Nonfixed Retirement Age for University Professors: Modeling Its Effects on New Faculty Hires
Name
Larson_Nonfixed retirement.pdf
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1.14 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1317048d6754154d9251d3e7f6db5a11
Author(s)
Larson, Richard Charles
Diaz, Mauricio Gomez
Date Issued
March 2012
Journal
Service Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
Larson, Richard C. and Gomez Diaz, Mauricio. “Nonfixed Retirement Age for University Professors: Modeling Its Effects on New Faculty Hires.” Service Science 4, no. 1 (March 2012): 69–78. © 2012 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We model the set of tenure-track faculty members at a university as a queue, where “customers” in queue are faculty members in active careers. Arrivals to the queue are usually young, untenured assistant professors, and departures from the queue are primarily those who do not pass a promotion or tenure hurdle and those who retire. There are other less-often-used ways to enter and leave the queue. Our focus is on system effects of the elimination of mandatory retirement age. In particular, we are concerned with estimating the number of assistant professor slots that annually are no longer available because of the elimination of mandatory retirement. We start with steady-state assumptions that require use of Little's Law of Queueing, and we progress to a transient model using system dynamics. We apply these simple models using available data from our home university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.1120.0006
