The Big Midlife Back to School Movement

In the higher education business, we call it the Enrollment Cliff.

The number of college-aged students in the United States is projected to drop dramatically starting around 2025. It’s a delayed effect of the Great Recession. When the economy collapsed in 2007, the U.S. birth rate plummeted, and it still hasn’t recovered. And if you’d been born in 2008, you’d be turning 17 in 2025. Starting that year, the pool of potential traditional first-year students is projected to drop by about 15 percent—and that’s before factoring in the additional disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Even against that backdrop, the name-brand elites will always be fine, as will the big and well-funded flagship state schools. However, that leaves a lot of institutions worried for their futures—places that are longtime anchors of their regions, repositories of vast stores of knowledge, expertise, and pedagogical skill, in addition to being proud training grounds and launching pads for generations of local leaders, workers, and productive contributors to their communities. Even before the pandemic, other demographic shifts were already starting to claim exactly those kinds of colleges in the Northeast, a part of the country where population growth has long been slowing and one that is dotted with older, smaller schools.

But there’s another major trend afoot, one familiar to readers of ROAR forward. It’s the New Longevity. Thanks to changing birthrates, better healthcare, and expanding lifespans, Americans are living longer—and better. By 2040, nearly half the U.S. population will be 40 or older. Some 20 percent, almost 80 million people, will be over 65. Already there are about 55 million Americans over 65, up from 35 million at the turn of the century.

Bringing these trends together can be a boon for both colleges and universities, seeking new students to fill their classrooms, and for the young Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials who will be the first to live out the New Longevity.

These will be vibrant people—people who will need and want to work, to engage, to take part in society. They’ll need to update their skills and learn new technologies. If they’re still working, they may be ready to pivot to new fields and engage with new things. And if they’re fortunate enough to step back from earning money, they’ll likely want to engage with new ideas and explore new concepts or challenge themselves by conquering new languages or digging into old passions.

Let’s call this what it is: a New Back to School Movement. It’s an opportunity for colleges and universities to widen the aperture of what we do, providing the benefit of our expertise and skills to a wider audience, while at the same time providing the important service of helping our country’s older population to be more productive, more engaged, and more fulfilled in their longer lives

To be clear, this Back to School moment is far, far from the one envisioned in the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield film! It’s not about successful professionals or recent retirees moving back onto residential campuses to redo their undergraduate years, or even, in most cases, about matriculating for full graduate programs like master’s degrees or doctorates (although some number of adult learners have always done that and will continue to do so.)

Rather, the higher education community has been re-thinking how we offer our services to adult learners who already have degrees. We offer many certificate programs that enable working professionals to gain new skills and expertise on limited timeframes. And, especially after the pandemic, we’ve become really good at offering these programs in remote and hybrid formats that allow us to meet adult learners where they are and fit coursework into their busy lives. That doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned in-person instruction, either. Some of the most successful kinds of remote learning involve some on-campus experience, whether for hands-on experiences or collaborative projects.

Then there’s a whole other kind of continuing education that’s more about gaining new experiences than gaining new skills. For older Americans who don’t need to work any longer, they’re excited to be able to attend nearby colleges and universities to feed their interests, whether that’s studying literature or algebra or learning to paint or code.

Sometimes these enrichment-type programs are formally structured. At Oberlin College, where I was formerly president, there was a close and long-standing relationship with Kendal at Oberlin, an adult-living community, residents of which participated fully in the life of the college, taking many classes. I’m working to develop a similar relationship at Pace University, where I’m now president, between our campus in Westchester County and nearby Kendal on Hudson. But sometimes they’re also more individualized, allowing area residents to take advantage of the many resources at their local college or university via a community outreach or continuing education office.

That’s the relationship we all need to build. Colleges and universities can do more for the New Longevity generation by making it even easier for them to know what we have to offer. Businesses can help by building partnerships with their local colleges and universities to keep their workers at the top of their games. And all of us, as we get older, will do well to stay engaged by taking advantage of the academic resources so readily available to us.

Yes, this New Back to School Movement will help colleges and universities by providing us a new cohort of students. But it will also be a boon for older Americans, for our communities, and ultimately for our country.

Marvin Krislov is the president of Pace University, a comprehensive university committed to experiential education that enrolls 13,500 students at three campuses in New York City and Westchester County. He is advancing Pace’s century-old mission of Opportunitas—providing all students, regardless of economic background, access to the transformative power of education.

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