not the retiring kind?

according to new nsf data, sociologists appear to have a higher rate of retirement than other social scientists. unfortunately, these retirements are not necessarily creating new tenure-track job openings. as inside higher ed reports today, sociologists also have a higher rate of unemployment than other social scientists. while the retirement rate for sociologists nearly doubled from 6.2 percent to 11.7 percent between 1993 and 2003, the unemployment rate doubled as well, from 1.3 percent to 2.6 percent.

my uneducated guess is that there was a bigger post-war surge in sociology phd production relative to, say, psychology, and that these folks are now retiring. i'm baffled as to why sociology suddenly has a significantly higher unemployment rate than psychology or political science, but a base rate of 2.6 percent is still pretty close to full employment