The Class Goes Gray
Retirees head back to college, and what's not to like? They often don't need to study for exams-or even pay tuition
Al Green worked for nearly 40 years before he was able to retire. But a life of leisure wasn't quite what he thought it would be. "I got bored playing golf," says Green, 80,of his 20 years of retirement in Florida. "And my wife didn't like the summers." As Green started to ponder a new retirement plan, many of his fondest memories centered on Pennsylvania State University, from which he graduated in 1947. So, Green and his wife moved back to State College, to take classes at Penn State.
College, of course, has changed since Green left campus. "There were 7,000 kids on campus when I was there," he recalls. Today, there are more than 40,000. That's just one of the changes. Jeoffrey Stross, board president of University Commons, a near-campus retirement community in Ann Arbor, Mich., says: "People have very fond memories of their time in college, and when they come back 40 or 50 years later it's different. Not only is the college different and the town different, but life is different."
Auditors. And there's no place where these differences are more apparent than in the classroom. Some 47,000 people over age 65 were enrolled in college in October 2004, the latest year for which the Census Bureau has data. But this number doesn't include people like Green who live in retirement communities affiliated with a campus and who audit classes, a statistic that is not tracked nationally. Some universities, like Princeton, report that the number of auditors has doubled since 2001 while others, like Penn State, say the stream of auditors has remained steady.
As retirees attend college classes, an intergenerational dynamic is unfolding. A typical undergraduate student might celebrate when a professor needs to cancel a class, while a senior citizen is more likely to feel disappointed. "Older students have a slightly different agenda than the average undergraduate who may be taking this course because it's a requirement," says Theresa Lafer, an instructor at Penn State who has taught several classes that include both retirees and traditional students. It's also very rare for an older student to miss even an early-morning class. Of course, since seniors often audit classes, they don't have the pressures of grades, exams, and papers.
Senior students may at first cluster together in classes. "When you have a class that's divided, with many adults versus as many traditional-age students, sometimes they separate into age cohorts," Lafer says. "But once they start talking to each other, it is quite clear that they learn from each other's experiences."
Green enjoys interacting with the undergraduate students as much as he likes the classes themselves. "You don't realize until you sit there how many changes you have seen that these kids haven't seen," he says. "When you come from Florida, where everybody is your age, it's kind of refreshing to realize there are people out there who still have their life ahead of them."
Voice of experience. The most popular classes among senior citizens are history, literature, and philosophy. "None of the things I'm studying right now are things I had courses in of any consequence in any of my earlier education," says Lance Friedsam, 67, a retiree auditing classes in art history and philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. But Friedsam has visited art museums all over the world with his wife, who is an art historian, something few traditional undergraduates can boast. Especially in history courses, professors will sometimes draw on retirees' knowledge for classroom discussion. "The teacher refers to them a lot more than usual," says Nadine Rudolph, 19, a sophomore marketing major at Penn State who has taken several courses with retired classmates. "They'll talk about something from the '60s and look at the other adults."
But with learning from one another's experiences also comes a propensity for retirees to share a little too much. Jost Lottes, director of the Senior Adult Learning Center at Portland State University, where any Oregon resident over age 65 can take classes free, says the school is careful not to enroll too many retirees in undergraduate classes. While about 500 senior citizens take classes each semester at Portland State, no more than five attend any one class. "We tell our seniors not to try to dominate the class and not to try to talk all the time," Lottes says.
Princeton University caps enrollment in its community auditor program at 10 percent of the total number of students in each class. "We have to make sure community auditors do not ask questions or seek to engage the professor during class," says Princeton spokesperson Cass Cliatt. Friedsam came right out and asked his professors at Georgetown if it was all right for him to continue to ask a lot of questions. He got the official OK. At Penn State, Green prefers to play it safe. "If I don't have something to say I think they're going to benefit by," he says, "I keep my mouth shut."
Other colleges seek to avoid the issue entirely by simply not allowing retirees to audit undergraduate classes. The University of Notre Dame in Indiana does not allow residents of the nearby Holy Cross Village at Notre Dame to audit courses (although another college does). "Residents may be involved in a variety of activities at Notre Dame and get a library card, but auditing courses is not one of the options, at least at this point," says Dennis Brown, the university's assistant vice president of news and information. Harvard University generally does not let anyone audit undergraduate classes, either.
Free tuition. Part of the generational conflict stems from the pocketbook. Older students can often audit classes free or for a small fee, while the younger student next to them is paying upwards of $20,000 for tuition at private schools to receive credit for the same class. A number of states, including Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Vermont, and Virginia, have adopted statewide tuition waivers for senior citizens who wish to take classes at public institutions, although sometimes a fee is required.
Other colleges offer classes exclusively for people age 50 and older. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is a collection of programs at 93 colleges across the country that offer senior citizens non-credit classes that usually last from four to eight weeks. The courses have no papers or exams and usually cost between $25 and $450, although the rules and fees for every program are different. A quick call to your local college should be able to tell you if there is any type of senior citizen audit program.
Marina Stites, who has been taking classes at Portland State University for eight years since retiring from the office of her husband, a chiropractor, says, "I was really amazed that the kids accepted me so beautifully." In fact, the only time that Stites, 75, ever found taking classes with younger students to be slightly uncomfortable was when she took a dance class. "You had to change partners," Stites says. "And when some of the guys got me they went, 'Oh, my God!'"
This story appears in the November 6, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.