For many of us, our college years were some of the best days of our lives: Spending hours engaged in deep and serious conversation, studying subjects about which we felt passionate, engaging with excited and curious peers and faculty, and enjoying opportunities to experience new social and cultural events. If the right time in your life came along to once again experience that environment, would you jump at the chance? Would you want to find yourself back on a college or university campus? Hanging out with your peers? Maybe not with the young adults who typically populate a campus, but how about with peers your own age and in a similar stage of life? If the answer is yes, then you just may be ready to retire to a University-Based Retirement Community (UBRC).

UBRCs come in many shapes and sizes, but they all essentially have some core characteristics: They provide housing for older adults on or near a college/university campus (but much nicer than a typical dorm room); they give such adults access to a range of on-campus opportunities, including attending classes and cultural events; and they create opportunities for intergenerational gathering, providing social engagement and stimulation for older people while allowing younger college students the chance to be mentored or gain wisdom from their older counterparts. This sort of intergenerational connection is considered a win-win for all, as older adults are not segregated based on age, younger adults benefit from exposure to older colleagues, and campuses are able to fill coffers and better utilize resources in difficult financial times. Depending upon the program, there can be formal affiliations between the retirement community and the university or a less formal arrangement. At this point, there are over 100 of these sorts of communities scattered around the country, with more in the offing, especially post-pandemic when so many older adults were turned off by the restrictions in place in so many other types of long-term care communities. Most of these UBRC communities offer some of the same amenities found more typically in continuing care communities, such as easy access to health care and transportation. These programs are not cheap and often come with an initial down payment that can run well into 6 figures and beyond. And before you sign on, you’ll want to ask some serious questions about how close to campus you would live, what programming on campus you would have access to, and more generally, what kinds of formal arrangements exist between the retirement community and the campus. For a better understanding of the issue, grab your composition book and click here. And as a sign that these communities are emerging as an attractive living alternative for older adults, take a look at the website for Varcity, a new developer of these lifelong learning communities.

If you need more convincing that heading back to college could be a good idea, you may want to take a look at some brand-new research out of the University of California at Riverside. According to this study, older adults who follow a method of learning similar to that used by younger students can improve their cognitive abilities substantially. Participants in this small research study spent 7 hours a week over the course of about 3 months learning 3 different “skills,” including Spanish language, photography, and music composition. The time and commitment of each participant were “similar to a full undergraduate course load.” These were new skills for each participant and their experience included motivational lectures, peer social support, and the creation of a rich learning environment. After their acquisition of these new skills, the participants underwent cognitive testing which demonstrated long-lasting cognitive improvements through this method of multi-skills learning. In essence, what the researchers demonstrated was that older adults can both learn and improve their cognition by emulating the learning behaviors of younger students. So get those class schedules ready and read more here.