“Ageism is a prejudice against your future self, an act of future self-harm which life expectancy trends are making ever more likely.”
Four years ago, I wrote here “A Modest Proposal to Save Higher Ed”, in which I argued that the economic challenges being faced by liberal arts colleges due to declining applicant pools and increased costs could be mitigated if more schools opened their enrollments to adults in their post-retirement years.
Unsurprisingly, this scandalous if reasonable suggestion fell on deaf or finger-plugged ears, and the trend identified in the article — the division of the higher ed landscape into two camps, one composed of failed or gradually failing institutions, and the other becoming more secure and dominant as competition diminishes — has only accelerated. Over 75 American colleges have closed since 2020, and another 70 are considered at financial risk, according to Forbes.
In the meantime, I wrote “Lifers”, a novel dramatizing the social, familial, and political implications of large numbers of human beings beginning to live dramatically longer lives. Among the challenges the characters face are the increasing likelihood that they’re going to outlive their savings, and their struggles to create a community conducive to the much longer productive life that their new lifespans will allow.
Now comes a new book by Oxford and London Business School economist Andrew J. Scott, “The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives”, which makes the argument that we’re on the leading edge of an era of rapidly lengthening average lifespans, and not only are we unprepared for such an “evergreen” society, but, much like our chronic pig-headedness about climate change, we’re resistant to the sorts of structural change that will be necessary to adapt to it.
Foremost among these is the need to free our preconceptions of the human lifespan from the constraints of what Scott calls the “canonical three stages” of life —education, work and retirement. This formula, which may have worked in centuries when people lived an average of fifty or sixty years, becomes dysfunctional when the average lifespan —indeed, healthspan — begins to push 100, as will be likely in the near future. Scott notes that the three-stage model, “in combination with a changing age structure…leads to fewer workers, more pensioners” and “a growing generational conflict pitting young and old against each other” in a grim struggle for jobs and resources (as dramatized in my novel).
There’s no single solution to this quandary, and Scott argues for a multi-pronged approach of “investing in adult education, redesigning jobs to support the needs of older workers, tackling agism, and revamping retirement.” These in turn will require longer working lives, shorter work weeks, more longevity-adapted savings and investment vehicles, periodic breaks for re-education and, perhaps most importantly, explicitly educating the young in the challenges and opportunities that their very long lives will present to them, not only by literary allusion or abstraction, but by concrete instruction in the realities of a longer life, including systematic interaction with productive older people.
Of course, this last element — routine exposure to older adults — is what the current college experience conscientiously omits. Academic age ghettos are a poor preparation for what will become a much more age-diverse workplace as older workers lengthen their careers either out of necessity or choice. As Scott puts it: “The workforce of the future will have a much more even spread across the ages. In other words, the real story is one of growing age diversity in the workplace rather than just more older workers.”
It’s here that Scott’s criteria for an “evergreen” society dovetail with my suggestion back in 2021 that the current social model of the college campus is in need of a major overhaul. Preoccupied with promoting diversity and cosseting identity politics, colleges have completely failed to diversify along the one dimension shared by all of humanity, that of age itself. A student at the typical undergraduate institution might be exposed to fellow students of several different races, backgrounds and ethnicities and from multiple distant countries, but will rarely meet another student of an age more than four years different from their own. This is not actual diversity, much less a microcosm of the world, but rather a rigidly-formulated late-adolescent age ghetto modeled after the grade-school cohorts of childhood.
The result, per Scott: “The young struggle to imagine being old and therefore fail to identify with older people. The old are then regarded as ‘not like us,’ leading to discrimination, exclusion, prejudice and stereotypes. If for most of human history the young were unlikely to become the old, this sense of the ‘otherness’ of old age was understandable. In an evergreen world it isn’t. Agism is a prejudice against your future self, an act of future self-harm which life expectancy trends are making ever more likely.”
“That brings us to the greatest generational challenge of all—how do we factor intergenerational fairness into our evergreen calculations, avoid generational conflict and harness the potential of generational diversity?”
As I asked in my “modest proposal,” what if it were normal for young and old to co-exist in the college classroom, perhaps in the dorms as well? At the very minimum, vastly broader perspectives would be brought to bear on campus and in classrooms, diversity would take on a new and more realistic dimension, and the entrenched underpinnings of ageism in our culture – starting with the social marginalization of older adults – would begin to be dismantled. Young students anticipating leaving the academe for the real world would have newfound opportunities to learn from their post-career classmates what to expect, how they navigated jobs, family, mistakes and successes, in a setting free from the strictures and preconceptions of intra-family communication, which is the only communication with older adults most of them have ever known.
Of course, an “evergreen” education wouldn’t stop with exposure to old people as fellow students. It would entail a shift in curriculum to address the reality of increasing longevity per se, and its implications for younger student’s future employment, family life, health, and physical development over a significantly longer lifetime.
Grade-schoolers are routinely educated in the realities of puberty, but what college student receives instruction in the challenges of later adult life, like hormonal changes, memory preservation, disease prevention, or strength and agility maintenance, not to mention the great gratifications that older age affords, like ever-deepening friendships and marriages, the joys and tribulations of parenthood, the necessity and dividends of maintaining social connectedness across time? They don’t, unless they infer it from a required reading in one of the remaining “humanities.”
But longevity itself, in all its permutations, can and should become a subject of undergraduate study. Imagine, for just one example, a sociology/psychology seminar in which undergraduates were challenged to reverse-adopt their 65- or 70-year-old selves, fully imagine their future circumstances, communicate with them through essays and letters, and begin to research and plan for the most optimal version of their future lives.
Most colleges that are wisely administered have increased their emphasis on career preparedness, both through their curricular offerings and by providing straightforward job placement and advisory services to their students. But these tend to be very near-term, immediate post-graduation “launch”-oriented, and less focused on longer-term career permutations, which in the near future are likely to entail multiple job and even expertise changes, not to mention re-education per se. All of these more mid-career-oriented preparations, including the offering of that future re-education, should increasingly become the mission of enlightened institutions of higher ed.
I highly recommend “The Longevity Imperative” to anyone involved in the administration of our colleges and universities. And I eagerly renew my perhaps not-so-modest (or outlandish) proposal of several years ago.