When most people think about how teachers enter the profession, they might think of what could be called a traditional route--student teaching during college, followed by a full-time teaching job beginning at 22 or 23 years old.
While this is still the typical path into teaching, only about 55 percent of incoming teachers in American public schools start out this way. Twenty percent enter in their late 20s, 16 percent enter in their 30s, and the remaining 9 percent enter after age 40. These data come from a representative sample of American public school teachers surveyed by the National Center for Education Statistics in the 2011-12 school year.
Still, these national data hide quite a bit of variation by state. At one end, Kansas and Iowa teachers are much more likely to take the "traditional" path. In both those states, more than 70 percent of teachers begin their careers by age 25, and more than 85 percent enter the profession at some point in their 20s.
In contrast, states like California and New Mexico have very different patterns. Less than 40 percent of teachers in these states enter the profession by age 25. In fact, New Mexico has the highest percentage of teachers who begin their careers after the age of 40, at 17.6 percent of their teachers.
Age when first started teaching 20-25 26-30 31-35 36-40 41+ National Average 55.0% 19.9% 8.8% 7.0% 9.3% New Mexico 33.7% 23.4% 10.9% 14.5% 17.6% California 39.4% 25.9% 13.8% 8.1% 12.8% Alaska 41.8% 24.3% 13.7% 9.0% 11.1% Rhode Island 43.1% 24.7% 12.0% 7.9%* 12.2% Nevada 44.0% 21.0% 11.8%* 7.1%* 16.1% Arizona 45.4% 21.9% 10.0% 7.5% 15.1% Idaho 46.1% 22.1% 14.0% 8.8% 8.9% Florida 46.2% 23.2% 11.2% 5.8% 13.7% Texas 48.5% 22.6% 7.8% 8.2% 12.8% Hawaii 49.0% 25.7%* 10.3%* 6.8%* 8.2%* Oregon 49.2% 25.1% 8.8% 7.4% 9.5% Vermont 50.2% 22.0% 9.2% 8.9% 9.7% Georgia 51.2% 23.6% 7.4% 8.5% 9.4% Utah 52.0% 23.5% 6.8% 7.3% 10.4% Wyoming 52.1% 26.3% 9.7%* 6.2%* 5.7% Washington 52.2% 21.7% 9.2% 7.3% 9.6% Oklahoma 52.4% 22.4% 8.2% 7.8% 9.1% New Hampshire 52.5% 16.5% 11.5% 8.3% 11.3% Colorado 53.4% 21.4% 9.5% 6.8% 8.8% Maine 54.3% 15.6% 12.2% 10.2% 7.7% North Carolina 55.2% 16.6% 9.5% 9.3% 9.4% Mississippi 55.4% 17.7% 9.5% 7.3%* 10.1% Massachusetts 55.7% 18.4% 7.6% 7.8% 10.6% West Virginia 55.7% 17.2% 9.4% 8.4% 9.4% New York 56.3% 19.2% 9.0% 6.4% 9.1% Kentucky 56.5% 20.7% 9.5% 5.8% 7.5% Louisiana 56.6% 19.3% 11.1% 7.8% 5.3% Tennessee 56.8% 15.1% 11.0% 7.5% 9.6% District of Columbia 56.9% 19.7% 8.5%* 4.9%* 10.0%* Connecticut 57.7% 21.3% 7.9% 5.0% 8.1% Alabama 58.1% 18.8% 9.1% 7.7% 6.3% Virginia 58.3% 15.2% 6.9% 9.0% 10.6% New Jersey 58.4% 19.8% 6.1% 6.9% 8.8% Michigan 58.6% 19.9% 7.1% 8.2% 6.2% Montana 60.7% 17.9% 8.9% 5.7% 6.8% Arkansas 61.0% 17.6% 9.0% 5.9% 6.6% Delaware 61.1% 15.3% 9.4%* 5.7%* 8.5%* Illinois 61.6% 17.0% 8.3% 6.2% 6.9% Minnesota 62.4% 19.5% 6.8% 5.3% 6.0% South Carolina 63.4% 16.8% 8.7% 5.0% 6.2% Missouri 63.5% 18.6% 6.7% 5.8% 5.5% Pennsylvania 63.8% 16.3% 8.0% 5.7% 6.2% Ohio 64.2% 16.0% 7.4% 6.0% 6.4% Wisconsin 65.2% 15.5% 7.4% 5.4% 6.5% Indiana 68.2% 15.7% 6.7% 4.9% 4.5% South Dakota 69.0% 17.5% 5.9%* 3.8%* 3.8%* Maryland 69.7% 13.6% 4.7%* 4.9%* 7.1%* North Dakota 69.7% 15.4% 7.2%* 3.5% 4.2%* Nebraska 69.9% 18.4% 4.7% 2.6%* 4.4% Kansas 70.5% 15.2% 7.0% 3.8% 3.5%* Iowa 71.3% 15.0% 5.7% 4.2% 3.8%* Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), Public Teachers Data File 2011-12
*Represents small sample size, interpret with caution
This question may be interesting in its own right way, but the answers have financial implications for teachers. Because teacher pension formulas are based on a teacher's salary in the last year they taught, regardless of when that happened to be, those formulas offer greater rewards for late-career service than than they do for the same years performed earlier in the teacher's career. So, for example, the same pension formula would be more beneficial for the typical teacher in California or New Mexico than in Iowa or Kansas, simply because California and New Mexico teachers are already closer to retiring. (See here for a longer explanation with examples for teachers of various ages.)
Teachers who start at younger ages do have the potential to eventually earn larger pensions by the time they retire, but, because they have more years to go, they're also more likely to leave before then. Younger teachers also face different and more difficult calculations about what to do with their pension. For a 35-year-old with 10 years of service who decides to leave the profession, it may make sense to cash out their contributions and roll over that money into an interest-bearing investment account. For someone closer to retirement, the pension may be a better deal.
From a public policy standpoint, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to prioritize some teachers over others. But that's exactly what teacher pensions do.
Taxonomy:As I wrote about previously, Arizona’s teacher pension system is complex, expensive, and fails to produce an adequate retirement benefit for the majority of its teacher members.
Over the past decade, the problem has been getting worse. The Arizona State Retirement System (ASRS) has simultaneously cut benefits and raised costs for teachers.
An important way to look at the impact of these changes on teacher retirement benefits is to analyze teachers’ retirement benefits net of their own contributions. As we’ve written about extensively, pension systems are back-loaded, which means that for years, often decades, teachers can actually have a net negative retirement benefit (that is, the pension they would qualify for is worth less than what they themselves contributed).
To show how the various changes to the ASRS system affect retirement wealth for Arizona teachers, I modeled how the benefit structure has changed over the past decade. Each curve in the graph below illustrates how benefits would accumulate for a new teacher hired in that year.
As shown in the graph, Arizona teachers’ net retirement benefits have decreased with each change to Arizona’s system. Part of this is due to rising teacher contribution rates, which will go from 9.45 percent in 2010 to 12.51 percent in 2020, according to the state’s projections. Teachers may feel that as a decrease in their take-home pay, but it also means a cut in their net retirement benefits. All told, a new hire in 2020 will have a much less valuable retirement plan than a teacher who was hired in 2010.
Source: Author’s calculations based on ASRS financial reports.
Each line represents a new entrant in a given year. The blue line shows a teacher’s net benefits in 2010. In a set of reforms enacted in 2011, ASRS raised teacher retirement ages and despite a 50-50 split of the total benefit cost, teachers assumed a greater share of the normal cost of benefitis since the employer contribution is mostly going to pay unfunded liabilities. The orange line shows the result of those reforms. The reduction in benefits shifted the curve to the right, while subsequent increases to teacher contribution rates have continued to depress the curve, producing lower net benefits.
Altogether, pension design issues affect how much teachers get out of the plans. Due to benefit cuts and cost increases, teachers are getting less bang for their buck as their net retirement benefit continue to fall.
This problem is not unique to Arizona. States across the country are asking teachers to pay more for lower benefits. But just as teachers in Arizona earned a much-deserved raise last year, they also deserve higher-quality retirement benefits.
Merely vesting in a pension plan is not sufficient to guarantee a decent benefit, and many vested teachers would be better off withdrawing their contributions than waiting to collect a pension.
That reality has taken me a while to grasp, because it's counter-intuitive, and because vesting in other types of plans matters much more. So let me start by explaining how vesting works in defined contribution, 401k-style plans. In a defined contribution plan, the employer makes a contribution as a percentage of the employee’s salary. Employees qualify for those employer contributions after they reach a certain number of years of service, called the vesting period. Employees who leave before vesting forfeit their employer's contributions.
Say an employee starts out with a salary of $40,000, and the employer contributes 5 percent into the employee’s 401k. In the worker's first year of employment, the employer contributes $2,000 (5 percent of $40,000) to the employee's 401k, but that money is not vested yet. The employee is entitled to that money only if he or she reaches five years of service; short of that, and the employer keeps it.
