Ageism

I am writing this post mainly from seeing a headline about a potential pending crisis - birthrates have been declining in the U.S. at a time when they are already below the replacement rate.  The implied issue is about Social Security, Medicare, and other "pension systems" (such as the one for public employees in Illinois), which have mainly a pay as you go aspect, where the recipients benefits, in aggregate, line up more or less with the contributions from working people.   This works beautifully in theory, as articulated by Samuelson, when we are in a steady state, so the relative population weights of retirees and workers remain constant, as do the benefits for retirees and the earnings of workers.  The decline in birth rates seems to muck up this balance, putting an increasing burden on current workers to contribute, so higher FICA taxes for them, and/or the system itself ends up going into deficit and eventually goes belly up.

To this doom and gloom scenario, one wonders whether there are accommodations that can be made to keep things in balance.  Some might recall that in the early Bush II years there were plans to privatize Social Security, to make it more like a glorified 401K plan and less like a defined benefit pension.  There was also discussion of raising the retirement age.  Both of these proved to be too bald as solutions, so ultimately were defeated.

Yet that those particular suggestions failed doesn't mean there aren't other potential accommodations that might succeed.  If so, then it is incumbent on us to do social experiments to learn about what might work.  Pretty early on in this blog I wrote about one such hypothetical that intrigued me at the time.  The post was called Second Careers and K-12.  The underlying idea is that those who had been mid to high level executives in their first career, but have since plateaued in that work, might reinvent themselves by teaching (the students and/or their teachers), and this would be an interesting way to attract high caliber talent into teaching and also to combat relatively low teacher pay, as these second careerists might be drawing some sort of pension from the first job, so their pay as teacher might be thought more as recognition than as compensation.  I am still intrigued by this idea, but I want to note that it hasn't gone anywhere since I wrote that post, more than a dozen years ago.  And I'm intrigued by other potential suggestion of the same ilk. More on that will follow.

But the type of experimentation that is needed here doesn't seem to be happening and indeed, if my own experience since retiring from the University of Illinois in summer 2010 is any indication, there are blockages in place to prevent such experimentation.  Those blockages are what I mean by ageism in my title.  Further, recently things seem to be getting worse.  I will gripe a little about that, but mainly want to suggest some alternatives as to how things might improve.

Now a little aside to consider service work, where there is no evident output (i.e., no widgets to count) for measuring productivity but where the recipients of the service have some sense of its value for them.  Teaching fits here.  How much students learn, particularly in upper level college classes where there is no standardized exam to gauge learning, is difficult to measure by those outside the class.  Indeed, outsiders to the class may not be able to measure the teaching input - how well prepared the instructor is, how much time the instructor spends interacting with students, and how flexible the instructor is when a student poses an idiosyncratic need as to whether that need will be accommodated.  In practice, service work when well done has a strong element of gift exchange to it.  (See Akerlof's paper Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange.  I've explicated this model so it is intelligible to the non-economists in a blog post called The Liberal View of Capitalism.)  Since gift exchange may be alien terminology to most people, you can think of it as volunteer work.  With service work, the paid work and volunteer work get jumbled together.

To this I want to add the following.  While it is difficult to measure the teaching input, it is not impossible.  One way to do that would be to have focus groups with some students in the class during the semester, this so the students could opine about how the class influences their own learning.  In my case, where I have students blog out in the open, I comment on those posts, and the students respond to those comments, reading that would be informative about my teaching input.  But it is my experience that we don't do measures like this at all.   Some shirking in teaching does get monitored - so if an instructor is very late for a class or chronically late for several classes, that might be reported to the department head. But other shirking (using a publisher's test bank and not writing exam questions of the instructor's own creation) goes completely unnoticed. The point here is that if you wanted to encourage the volunteer component to the work, you'd likely need to do some monitoring that is not present in the current way we go about things.

Now, cycling back to the original issue, if more mature employees partially did paid work and partially did volunteer work, with the latter compensated with some sort of pension payment accrued from when the employees were more junior and were doing full time paid work, then the contributions to the retirement system that we associate with paid work might be brought into balance if the fraction of paid to volunteer work adjusts gradually as workers mature. Arithmetically, it is clear this can happen.  Functionally, it is less obvious that this is do-able, with the volunteer part evidently being productive.  This is precisely where we need experimentation to reveal what is possible.

