Back to school: Older Coloradans stimulate intellect, ease transitions through college offerings

When she taught Italian at the University of Colorado, Nivea Soto-Lightbourn loved to see older students — from their mid-50s on up — arrive to audit her class, sprinkling flecks of gray amid the youthful undergraduate enrollment.

For one thing, they were happy to be there, even though auditing a class comes with no college credit. Also, they came prepared. And while they weren’t required to complete assignments and take exams, they often did so anyway. And best of all, many loved to engage with the younger students.

Now Soto-Lightbourn, age 65 and a decade removed from her teaching days, finds herself the eager auditor looking to expand her own learning horizons. For a modest fee, she has taken Portuguese as well as classes in literature and indigenous Brazilian art — and has no plans to stop adding to her later-in-life education.

“It goes beyond just sitting in the classroom and learning something,” she said. “The contact with the professors is very motivating. The contact with young people is very motivating. I try to keep myself running, because I know that the day I stop, I’m gonna be in trouble.”

The ongoing opportunity to exercise their intellect continues to engage older Coloradans, whether they’re taking advantage of free or low-cost opportunities to audit college courses or signing up for programs — like Change Makers at CU Denver or Retirement Reimagined at the University of Denver — specifically designed to help them prepare for and navigate the years beyond retirement, or reinvention. 

Many colleges and universities offer classes to older students under a variety of names like enrichment and lifelong learning. And while faculty tend to enthusiastically welcome individuals whose experience sometimes intersects the subject matter, issues around class size and type — subjects that include labs, for instance — can limit the number of auditors or, in some cases, take certain courses off the table. Among other options: the network of non-credit Osher Lifelong Learning Institute classes available in Colorado through DU and Colorado State University.

At CU, 80% of the 365 people who audited classes on the Boulder campus in 2019 (that year serves as a pre-pandemic benchmark) were 55 or older, says Suzanne Claussen, CU’s assistant dean for strategic engagement for continuing education. Yet these educational options often fly under the radar of a demographic that’s growing especially rapidly in Colorado, which has the third-fastest population turning 60 in the nation. 

Interest in the CU Boulder Auditors Program hasn’t followed the demographic surge, in part because the pandemic shut down the classroom offerings for a few semesters amid strict campus safety protocols, Claussen says. While a handful of auditors track classes online, most prefer the social interaction of attending on campus.

The costs are nominal. For students 55 and over, CU alumni pay $80 per semester ($95 for non-alumni) for an all-you-can-eat intellectual buffet. Student auditors under 55 pay $250 per semester.

Claussen notes that nationally, many universities are finding ways to support an aging population — including by creating senior residential communities on campus and offering study and travel opportunities.

“I don’t think we’re there yet,” she says, “but I do think that we would be remiss if we weren’t looking at additional opportunities for the 55-plus or retired individuals.”

The university doesn’t market its auditing program at all, but word-of-mouth has continued to generate interest. That’s how Warren Herzog and Terry Kreissl, a retired couple from Broomfield, connected with a program that has attracted them to classes on subjects from astronomy to literature to religion to political science. 

They heard about auditing from a neighbor. Now they ride the bus to Boulder a couple times a week to attend classes, and figure that they’ve taken more than a dozen between them.

“Like anybody else who’s retired, you worry about losing your intellectual capacity, so it’s an easy way to keep sharp and have sort of a disciplined schedule,” says Herzog, a 70-year-old former accountant. “The teachers are quite good and their programs are very good and if you follow through on it, you can’t help but be intellectually stimulated.”

Kreissl, 71 and a retired respiratory therapist, has taken courses like one on Abrahamic religions, another enticingly titled “Spies Like Us” that examined the role of espionage throughout history and another, “Inside Nazi Germany,” that she says attracted a packed classroom.

“They have a great faculty,” she adds. “They’re just trying to get you to think. And it doesn’t matter how old or how young you are, it’s good to think.”

Reimagining a post-career future

In a classroom on the fourth floor of a downtown Denver building, 27 adult students sit at tables arranged in a horseshoe, munching on potluck dishes and taking in the evening’s program — an exploration of rediscovering their creativity.

They all share a desire for a fuller “midlife transition” — give or take a few years — through CU Denver’s Change Makers program. The combination of guided courses, social connections, seminars and class audit opportunities has been constructed in response to the more elastic span of retirement years created by greater life expectancy, as well as the institutional goal of creating a “university for life.”

In this seminar, art and disability activist Damon McLeese engages them on the value of creative pursuits, and asks the group what they think older adults bring to the table.

“We’ve traveled a lot,” one says.

“Context,” says another. “We’ve seen a lot of things.”

“We get to a certain age,” chimes in a third, “and we don’t care what people think.”

For many older Coloradans, the topic they need to untangle is aging itself — particularly the questions that accompany retirement and sometimes drastic shifts in self-perception once they’ve exited a defining job or career. Change Makers, which launched in spring of 2023 and now is serving its seventh cohort, offers a structured approach that helps participants imagine their next chapter.

Anne Button, the program’s 60-year-old director and founder, started looking ahead when she felt burned out at her own job in communications. She considered how her parents had transitioned from their work life: Her father “retired badly and never really found his groove again.” Her mother-in-law lived to 95 and from her final 40 years carved “an amazing second chapter.”

From those role models, good and bad, she began putting together a program inspired largely by similar courses pioneered at Stanford and Harvard. Divided into three parts, the course begins with introspection — defining values, strengths and desires. The second phase examines external options, things like work or volunteer opportunities and community activism. Finally, students develop a 12-week plan for exploring possibilities, doing “small experiments” that by trial and error can help define a path forward.