This is part of the reason why, in a new report out this week, we found that immediate vesting would significantly improve the percentage of workers who qualified for adequate retirement benefits in defined contribution and cash balance plans. In contrast, immediate vesting would do virtually nothing for the vast majority of teachers in defined benefit plans. That's because vesting works differently in these types of plans.
An example may help here. Consider the case of a 25-year-old teacher who started her career last fall in Los Angeles. She’s automatically enrolled in the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS). CalSTRS has a five-year vesting period, which means she’ll first qualify for retirement benefits if she leaves after her fifth year of service, at age 30. But she won’t be eligible to begin collecting her pension benefit until she reaches age 62, in the year 2055, and it will be based on her salary in her final years of service, in the year 2023. By the time she's able to begin collecting, inflation will have significantly worn away her benefit.
Critically, this distinction affects young teachers much more than older ones. That’s because older teachers are already close to retirement, and they won’t have to wait as much time for inflation to wear away their benefits.
The graph below, from an Urban Institute report by Richard Johnson and Benjamin Southgate, helps show what this looks like. Each line represents the value of a teacher’s pension benefit, net of her own contributions, depending on when she started teaching and how long she serves. I’ve added an arrow pointing to the five-year mark when teachers in California qualify for a vested pension from CalSTRS. Note that, while all teachers technically qualify for a pension after five years of service, that benefit is negative for all teachers hired at age 25 or 35. It’s only for teachers hired at age 45 or 55 where vesting produces a positive net benefit.
To put this in perspective, consider that most teachers begin their careers in their 20s or 30s. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, only about 7 percent of California teachers began their teaching career at age 45 or later. Another way to say this is that vesting produces a positive benefit for only 7 percent of California's incoming teachers. Of course if they continue teaching their benefit will continue to grow, but as the graph above makes clear, California teachers may have to stay for 15, 20, or 25 years before realizing a positive net pension.
Teachers who leave the system also have the option of withdrawing their own contributions, but even vested teachers in most states do not qualify for employer contributions. That's true in California as well. For many departing teachers, cashing out and withdrawing their own contributions is often a better deal than leaving their contributions with the plan and waiting to collect a pension. In doing so the employee forfeits the guarantee of the pension, but that’s often the right financial decision.
States know this too. In a piece last year for The 74, I noted that North Carolina dropped its vesting period from 10 years to five after finding the change cost very little. Other states could likely do a similar analysis and find that their vesting periods are largely symbolic. Moreover, when we looked at the data on teacher behavior right around vesting periods, we found that teachers do not stick around longer just to vest in their state's pension plan.
Given the data I've explained above, teachers are making a rational decision to ignore vesting periods when they're deciding whether to remain in teaching or not, but that means vesting periods are really only accomplishing two things. First, vesting periods do limit the retirement benefits earned by teachers who enter the profession in their 40s and 50s. Second, for younger teachers, vesting periods are forcing risk-averse teachers to choose between withdrawing their contributions or waiting for a "guaranteed" pension, even if that pension might be worth less than the teacher's own contributions. In both cases, vesting periods help the finances of state pension plans, but they're bad for teachers.
Our news cycle is lightning quick. Proponents and naysayers alike are often loudest just prior to a policy change’s implementation, before moving on to tackle the next one. But what happens after the dust settles? Were the changes as meaningful as supporters hoped? Were ramifications as cutting as detractors warned? We don’t always get the chance to go back and check.
Alaska’s 2005 teacher pension system reform legislation provides a unique opportunity to do just that. We’ve collected pre and post reform data to examine teacher workforce impact in the wake of retirement plan changes. While it is important to note that these trends should not be interpreted as causal, we feel there are meaningful takeaways all the same.
But first, some history. In a 2005 special session, the Alaska state legislature passed retirement reform laws, effectively freezing the state’s existing defined benefit pension plan, and enrolling new employees in a 401(k)-styled defined contribution plan. The state faced a $5.7 billion unfunded liability, and while changing the plan structure would not eliminate that debt, it would prevent it from snowballing further. Critics were concerned that the switch would cause teachers to leave the profession in droves, or never enter it at all, citing pensions as a key recruitment and retention incentive.
So what actually happened? Not much. The table below tracks the average Alaska teacher salary, the number of teachers in the state*, and the percentage of Alaska teachers leaving their district in a given year. The 2005-06 school year is highlighted to denote the policy change. Alaska’s average teacher salaries have risen steadily from 2002 to 2012. The number of teachers has fluctuated over that time, but remained largely consistent.
And teacher turnover, one of the biggest concerns going into the reform, has remained steady as well. The chart below tracks the percentage of Alaska teachers who left their district each year (including those who leave the profession entirely or moved to a different school), and highlights the new hire cohort first enrolled in the new retirement system. Warnings of dramatic teacher shortages in the wake of retirement plan changes have not come to pass.