I want to close this section by flipping the discussion from the needs of mature employees to the needs of students.  The type of experimentation mentioned above should happen where there is a double-coincidence of needs and where those needs aren't otherwise being addressed.  One prominent example, students need to develop soft skills.  An argument being increasingly made is that this generation of students, with their heads always focused on their phones and computer screens, need lots of practice with face-to-face interaction.  Students, particularly in their first year when they take mainly large lecture classes, need a sense that the institution cares about them.  Many students I've taught since retiring believe the exact opposite.  They develop a nihilistic personal philosophy as a consequence and become quite cynical about life. We should want to combat that, if we can.  Further, most students want to have a personal relationship (on an intellectual level) with some professor.  Private universities exist, with their much higher tuition, in good part because of an increased likelihood of that type of personal interaction.  Public universities, facing budget pressure, should nevertheless try to provide those opportunities where they can.

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Now I want to talk about some blockages that I've experienced at Illinois and what I'd like to have seen as an alternative.

I have twice volunteered to teach a class for free.  In each case I was turned down.  In both cases it was a first-year seminar class.  One was Rhet 105, which satisfies the Composition I Gen Ed requirement.  The other was a class in Economics, the topic to be determined, perhaps a small section version of principles or maybe a special topics class.   My offers to teach for free were too out of the box, so were readily dismissed.  I should add that I have a colleague who was a high level administrator at another university and when she was dean of their college of arts and sciences she did teach freshman rhetoric.   So that idea I got from her.  I had taught a Discovery Section of Econ 102 way back when, I believe in 2002, but at the time I didn't have it in my head to use the course to shape how the students go about their learning in the rest of their studies.  The reason for wanting to try it this time around would be to do exactly that.

Having been an administrator for some time, I can imagine these sort of out of the box requests difficult to manage.  What sort of precedent would they set?  Could that create problems down the road?  Also, in the Rhet 105 case, the instructors are all graduate students in Writing Studies and they are taking a graduate seminar concomitantly with teaching the introductory rhetoric class.  I didn't want to take that graduate seminar, so that might have created some issues then and there for the course director.

As one-offs it is hard to make a case for doing what I proposed.  As a more regular practice, however, it might be something for the institution to consider, having faculty teach first-year classes that they don't regularly teach, as an unpaid overload, or getting retirees to do likewise on a volunteer basis.  For the rhetoric class in particular, I consider myself an intelligent amateur.  I never took courses on writing when I was in college, yet I care about writing a lot, and I've now gotten quite a lot of experience in teaching with blogs, so can report it is definitely not just about the writing but also how students learn to make personal connections to the subject matter they are studying.   So, perhaps arrogantly, I believe that if I had been given this opportunity my section would be better than the typical section.

I've had a different experience, while I was still working full time, of teaching a special topics class for the Campus Honors Program.  The class was called Designing for Effective Change.  The class was listed as either CHP 395 or CHP 396, with the latter section approved to fill the Composition II requirement.  I learned then that these CHP classes have to at least give the option of filling some Gen Ed requirement for the students, in order for them to be able to fit the course into their schedules.  In this case the Director of CHP ran some interference to get the course approved for Comp II.  Based on that experience, my belief is that the type of experimental teaching I wanted to do is possible, but requires some high level person in the middle to enable it.

Let me turn to the other blockage, which appears far more systematic and to me is far more insidious.  It seems that the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and maybe the entire Campus is moving away from hiring retirees for teaching.  The reasons for this, as far as I can tell, are two-fold, both financial.  One is the matter of double dipping.  If the retiree is already getting an annuity from the state, getting paid some salary in addition is bad form.  There are already limits in place to the magnitude of the double dipping.  Now it appears it is being eliminated altogether, which is why I didn't teach this past fall.

The other issue, one I'm more sympathetic too, is that when hiring a retiree, that person doesn't contribute to the retirement system.  In contrast, full time employees have 8% of their salaries withheld as contribution to the retirement system.  So teaching with a retiree under contract limits contributions to the retirement system that would have occurred if a full time instructor were teaching the course instead.  Note that this issue is also there when a doctoral student ends up teaching a class under contract or when a visiting faculty member teaches.   Here I want to consider a possible work around that makes sense to me.

