I’m always energized being back on a college campus, especially if it’s the University of Notre Dame with its stunning architecture and magnificent landscape.
My guide one chilly morning was Paul Morlock, a former healthcare executive. Morlock took me to an undergraduate class he participates in, “Theology, Ethics and Business.”
Later in the afternoon I went to the undergraduate class “Work, Meaning and Happiness” with David Tank, a retired attorney and Bill Wittland, a business marketing communications executive. Professor Paul Blaschko started the class discussion with a reading from St. Thomas Aquinas, “Whether religious are bound to manual labor?” (In essence, yes.) “I like having older students in class,” says Blaschko.
The reason for my visit was to learn more about Notre Dame’s Inspired Leadership Initiative (ILI). Morlock, Tank, and Wittland are among the program’s 20 fellows. Instead of retiring for the proverbial golf course, the ILI fellows take an academic year at Notre Dame to broaden their horizons and to explore what they might want to do next now that their main careers are over. The program offers a core curriculum designed to help them understand their skills better and to help them create a vision about what might give them purpose in their next act. The fellows can take undergraduate classes, too.
“The fellows learn from each other and from being around undergraduates,” says fellow Timi Griffin, who worked with multiple companies in her 20-plus year career in organizational development and talent management. Adds Mary Joan Wilcoxen, another fellow who taught high-school level Spanish for 23 years: “I am beside myself with the classes I have taken.”
Also see: 4 simple rules for a happier retirement
Programs like Notre Dame’s ILI are in the vanguard of what could turn into a major transformation of America’s higher education institutions (fingers crossed). Longer average lifespans are pushing more people into multiple jobs and several careers. A newborn today who attends college as a young adult can reasonably expect to work 60, 70, perhaps even 80 years. The spread of new technologies into organizations during that time will render some skills obsolete while creating new opportunities for those with the right training. The potent combination of longer lives and technological disruptions means the need for lifelong learning—to train and retrain, to learn and relearn–is no longer a cliché but an economic necessity.
Surveys show that older workers are aware of the need for additional education. For example, a 2021 survey by AARP noted that two-thirds of older workers surveyed were interested in additional job and skills training. Similarly, a 2016 survey by Pew Research had more than half of adults in the labor force saying it will be essential for them to get training and develop new skills throughout their work lives.
Yet colleges and universities are far from being multigenerational institutions that impart skill and knowledge to people throughout their careers. Higher education still largely focuses on developing the talents of young adults. America’s colleges and universities in the aggregate are failing an aging population and workforce.
“Put this way, the future university may need to be a very different creature than in the past,” said Andy Haldane in a talk several years ago when he was chief economist at the Bank of England. “It may need to cater for multiple entry points along the age distribution, rather than focusing on the young.”
There has been some progress, mostly through small experiments. Best known are the handful of programs started at several elite institutions, including Notre Dame, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Texas, Austin. The Ignatian Legacy Fellows Program is a yearlong program hosted by Loyola University Chicago, Boston College, Santa Clara University, and Georgetown University. Elite programs like these are built around a small cohort of fellows in the second half of life. The cost is at least $50,000, although some fellows attend for a reduced fee.
There are some lower cost initiatives that are typically less time intensive, too. Among them: The Encore Transition Program at Union Theological Seminary ($2,500 for the four-month program); Change Makers at the University of Colorado, Denver ($3,200 for the one semester program); and Encore Connecticut at the University of Connecticut ($2,950 for the program that helps corporate professionals transition into Connecticut nonprofits).
The pioneers behind the various initiatives seem united in their desire for colleges and universities to become genuinely intergenerational institutions (or what Haldane calls multiversities). The Nexel Collaborative is an alliance of some 60 colleges and universities working toward a more age inclusive higher educational system.
“Hopefully, 10 years from now the kind of choices undergraduates have, in terms of, I can pick my local community college, my local state college, I can pick a national university, a smaller university,” says Thomas Schreier, Jr. founding director ILI. “That same spectrum of opportunities will be available for people that have completed their traditional career and are looking to make a meaningful pivot to something else.”
The power of bringing together a diverse group of people with careers in different industries and countries, all trying to figure out what comes next, is impressive. In a lower-level classroom on campus the fellows meet for the Designing an Inspired Life core course co-taught by Schreier and Professor Steve Reifenberg, senior strategic adviser of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame. In an earlier class the fellows had drafted a series of motivating questions that they were reviewing the day I visited.
Among the motivating questions were:
What are those activities/experiences that give me joy to grow what I want to be?
How can I enhance my creative capabilities and pursue multiple avenues for expressing that creativity?
How many ways can I honor important relationships and my well-being while following my next vocation as a mentor/coach?
Schrier and Reifenberg used questions like these from the fellows to lead the conversation. Small breakout sessions allowed for the fellows to help each other out more directly.
“How are you feeling about your motivating question? Is it a good one?” asked Reifenberg. “If not, what else might be helpful? If yes, what are the first steps to take?”
Change comes slowly in higher education. Yet the demographic and economic need for colleges and universities to become intergenerational institutions designed to support longer work lives is compelling. I have a feeling if I returned to Notre Dame or any other campus in 30 years’ time there won’t be a dominant age cohort on campus.
This post was originally published on Market Watch
