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5.0 Life-long learning
Life-long learning is a global trend;
14 million Americans aged 55 and
over are engaged in studying, for
instance, and there are now 527
branches of the University of
the Third Age.
But learning doesn’t stop with university. People’s skills need
updating throughout their professional careers and life-long
learning is an increasingly important trend. We need to create
mechanisms that ensure that learning is continually accessible
throughout people’s lives so that they can embrace it wherever
and also whenever it needs to take place. There has been a
huge increase in the number of people engaged in life-long
learning and increasing numbers of them are actually retired.
Seven per cent of the three and a half million people engaged
in life-long learning are over 60, a three-fold increase since 1994.
And 44 per cent of these 60-plus life-long learners are studying
computing, maths or science (the oldest graduate of a further
education computing course in the UK, by the way, is 108).
Life-long learning is a global trend; 14 million Americans aged
55 and over are engaged in studying, for instance, and there
are now 527 branches of the University of the Third Age (U3A),
which is a self-organising continuous education body founded
in France in 1973.
I’ve been doing some research for a while now into university
linked retirement communities. As a professor at the University
of Michigan put it; ‘people are no longer satisfied with the condo
and the golf course. They are looking for more value and meaning’.
The idea of returning to your university roots on retirement is
proving very appealing in the US. There are already at least
60 retirement communities located on campuses at American
universities and they’re not restricted to retired professors.
These communities aim to bring the alumni back into the fold
as they finish their working careers. It’s partly a revenue earning
exercise – the universities can re-sell real estate on a fairly regular
basis to this population and they are also able to fully engage
retirement communities in the process of giving (alumni funding
in the US is very, very important). But it’s also a way of enriching
the academic community and creating a context for life-long
learning. It brings a lot of experience back into the university –
the retired population can be engaged as mentors, perhaps
for people from other cultures. As part of our research we
developed this matrix of university retirement communities
19 Life-long learning