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The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce by Dan Pontefract
Published in May 2026
Look around. How old are your colleagues?
Are there more of them in their 50s (like me) than in their 20s?
Do you hear more talk about retirements than new hires?
The name that Dan Pontefract, author of the smart but uneven and overstuffed book The Future of Work Is Grey, gives this phenomenon is “age debt.”
Having a name for a challenge is helpful, and age debt is a good one. A rapidly aging (campus) workforce creates a slow-moving institutional liability. Much like having a campus with a physical deferred maintenance backlog, an institution with an age debt will eventually need to pay the cost.
But what will be the price for an aging higher ed workforce?
The answer to that question will depend on how thoughtful, strategic and proactive our institutions can be in navigating our growing age debt.
Pontefract is clear that an older workforce can come with many advantages. Older workers (my cohort) are referred to as Rubies in the book. We Rubies have been shaped by years of experience and come to work with a wealth of institutional knowledge and ecosystem-level expertise. While the most senior leadership roles in most organizations (including universities) may be occupied by Rubies, most Rubies are not in those roles. Instead, Rubies often self-select themselves into more specialized roles—learning from years of experience that it is best to play to one’s strengths.
In the formulation of The Future of Work Is Grey, it is not the Rubies that make our organizations (and universities) run: It is the Rocks. The Rocks are midcareer, middle- to upper-management professionals who serve as player-coaches within the organization. Rocks take on ever-growing areas of accountability and responsibility, managing people and budgets and working across the organization to get things done.
To round out the archetype triad (Pontefract wants to move away from unhelpful and rigid generational labels), Rivers are early- and early-midcareer professionals. Rivers are building their knowledge, networks and experience while looking to move into areas of greater impact and responsibility.
As more higher ed people transition (evolve, age) into their Ruby years and fewer smart, energetic, ambitious, curious and fluid Rivers are hired, the pressure builds on the Rocks. These are the people who are motivated to one day move into senior leadership roles and/or who feel most responsible for their teams, projects, services and initiatives.
The risks of age debt for universities are that the Rocks will burn out, the future workforce (the Rivers) will not be developed and the institutional and ecosystem knowledge will walk out the door when the Rubies retire. Higher ed’s endemic age debt is not the crisis du jour, and maybe not even as existential as the demographic cliff, so it gets too little attention.
How many cycles are our presidents and provosts spending on coming up with long-term strategies to mitigate the age debt of the university workforce? What are HR’s areas of agency and degrees of freedom to put in place long-term policies to optimize around an aging workforce, as opposed to dealing with budget cuts, layoffs and dysfunctional units and departments?
One recommendation in The Future of Work Is Grey is to offer Rubies opportunities to bridge into retirement through job reclassification, reduced hours and increased vacation time. Many Rubies would be happy to trade some compensation for more flexibility and are at a point in their lives where they can financially make that trade-off. The goal would be to retain the benefit of experienced workers while providing incentives and structures that enable older workers to remain as valued contributors.
Unfortunately, it is often more attractive to balance the annual budget by letting the most seasoned (and expensive) employees go, through voluntary or forced attrition, than to find creative win-win solutions that reduce compensation costs and improve long-term retention.
Can universities take a long-term, strategic view of their workforces—faculty and staff—in an era of intensifying scarcity?
The Future of Work Is Grey might convince you that, among all the questions we are asking about the long-term resilience of our institutions, our growing higher ed workforce age debt should make it onto our (long) list of emerging postsecondary challenges.
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