To retire or not to retire? For academics, this can be a complicated question

In academia, a growing number of PhD graduates are competing for a limited number of academic positions, and with tenured professors often retiring later, the competition for these positions continues to increase. Joining me for this episode to take a deeper dive into this topic is Richard Larson, post-tenure professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this episode, Professor Larson draws on the results of several recently published papers, all from eight years of NIH-supported research. Most papers have coauthors, representing multiple disciplines and three universities: The Ohio State University, Virginia Tech, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Larson’s home university. For more information, Professor Larson can be reached at rclarson@mit.edu .

Larson RC, Ghaffarzadegan N, Gomez Diaz M (2012) Magnified Effects of Changes in NIH Research Funding Levels. Service Science 4(4): 382-395.

Larson R, Gomez Diaz M (2012) Nonfixed Retirement Age for University Professors: Modeling Its Effects on New Faculty Hires. Service Science 4(1): 69-78.

Larson RC, Ghaffarzadegan N, Xue Y (2014) Too Many PhD Graduates or Too Few Academic Job Openings: The Concept of R0 in Academia. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 31(6): 745–750.

Andalib MA, Ghaffarzadegan N, Larson RC (2018) The Postdoc Queue: A Labor Force in Waiting. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 35(6): 675-686.

Ghaffarzadegan N, Hawley J, Larson RC, Xue Y (2015) A Note on PhD Population Growth in Biomedical Sciences. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 32(3): 402–405.

Larson RC (2018) What are you waiting for?. Science. 362(6414): 610-610.

Interviewed this episode: