• P J Friedman.
• UCSD School of Medicine, La Jolla 92093.
• Acad Med. 1989 Jul 1; 64 (7): 372-7.

AbstractThe Age Discrimination in Employment Act was amended in 1986 to remove age-determined mandatory retirement for nearly all employees. The present study was prompted by the concern that if medical school faculty failed to retire, there would be no positions available for new faculty. The author used 1984-85 data on both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty of the five medical schools of the University of California (UC) to make projections, over 20 years, of faculty age distributions and available positions, at several possible growth rates and delays in retirement age. Association of American Medical Colleges data on all U.S. medical school faculty in 1980 were used to show that the UC data were not exceptional. Acknowledging the various assumptions used in manipulating the data and the need to examine longitudinal data on faculty age, growth, turnover, and retirement to make more realistic projections, the author demonstrates that the impact of delaying retirement by several years would be minimal. Because of this conclusion and also the inevitable aging of the faculty resulting from the slowed growth of medical schools, academic institutions should pay more attention to maintaining the vitality and productivity of their individual faculty members, regardless of age.

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