8 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 295 2018 would carry on through 2020. In that glorious year, a majority of the population would be aged 50 and under for the first time since 2000. At that point, the profession’s age profile would resemble the actual 1986 population of ARL professionals, the first and also the youngest population in the data series. What those projections failed to anticipate was that 2010, far from marking a changing of the generational guard, would instead be the beginning of a sudden and dramatic turn towards delayed retirement. The retirement-prone 65+ age cohort, which had been stable at about 3% of the population since 1986, jumped to 5% in 2010, and then to over 9% in 2015. Delayed retirement is also evident in the librarian population tracked in the US Current Population Survey (CPS), where the 65+ cohort more than tripled between 2005 and 2015 to almost 11%. Figure 3
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