Aging trend fuels adult-education boom

A result of the population living longer is that people also are spending a lot more years working, either in the same job, switching careers or coming back into the workforce after doing other things.

It’s a trend that is fueling a boom in adult education as older people clamor for courses that will teach them new skills or at least keep them in touch with their own rapidly changing work environments.

One man who deals daily with the increasing demands placed on the education system by more mature people returning to school is Lonnie Hart, vice president of the Front Range Community College.

The college comprises four campuses — at Fort Collins, Westminster, Longmont and Gunbarrel in north Boulder — which together cater for up to 18,000 full-time and part-time students per year.

“We have a fairly substantial group of individuals who are 40-plus and 50-plus coming back to school for retraining,” says Hart, who is based at Longmont and is chief executive officer of that campus and the one in Boulder.

“This reflects the fact that people are living longer and healthier these days and consequently working longer, too, sometimes into their 60s and 70s. A significant proportion of the older population is taking the opportunity to attend college to enhance their stock and for the sake of their careers.”

Hart says people realize that if they are going to keep working they need some kind of ongoing education either to maintain their skill levels or to retrain in another area. “I’m 56 and I take some sort of educational courses every year to maintain my professional development.”

Coincidentally, Shirley Pidcock, who works for Hart as an administrative assistant, is also 56. She’s also an example of a senior student who went back to school and successfully retrained for a new job.

Pidcock spent about 28 years nursing in Longmont and Boulder until the lifting involved in home care caused such back problems that her doctor advised a change of career. The mother of four adult children, she returned to school in 1995 and after two years full-time study at Longmont emerged with an associate degree, majoring in accounting.

While studying she had been working temporarily as a front desk administrative assistant at the college and when a permanent job opened up last January she applied and was successful.

Pidcock says she loves to learn and ultimately would like to complete a bachelor’s degree. She hopes to fit in three courses annually and this year her choices are as different as nutrition and algebra.

According to Hart, the number of seniors (defined as those over 55) returning to school has been growing “fairly significantly” year by year and includes a lot of people who already have graduate degrees. The reason they and many others come back can be summed up in a single word: technology. Hart says technology courses involving computers are very sought after.

“This has become almost a core subject — it’s certainly a core work skill in almost every job these days.”

Other popular choices among older students are the health field, including nursing and medical technicians, and business subjects such as economics, accounting and bookkeeping.

Some seniors return to school with specific career goals in mind, others just to develop new skills or fine-tune existing ones. In today’s rapidly changing high-tech world, Hart reckons some skill sets may last only a few years … or as little as a few months.

A new computer program, housed in a 16-station laboratory still being fitted out, is due to debut on the Longmont campus around August/September, in time for students starting the fall semester.

SeniorNet is part of a nationwide program that began in 1986 at the University of San Francisco. As the name suggests, the emphasis is on more mature students though the Longmont facility also will be used for other college computer classes.

Hart says the new laboratory will have the latest Pentium computers, printers, access to the Internet, ergonomically designed desks and a wall-mounted VCR for teaching purposes. Hart puts the cost of the laboratory at around $60,000 and describes the venture as a “technology-focused partnership” between SeniorNet and the college, each of which is providing half the computers.

The City of Longmont Senior Services Division will help run the new facility while Hart says they are hoping to recruit a significant pool of volunteers from among retired IBM staff to teach basic computer courses.

The curriculum will cover topics such as word processing, e-mail and the Internet, spreadsheets and graphics, plus projects of special interest to older people such as genealogy and using computers to compile a family tree.

“My guess is the concept of seniors teaching seniors has definite benefits, especially for those who have not been in school for a while,” Hart says. “I believe some older students would feel a little intimidated facing a 22-year-old teacher but not a 65-year-old retired veteran. They have a shared history which helps create better rapport and produces a much more conducive learning environment.”

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