Caitriona]

I think you're right about the need for age diversity. That is one of the concerns of many home educators. We're able to give our children age diversity that's not available in the public/private school setting.

People need to be able to successfully interact with others of many different ages, but if they've *always* attended school with only their immediate age-mates, being taught by people who are their parents/grandparents age, they lose the ability to learn from people between their age and their parents age, or from those who are younger than they are. That is a HUGE loss. I'm not sure quite how to address it in the community college and university settings.

[ScottM]

Fortunately, those worse cases who will work until 70 for a generous pension are still as well off as the rest of us, who are expected to work until 67/68. So while they're not privilleged enough to get out early (as you'll be able to), at least they're not much worse off than their private sector counterparts.

[Andrew Purvis]

I recall having undergraduate professors in their mid-twenties, and that was always a little bit of a surprise, but what we enjoyed about the experience, as students, was the sense of hope it provided. There was a feeling that we, too, could achieve the goals we had set for ourselves. Perhaps that is the way things are elsewhere.

I am in my mid-thirties, and I have been working as an adjunct in the California community college system for almost four years now. Hiring practices still mystify me, as they do my fellow adjuncts, many of whom have been plugging away far longer than I. I suspect much of this is a play to control budget, sas you suggest, though not merely from a pension perspective. Consider the first tier in many salary schedules: 1-6 years. If someone gets hired fresh from grad school, that person moves to the second tier after one year. Someone who works as a freeway flier for six years moves to the second tier after one year, but he or she will be five years older, saving the school tremendously by retirement.

[Dean Dad]

"Age diversity." Amen! We don't have that at my college. We have more f-t faculty over 65 than under 40, and it's getting worse -- most of our new hires (to the extent we have any) are at least in their 40's. I can say, from this side of the desk, that pension concerns have nothing to do with it. We're so focused on the budgets for the next year or two that a hypothetical savings 20-30 years from now just doesn't enter into the equation.

Part of the problem is that federal age-discrimination laws are written on the (false) assumption that age discrimination works only against older workers. The cutoff is 40. If I hire someone under 40 and someone over 40 files a claim, the burden is on me to show that the claim is without merit.

When you have an extremely top-heavy faculty, though, I think there's a more-than-compelling 'diversity' argument for some young blood. We just have to convince the federal government. How hard can that be?...