Drafting the next chapter: A scoping review of academic retirement planning

Interest in retirement planning among university faculty has grown in recent years as more academics approach traditional retirement age. This scoping review examines the current literature on retirement planning among higher education faculty by examining study characteristics; participant characteristics; theoretical frameworks employed; factors influencing retirement planning; and the quality of the included studies.

A comprehensive search across Medline, Embase, APA PsycInfo, AgeLine, ERIC, Education Source, Business Source Premier, Sociological Abstracts, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, JSTOR, and Web of Science Core Collection yielded an initial dataset of 8,906 unique articles. Following full-text assessment, 44 studies met the inclusion criteria.

Five factors prevailed across this literature as key mechanisms in academic retirement planning, including: 1) financial security; 2) health factors; 3) age and/or institutional policies; 4) work, family, and lifestyle factors; and 5) professional identity. Participant characteristics such as age, gender, stage of retirement, and other characteristics of the academic environment were reported inconsistently across the literature; only 14 of the studies mentioned a theoretical framework.

This is the first scoping review of academic retirement with a focus on planning that includes a range of methods. While health and financial security remain central to retirement planning broadly, the studies in this review suggest that professional identity plays a distinct role in shaping how academics approach retirement planning. Implications include the need for longitudinal designs to capture how faculty transitions, shifting professional identities, and planning behaviors evolve dynamically over time.