Student Enrolment and Faculty Renewal: The Response of the Tenure- Based University System to Demographic and Budgetery Shocks.

A problem common to many state-funded universities or university systems is how to maintain an inflow of young (and ceative) new faculty when student enrolment declines or government grants are reduced, and existing faculty are aging but subject to tenure protection. This paper considers the problem in a generic setting. A model is developed in which the problem is posed as one of constrained optimization: a hypothetical university optimizes its situation, for a given planning horizon, by minimizing a (nonlinear) loss function subject to a set of (linear and nonlinear) constraints.