This is not to say that Alaska’s reform is a perfect exemplar. The DC plan sets decent contribution rates, with a mandated 8 percent employee contribution and a 7 percent employer contribution, but in passing the 2005 reform legislation, the state missed an opportunity to extend Social Security coverage to its teachers. As a result, Alaska teachers continue to be uncovered, putting their retirement security at risk. The plan isn’t ideal, but it does offer better benefits to a larger group of mobile workers, and it should help keep the state’s finances stable over the long-term.
Pensions make up an increasing portion of a state’s education spending and any changes to the plans must be balanced to both do right by new hires as well as uphold promises made to existing employees. There are no easy answers, but taking opportunities to examine results in case studies like Alaska allow future policy makers to cut through some of the discourse.
*Classroom teachers, includes part-time
No offense intended, but actuaries typically are not the bearers of good news. Broadly speaking, actuaries are the people who count money and warn about a rainy day. While most policymakers and CEOs don’t like seeing them coming, actuaries perform a critical function and help ensure that governments, companies, and other entities have enough money set aside for future costs or unexpected expenses.
A recent, one-of-a-kind study from the Society of Actuaries presents a mixed bag: good news for some, and greater expenses for others. After studying more than 100 public retirement systems from 2008 to 2013, across 46 million life-years, they found that teachers have the longest life expectancy of all public employees. Over this period, female teachers on average lived to be 90 years old, and the typical male teacher is expected to live till they’re 88.
Great news, right?
For teachers, absolutely. These findings suggest that in general teachers enjoy a comfortable retirement with sufficient financial support. The fact that most teachers will live into their ninth decade is particularly encouraging given that the average American life expectancy fell for three consecutive years.
Living longer, however, carries consequences for states. Approximately 90 percent of teachers are enrolled in state pension systems. This means that qualified retirees earn an annual pension benefit that is derived from a number of factors, such as years of experience and their final salaries, and a teacher pension is a lifetime benefit. In other words, unlike a 401k, an individual’s pension cannot run dry. The state is obligated to pay the annual benefit for each year of the retired teacher’s life.
Thus, the longer a retired teacher lives, the more valuable their pension becomes. This carries serious implications for state pension funds. These funds, relying on the help of actuaries, base their funding levels, at least in part, on life expectancy estimates. If states are using outdated data or less optimistic life expectancy tables, then they’re likely underfunding their pension systems. In addition to the longstanding tradition of state legislatures simply not providing the actuarially determined level of funding necessary for their pensions to keep up with their obligations, this would mean that even the level of financing recommended by the actuaries may have been too low.
With virtually every state facing a teacher pension crisis, it is vitally important that state pension systems have an accurate picture of their retiree’s life expectancy. While it is likely that the conditions will vary, states should carefully assess their life expectancy estimates and, as necessary, realign their funding levels so they can meet their obligations over a longer term than they may have anticipated.
The following is a guest post from Ryan Frailich, a Certified Financial Planner. He started his career teaching in Mississippi, before moving to teach in New York City and then New Orleans. In the first decade of his working career, Ryan ended up with one state pension and three different 403(b) plans. Upon researching his situation and learning more about the state of retirement for teachers, Ryan switched careers and then became a financial planner with a focus on helping young couples and educators plan for their financial lives.
The chart below is something everyone “knows,” but most people forget about for 99 percent of their lives. Inflation, a concept all of us are exposed to in high school economics class, is the slow moving force behind those stories your grandfather told you about going to the movies for 25 cents, or buying a bottle of coke for a dime. Yet when it comes to the impact on teacher’s retirement plans, people are in the dark.
Teacher pensions are a struggle to write about because there’s a chasm between what’s promised and the outcomes for the overwhelming majority of teachers. I believe all teachers should get the benefits promised to them, but here in the real world, we have to face the fact that the commonly held notion of a teacher working 30-35 years and retiring with a gold plated pension is largely fiction. The small number of teachers who actually reach breakeven has been widely covered, not to mention the even tinier fraction of beginning teachers who actually reach full retirement age. Setting aside those issues for a moment, let’s take a look at what happens to a teacher who starts in a retirement system, spends 30 years in it, and retires.
I’m in Louisiana, so let’s take a teacher who started in 2018 in the Baton Rouge schools. Let’s call this teacher James. James is 22, right out of college, and the starting salary for a brand new classroom teacher is $44,500. James stays in the district his entire career, earns a Master’s degree along the way, and retires 30 years later with a peak salary of $67,200.
