Faculty retention and attrition focus on the likelihood that faculty will remain in a department. Some mobility is to be expected. Some faculty will move from one academic job to another or from academia to a position outside academia (e. g., in industry). Some faculty will leave departments to retire or because they are ill. The most problematic kind of attrition involves faculty who leave because they feel unwelcome. These faculty members have not failed, but they also have not fit in, and the departments they leave have invested time, money, and other resources that can be lost. For example, “new hires who leave their units in the first or second year end up costing programs tens of thousands of dollars in recruitment costs, moving expenses, start-up packages, and more” (Bugeja, 2004). The loss of a faculty member may also lead to a lost faculty line, as the faculty member might not be replaced.
It is often thought that female faculty attrition is greater than male faculty attrition, but the evidence is mixed (August, 2006; August and Waltman, 2004; Carter et al., 2003; Cohoon, et al., 2003; Trower and Chait, 2002; Yamagata, 2002). One way to examine retention issues, generally, is to ask faculty whether they have received outside offers or whether they are considering leaving their department.[80]
The survey asked tenured faculty whether they had “received an offer to leave their current institution in the last 5 years.” Overall, the fraction of men and women reporting that they had received one or more offers was almost identical (32.7 percent of women and 32.5 percent of men.) There were no differences between men and women in biology and civil engineering (see Appendix 4-23). In chemistry and physics, a greater percentage of men than women reported they had received at least one offer to leave their current institution. This was reversed in mathematics and electrical engineering, where more women than men reported receiving one or more outside offers.
We looked at what factors contribute to getting outside offers. The response variable was considered to be dichotomous: zero, or one or more offers to leave the institution. The results of this analysis must be very carefully interpreted, because clearly the people who received offers and stayed were the “happy” ones. Therefore, any statements regarding the effect of factors on offers to leave need to be qualified by noting that the findings are conditional on the fact that faculty remained at their institutions, whether they had offers or not.
In this analysis, we tried to investigate the effects of discipline, gender, rank, type of institution, prestige of the institution, whether the faculty member had a mentor, and the faculty member’s productivity in terms of grant funding and publications on retention. However, we found that only 526 respondents (out of a total of 1,404 full-time assistant, associate, or full professors) had complete information for all covariates. Furthermore, only one male assistant professor and no female assistant professors reported receiving one or more offers to leave. Thus, we restricted attention to the 526 associate and full professors who had complete covariate information, and we fitted a model that included all the covariates of interest. The probability of receiving at least one outside offer was not different for men and women of any rank or across disciplines. In general, the probability of receiving one or more offers to leave was not associated with many of the covariates. The only two associations we found were with prestige of the institution and with research funding. As one might anticipate, faculty in institutions of medium or high prestige were more sought after than those at institutions of lower prestige (p < 0.001). Faculty with more research funding were also more likely to receive one or more outside offers. For every additional $1,000 in research funding, the probability of having received at least one outside offer increased by about 1 percent.