A Senior (Citizen)’s College Experience
By Livia Kleiner
At 18 years old, Doris Parrish finished high school and began working at a local women’s clothing store. A few years after that, she worked as a secretary for the army before getting married and starting a family. Decades later, at 80, Doris attended her first ever college class at Villanova University
At 80, Doris was far from a conventional college student. With three grown children and a well established career, she was nothing like a typical right out of high school college student. But her experience shows that learning is not something people only do early in life.
In my college experience, nearly all of my classes at Arcadia University have consisted of people around my age: within the 18–22 years old age range, who attended college directly after high school. One class I took, though, cleverly titled Shakespeare With Seniors mixed these traditional students with seniors. The goal of the class was for all of us to work together to rehearse and eventually perform an intergenerational performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I didn’t know what I was getting into going into this class, but I found that the seniors and traditional students worked really well together. It ended up being a great lesson in the benefit of working with people from different age groups. Based on our reflections from the end of the course, it seemed like most of my traditional classmates felt the same way about the class, and the seniors also expressed that it was a meaningful, important experience for them.
It makes sense that most of my classmates have been around my age, as statistics show that two-thirds of college students are aged 24 years and under. Only a small fraction (0.10%) of people aged 65 years and up are enrolled in postsecondary education compared to the 42.1% of 18 to 24 year olds who are enrolled. Clearly, and understandably, it’s not nearly as common for seniors to attend college as traditional aged students.
I know Doris because she’s my grandmother. Born in 1922–now 100 years old–she has many fascinating stories from throughout her life. One of them is her experience at Villanova, which she always speaks very positively of. She always expressed her gratefulness for this experience, as she hadn’t attended college after high school. At that time, it wasn’t nearly as common for girls to attend college, though this has changed significantly over the past fifty years.
I knew a bit about her experience from the stories she’s told, but I wanted to find out more, so I sat down and asked her some questions to find additional details about her time in college.
Doris worked as secretary throughout her life; she learned the job through her high school through vocational classes. But at 50, after being widowed for a year or two, Doris decided to take a completely different path to better support her family. She became a realtor, and her career took off. Doris described this career as “lucrative and successful.” She loved her job and says “it added a wonderful dimension to my life.” She sold millions of dollars worth of real estate and won multiple awards from the ERA Philadelphia Broker Council.
Decades later, at 80, she was still thriving in the profession, but she wanted to try something new. Her friend Carol was already auditing classes at Villanova University and encouraged her to sign up so they could go together. They picked out their classes from the catalog and went to the university to register. When Doris was leaving the building, she said knew this was going to be a good experience. She’d never been to a university before and was excited at this opportunity.
At Villanova, Doris mostly took history classes, such as Italian, Russian, and Chinese history, and was fascinated by the material covered in classes. She says her experience in college was “unbelievable.” She loved her classes, her professors, and her classmates. The professors were very welcoming as well and she says “they were happy to have us there.” She also had no problem with the traditional students in her classes despite them being from very different generations; she says they were very welcoming to her as well and made her feel comfortable in class. Listen to Doris talk about her classes here:
Going to college as a senior isn’t just a unique experience for the seniors themselves, it’s also one for their professors and classmates. Professors have to be able to effectively transmit information to a demographic that’s very different from who they used to teach. Classmates, as I’ve personally learned from my “Shakespeare with Seniors” experience, also need to adapt to having classmates from a different age group. Especially when working on collaborative projects, it requires having to learn how to connect with people who you don’t typically work with. But, when you’re able to connect with people from different generations, it turns that class into an incredible learning experience.
To find out more about what it’s like being a professor to senior citizen students, I asked my Shakespeare With Seniors professor Celeste Walker about her experience with that class.
Her favorite part about having seniors and tradition students in a class together was watching them work together and get to know each other. She says the seniors’ energy and investment in the class helped students to become less self-conscious and have more fun during rehearsals. She thinks that her traditional students “regarded the seniors as one of their own.” I can attest to this. Celeste stated: “I think that my students thought that they were helping the seniors on some level, but the seniors ended up helping the students understand that aging doesn’t mean that your life is over, and that life’s lessons, curiosity and the willingness to learn and create can allow you to be ageless instead of aged.”
Celeste says she is grateful to Arcadia for allowing to create such a special class, and that is grateful for the amazing people she got to work with. Clearly, having students from different generations in a class together can be a fantastic experience for everyone involved; students, seniors, and teachers can all learn from each other.
Doris’ story shows that not everyone’s college experience is the same and that there is no age limit to attending classes. It’s not just possible for people to continue learning later in life, it’s extremely beneficial. Doris says she would highly recommend auditing classes to seniors interested in learning. Even though she’s no longer taking classes, she still finds ways to continue learning and to keep her mind active.
Doris exemplifies that it’s never too late to try new things or learn something new. Interestingly, there’s recently been an increase in older adults going back to college. More adults who hadn’t attended college as teenagers are making the decision to begin attending classes: some for professional reasons, and some for personal reasons. It’s wonderful knowing more older adults will get this great experience that they shouldn’t have to miss out on simply because of their age.
When Doris talks about her time at Villanova, her face lights up. It’s clear that–although completely untraditional–her time in college was an unforgettable experience. Doris is a resilient and determined person, so it’s no surprise that she didn’t let her age or anything else that was happening get in the way of her doing something she wanted to do.