Using the Teacher’s Retirement System of Louisiana’s pension calculation, we calculate his benefit the year after he retires as follows:
Years Worked * Pension Multiplier * Highest three years average salary
30 * 2.5 * $66,200 = $49,650
Wow! He can stop working and go on collecting $49,650 from age 53 until whenever he passes away. Or can he?
Enter the inflation monster.
History isn’t entirely predictive, but let’s use historical inflation to see what happens to the real dollar value of James’ pension over time. The consumer price index rose 2.54 percent per year, on average, from 1988-2018, so we’ll use that as our estimate of the next 30 years.
Technically, TRSL offers a cost of living adjustment that can be about 1.5 percent per year, so we’ll factor that in for now. As we’ll get to later, that’s another one of those things that’s promised on paper until you read the fine print.
With the numbers cited above, the table below captures the current value of his pension at ten year increments into the future.
Ugh. Now, at 82 years old, James has to find a way to make up for the fact that his pension has lost 26.3 percent of his purchasing power to inflation since he retired.
The above assumes that TRSL awards that 1.5 percent cost of living increase every year, but historically that hasn’t been the case. TRSL has rules governing when a cost of living increase can be awarded, and those rules are incredibly complex, but essentially hinge on 3 things:
The funded ratio of the plan
The past year’s investment returns &
approval from the state legislature.
Translation: It’s not happening annually. In 2016, Louisiana teacher retirees got their first cost of living adjustment in eight years, and it was 1.5 percent. If we know his pension loses 26 percent of its value while getting a yearly cost of living adjustment, imagine how bad it looks if he only gets one every eight or so years.
This scenario I’m presenting is, in all reality, the best case scenario for many teachers in Louisiana. There are a variety of other scenarios in which the payout looks even worse.
It’s worse because whatever meager Social Security a teacher in Louisiana may be eligible for would get reduced due to the windfall elimination provision. I say meager because years spent teaching in Louisiana are years not spent contributing to Social Security, so career teachers may only have sporadic income from college or post retirement to earn Social Security credits.
It’s worse because just over one quarter of teachers who enter the system even get to the roughly 20 years required to break even, adjusted for inflation, on their own contributions. And if you leave the system, the amount you can withdraw and put in your own IRA has sat, uninvested, without interest, for years.
It’s worse because if you decide to leave your contributions with the state of Louisiana, and draw your pension in the distant future, inflation erodes it all along the way. Say James stops teaching after 15 years and changes careers, but wants to draw his pension. The pension won’t be accessible for him until age 62 (age 60 for some retirees). Those 24 years of inflation at 3 percent leave what would’ve been an annual payment of $19,331 worth just $9,306 per year.
It’s worse because the Louisiana pension has been underfunded for years, so at some future, indeterminate point, it’s possible the benefits that do exist will be reduced.
If one of the best outcomes for a new teacher entering the system is one in which their pension payout loses 26 percent of its value over a 30 year retirement, then thousands of teachers get even worse.
What You Can Do About It
There are a host of policy changes I’d love to see, but for this article, let’s stick to what’s in your control.
- Max out a ROTH IRA. I encourage all teachers to contribute to a ROTH IRA, and work to max out the annual limit whenever possible. This will give you a post-tax pot of money to draw on and supplement your pension in retirement years.
- Use the 457 or 403(b) Plan (with caution). Most districts have either a 403(b) plan, a 457 plan, or both. These are retirement plans that allow you to put much more money in each year than an IRA. But use caution because 403(b)’s are rife with horrendous investment options and investment fees I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. Do your homework before committing to one of these plans, but when you find a good one with reasonable fees and adequate investment options, it will provide a tool to start building money you can rely on if your pension falls short of fully meeting your long term needs.
- Adjust your expectations. New teachers need to go in with eyes wide open, and know that the odds are against them in getting the gold plated pension. Being clear eyed about this helps people know well in advance, and better prepare for it.
- Decide on a career path early. This is hard because my advice is to decide in the first few years of your career whether you’re going to stick with it for the long haul or not. That is obviously easy to say but much harder to implement given all the life variables that come peoples way. That said, if you are going to make a full 20+ year career of teaching in one state, you’ll do okay with your pension. If you work 2-4 years and move on, the decision to withdraw your contributions and invest in an IRA is easy. The challenge is hardest for people who have 8-15 years in the system, and either way they choose comes with significant downsides.
To me, it’s a shame that so many teachers will end up having inadequate resources to retire on. If I could wave my magic wand and give teachers a pension option that met the needs of the majority of teachers, I would do it in the blink of an eye. Teachers deserve better than the disjointed, underfunded, and inadequate system most have access to.
