Andrew Carnegie created the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA), a fully funded system of pensions for professors, in 1918.
Conservative investing helped the company survive the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression.
Today, TIAA is a Fortune 100 financial services organization that is the leading provider of financial services in the academic, research, medical, cultural, and governmental fields. The company serves over 5 million active and retired employees participating at more than 15,000 institutions and has $1 trillion in combined assets, with holdings in more than 50 countries.
In February 2018, TIAA was providing parental leave irrespective of the parent’s gender.
In late 2020, the company announced that it would no longer be in the business of home loan mortgages. This meant that at least 200 jobs would be eliminated.
In June 2021, CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett asked members of Congress to include in any future infrastructure legislation a bipartisan initiative called IGNITE – the Institutional Grants for New Infrastructure, Technology and Education for HBCU Excellence Act.
TIAA maintains a corporate office in New York, New York.