Departments who hire under contract a person to teach a course would face a tax that they have to pay the campus.  The tax would be .08/.92 of whatever they are paying that person.  The campus would then contribute that tax to the retirement system - on a voluntary basis as this is not mandated by law. This would make the contribution to the retirement system not depend on who is doing the teaching, so that could be determined by other more relevant criteria (like who would teach the class well).  Invariably retiree pay for teaching would go down, but might still be enough to induce the person to teach. To me this makes more sense than a total prohibition on retiree teaching, especially given my discussion earlier about voluntary work being bundled with paid work.

Let me add something here that may not be possible, but I'll mention it, because it counts in with the type of experimentation I'd like to see that I discussed in the first section.  That is, retirees themselves might voluntarily opt to have their retirement pay taxed (rebated to the retirement system).  There are two reasons why this might make sense, and I'm using myself as an example in each case.   I retired early, at age 55.  My pension benefits depend on my years of service and my salary near when I retired, but not my age.  It is reasonable to think that pension benefits should be lower for people retiring early.  Second, I was a reasonably well paid administrator in the College of Business when I retired and there is a COLA on my pension benefits of 3% per year, more than the rate of inflation in that time period and more than the rate at which the campus gave salary increases to those still working. This is a different imbalance that might be at least partially corrected.    And if these imbalances were corrected, then the double dipping issue might not seem so dire.

Would there be some headaches in trying to move to these alternatives?  Of course there would be.  And they are not my headaches, to be sure.  So, on the one hand, I'm reluctant to be too critical about these decisions.  But my sense of these things is that these decisions are being driven by budget concerns for the university - the funding from the state will never get back to what it once was - but not at all about the need for the university to be a leader in solving the larger demographic issue for society overall due to declining birth rates.  I think we need to get out of the mindset that individual faculty in their labs do research, but administrators don't, they just make the trains run on time.   The administrators need some forward thinking about society overall, not just their own institution, and try to come up with solutions that might work for both.

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I want to complete this exercise by talking about volunteer activities I've done on campus since retiring and how they relate to teaching.

I've mentored students, some through a campus program called Illinois Promise, where the mentee is matched to mentor at the outset, and I've also done mentoring where the mentee previously took a class from me and the mentoring was arranged informally near when the course was over.  In the latter case, in fact, I aimed to have a discussion group, with a few students, which if there is critical mass is more satisfying to me than the one-on-one mentoring, because the students get a boost from each other as well as from me and they tend to relax more readily as a result.  Even when there is only one student, it is easier when the student has already had my class.  The prior knowledge means many implicit assumptions have already been validated.

Of course, it is possible to have a successful relationship with a mentee in Illinois Promise.  And the social need may be greater there - the mentoring might increase student retention for first year students, especially the I-Promise scholars who are from low income families.  But I've found that after a while those relationships tend to hit a wall. The discussion gets repetitive.  And I seem to be like a broken record on the same point - go to office hours for your courses and let the instructor get to know you.  I don't want to be their mother, but segueing to philosophy of life discussions is hard to do, so being a surrogate mother is the likely outcome after a while.

I have also supervised some students in independent study classes, which the university treats as a volunteer activity.  Where this has worked reasonably well, the students had performed quite well in the class they took from me.  I had one experience where I accepted a middling student of mine for an independent study.  I was quite critical of the first piece of work he showed me, as I felt he entirely misread (really ignored) the article I had him read.  He dropped the class soon after that.  I have gotten multiple requests from students I had never met to supervise them in some independent study.  I declined in each case.  It's simply too much to ask that we learn about each other's capabilities and expectations this way when starting from ignorance.  I don't have the inclination to encourage that.

My point here is that the teaching for pay creates positive externalities where the volunteer work then makes sense. To view volunteer work as entirely severed from the paid alternative is quite restrictive, at least in my experience.

So it is my belief that institutions like the university should be doing experiments blending compensation, work, volunteering, and retirement pay.  I don't know whether I'm a good model or an outlier on these things, which is one thing experiments might reveal.  In the meantime, not doing such experiments looks like ageism to me.