Kids wave meets don dearth
A SHARP increase in the age of academic staff and a looming rush to retire will create a shortage of university teachers just as two waves of school-leavers engulf post-secondary education.
The percentage of the academic workforce aged over 50 increased from 26 per cent in 1991 to 39.8 per cent in 2006, according to University of Adelaide research fellow Graeme Hugo.
The oldest baby boomers would pass 65 in 2011, so the exodus of baby boomer retirees would gather momentum during the second and third decades of the century, Professor Hugo said.
Macquarie Graduate School of Management dean Roy Green told the HES that "institutions appear to be keeping afloat with all the outward trappings of normality, but beneath the surface a national crisis is looming if Hugo's assessment iscorrect".
However, leading Melbourne Business School academic Joshua Gans said "the crunch time" would be far sooner, especially in the sciences, since time taken to do PhD and postdoctoral work - often overseas - had extended the time to produce an academic by up to 12 years.
The increase of more than 80 per cent in the academic workforce aged over 50 comes comes as the Australian Bureau of Statistics projects universities will not only have to cope with a wave of retirements but increased demand on already overstretched universities.
The ABS projects the number of 15 to 17-year-olds increasing to almost 860,000 during the next few years, declining to 825,000 about 2018, before increasing back to almost 850,000 by 2025.
The new waves of students will pour into universities where student-staff ratios are already regarded as far too high, at 20.3 students for each academic.
Compounding the problem, Professor Hugo also identified a "lost generation" of potential academics in their 20s and 30s needed for academic renewal but who had been lost to the system for unknown reasons.
Academic leaders have welcomed the Rudd Government's recent doubling of postgraduate awardees and funding of 1000 mid-career researchers as a good start, but warned universities still faced a monumental task in countering the looming wave of academic baby boomer retirements.