Though more Eastern employees are retiring this year than normal, William Weber, Vice President for Business Affairs, said this will not affect students in a profound way.

He said, as of now, 36 members of Eastern’s instructional staff and 93 administration staff members will retire this year.

Weber said this is around double the number of Eastern employees that retire during an average year.

He said because the majority of retirees will be administrative staff and not instructional faculty, most students will not notice an abnormal change in the education they receive.

“I don’t think students will see a lot of change,” Weber said. “There will be some new faces in classrooms, but not to many more than usual.”

Blair Lord, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, agreed with Weber, and said in an e-mail that even though there will be several new instructors and professors, this is the case every year.

“The job of academic affairs is to deliver the curriculum. We will do that,” Lord said.

Weber said most of the fresh faces will found at Eastern’s day-to-day staff. He said this would include positions such as secretaries, facilities, planning and management employees, and housing and dining employees.

While many students develop relationships with administrative staff, Weber said the effects of their departure will likely not be noticed by students as much the departure of professors.

Both Lord and Weber said they do not expect a drastic increase in the cost of recruitment to replace the retiring faculty and staff.

Lord said in an e-mail that administrative staff is usually replaced locally and does not require much, if any, money to recruit them.

He said they have always had to annually replace a number of departing faculty members.

“With enrollment still on a downward trend and state funding shrinking, we will be looking carefully at replacements,” Lord said. “I do not foresee any dramatic spike in the costs associated with replacing faculty positions.”

Weber said the university will likely save money on salary costs since openings in hire positions are frequently filled with entry level employees such as a professor being replaced with an assistant professor.

Both Lord and Weber said one of the reasons so many employees are retiring this year is because of the recent changes made to the Illinois state pension system and the ongoing pension reform debate at the state legislator.

Weber said the primary change was in how the state calculates a government employee’s pension. The recalculation would result in an average seven to eight percent drop in most state employees’ pension funds, Weber said.

He said this change will take affect next Monday and a number of people who would have been affected chose to move up their retirement date up to this year.

Weber said another factor of pension reform is Senate Bill 1313, which was signed last week by Governor Quinn. The bill changed health insurance benefits of retirees, Weber said.

Under the old law, the state government subsidized five percent of a state retiree’s health care per year of employment, Weber said. This meant that if a state employee worked for 20 years or more, their entire cost of health care would be subsidized by the state upon their retirement.

Weber said Bill 1313 does away with this formula, and now the Director of Central Management Services revises the amount of subsidized health care on an annual basis.

Lord said the large number of retiring employees is caused by factors other than pensions as well.

“We are looking at a retirement bubble cause by the hiring many years ago of faculty who came of age as a result of the post-war baby-boom,” Lord said. “There is simply a large cohort of faculty who are getting close to retirement age right now.”

Seth Schroeder can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].