Among U.S. workers, nearly 90 percent of Americans employed in K-12 and higher education actively save for their retirement compared to 59 percent of all American workers. In “Retirement Confidence in the Education Sector: Comparisons by Race,” a collaboration between the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the TIAA-CREF Institute, the report presents both similarities and disparities in how Black and White education workers fare with planning and managing their retirement savings.
Among education sector employees, 87 percent of African-Americans and 88 percent of Whites save for their retirement. In addition, the report discloses that nearly 80 percent of the respective groups are confident they are investing their savings properly and close to 70 percent of the groups are confident they will have enough money to live comfortably during retirement. A majority in each group say that they are confident they will not outlive their savings and approximately half have calculated how much they actually need to save to achieve this goal, according to the report.
“Building on their established base of solid savings behavior, however, the education workforce is more likely than the U.S. workforce overall to achieve the goal of a financially comfortable retirement,” the report states.
“I think overall [the report is] meaningful because it shows that in one sector, African-Americans and Whites are equally likely to be savers, or to say that they currently save, and that’s not true in all employment sectors,” said Dr. Wilhelmina Leigh, the report’s author and a Joint Center senior research associate.
“I think that’s worth noting,” she added, noting that the study grew out of discussions Leigh had with TIAA-CREF officials after she became a TIAA-CREF Institute fellow in early 2012. The Washington-based Joint Center conducts research and policy analysis on topics of concern to African-Americans and other racial minorities.
“There is something at work within the education sector environment that may not be at work in other sectors that may have fostered this particular outcome” of high rates of retirement savings confidence, she says.
