May 7, 2008

Increased recruitment of academic talent by universities anxious to address the problem of an ageing workforce has failed to stem a further greying of academe, unpublished datashows.

The percentage of the academic workforce aged over 50 increased from 26 per cent in 1991 to 39.8 per cent in 2006, University of Adelaide professorial research fellow Graeme Hugo has found.

Mr Hugo incorporated 2006 census data into his previous benchmark analysis to conclude that during the 15 years to 2006, there was an increase of more than 80 per cent in the academic workforce aged over 50.

Mr Hugo's new figures on the outlook for Australian academic staff follow the release of groundbreaking new data from Universities Australia on the disciplines most affected by the looming wave of academic baby-boomer retirements. UA has produced graphs to show the areas most at risk: where there is an ageing workforce and not a lot of younger people to replace them, and where more than 50 per cent of the academic workforce is over 50.
Agriculture (60 per cent over 50), general education (60 per cent), teacher education (60 per cent) and curriculum and education studies (59per cent) have been identified as the disciplines, and thus professions, most vulnerable. However, maths (53 per cent), information systems (54 per cent) and nursing (51per cent) are also identified as at risk.

Mr Hugo told the HES there was a general appreciation of the ageing of the academic workforce, but administrators might have felt an increase in recruitment during the past five years had offset ageing. ``But this is a very large group of baby boomers moving up into retirement age and the academic workforce has continued to get older (faster than recruitment),'' he said.
Mr Hugo said baby boomers constituted about one-third of the workforce and they would be retiring during the next 15 years. But the issue for the universities was even sharper than that faced by the general workforce, since the academic workforce was older than the general population and the professional population.

``The real crunch will come in 10 to 15 years when on current projections we will have lost 20 per cent to 25 per cent of academic workers,'' he said.
While this might seem plenty of time to develop strategies to counter the growing shortfalls, talented PhDs took a minimum of eight years to complete training from the start of their undergraduate years and, even then, they couldn't replace lecturers and researchers with 30 to 40 years experience, he said.
Australia needed to implement a range of recruitment, retention and return strategies to avoid an unhealthy reliance on overseas postgraduate students or those without proper qualifications. 

In the wake of the UA discipline data, Mr Hugo called for an even further disaggregated analysis, by subject area, by university and by present patterns of Phd research. ``We have done detailed studies in a few universities and there are some patterns emerging from this, such as the fact that education and health teaching staff are especially concentrated in older ages in those universities,'' he said. But Australia needed to establish in which discipline areas, in which years and in which universities specific shortages will arise.
Heidrick and Struggles education partner, Asia-Pacific, David Pumphrey said the half-dozen academic recruitment firms that had sprung up during the past 10 years highlighted the shortage. ``We mainly recruit for university leadership positions, but we have to search internationally simply because there's a smaller pool of talented professors to recruit from,'' Mr Pumphrey said.