Cost of the program is $3,600 for the semester. Although students have ranged in age from 46 to 82, the vast majority fall in their 50s to 70s, with an average age of 62.

“They’re all definitely trying to figure out what they want to do with, hopefully, this big chunk of time in this new life stage that society is not really built to accommodate,” Button says. “Some need to keep working, and they want to find a job. Some are saying, ‘I don’t need to work anymore, but I miss the purpose that work gave me, so I’m looking for some meaningful volunteer work.’” 

A different kind of transition

The program has seen growing demand not only from around the state but also outside Colorado. But for now, Change Makers has the budget to offer just one cohort at a time, run by Rachel Cohen, who started as a consultant to Button in designing the program and jumped into the role of facilitator with the second cohort. 

But longer-range plans involve expanding to a virtual offering of the course to run parallel to the in-person version. Currently, Button and Cohen are training some of the Change Makers alumni to become facilitators to serve the rising numbers of Coloradans aging into the target demographic. 

People currently hitting those age milestones associated with retirement or transition often find that their circumstances look far different from their parents’ version — which might have been a Social Security-based eight to 10 years of travel and relaxation, Cohen says.

The current generation facing post-career pursuits can face a very different reality. For instance, they might have had children later in life, and some of those kids may not have launched from the home. But while today’s older Coloradans may realize that their lives don’t dovetail neatly into the traditional definition of retirement, they’re not sure how to redefine it. 

“There are these little underlying threads and themes for Change Makers,” Cohen says, “and one of them is permission. It’s permission to redefine this next chapter and to create your own. The word means something different to everybody now.”

Mark McQuaid, one of the students at the Change Makers potluck, is just three weeks into the current cohort’s program. At 61, he’s a relative newcomer to Colorado who decided he was done with work “in the traditional sense” and hopes to find clues to help him move forward. 

“Clarity is the first word that comes to mind,” McQuaid says, describing what he hopes to take away from the experience. “You know, you talk about vision and mission and purpose for your life. What does that mean? I know what I’m good at. I know what I like to do. I know what I don’t want to do anymore. But clarity on my purpose, expanding on what I already know and how that fits into the next thing, is what I’m looking for.”

That’s exactly what Mark Montgomery found after taking the course with the cohort that finished last spring. The 63-year-old former educator had parlayed his teaching experience into a small consulting business helping kids with college admissions, but felt ready to sell his company. In Change Makers, he saw an opportunity to apply structure to the self-examination he needed to figure out his next act.

In the end, the value of the program wasn’t so different from the service he provided high school graduates — helping them through “a big, hairy transition in their lives.”

He sold his business just as he completed the CU Denver course. Since then, he has taken an acting course and performed Shakespeare. He joined the Rotary Club, a couple of book clubs and sings with the Colorado Chorale. He also has honed his French language skills and does volunteer work evaluating medical facilities for Denver-based Project C.U.R.E. in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa. He makes jam and is on the cusp of earning his fourth belt in Tai Chi.

“I’ve got lots of stuff going on, but there’s no one common denominator, one singular purpose that animates me,” Montgomery says. “It’s more like I have lots of things that animate me, and I’m good with that. I’m enjoying the exploration.” 

Figuring it out in a social setting

Barbara Kreisman can trace her interest in studying people at work to her first job, when she parlayed a journalism degree into a gig with a paper manufacturer in northern Wisconsin. Part of her job was interviewing men about to retire, sometimes after nearly a half-century working at the mill, and publishing those accounts in the company’s internal newspaper. 

“I always liked the men, and they would kid, and they would talk about getting a travel trailer and seeing the country,” she recalls. “But what got me was I also had to write the death notices. And those same men often died within 12 months or 15 months of retirement. And it was the linkage of that — the lack of work and then death — that caused me to go into the field of organizational development.”

Fast forward several decades. Kreisman and her husband, Scott McLagan, experienced two major transitions that powered their exploration of the years beyond retirement. They each left corporate executive jobs in their early 50s to become professors at the University of Denver. And more recently, in their 70s, they turned their attention to what they call purposeful aging.

After teaching a couple cycles of a workshop on retirement available through the lifelong learning offerings of DU’s Enrichment Program, they went back to school themselves, as fellows in a yearlong University of Chicago Leadership and Society Initiative. The program, aimed at people over 50 wanting to continue to do meaningful work, offered the additional benefit of helping them add breadth and depth to their DU workshop, Retirement Reimagined.

The in-person program, which will next open for enrollment in the early spring at less than $500 for multiple sessions, leans into the social engagement of a cohort to guide students through the challenges of retirement with a variety of activities and exercises, including attention to physical health. But the workshop also emphasizes recognizing and defining purpose, in part through the distinction between “big-P purpose and little-p purpose.”

“There tends to be this thinking that I’m going to go from work into big-P purpose,” McLagan says. “I’m going to find this big passion, and I’m going to focus like I did at work. But a majority of people find themselves in this world of what we call little-p purpose, or a set of things that they find meaning in.” 

Kreisman counts herself among the leading edge of the movement toward women entering the workplace as professionals, which led her to seek similar women to share thoughts in a “wisdom group.” It initially involved 13 women meeting at the couple’s Denver condo. In a little more than a year, the free meetings have expanded to nearly 170 women between the ages of 50 and 82 who meet monthly at DU’s Knoebel Institute for Healthy Aging.

What makes retirement different for women? Often they don’t have the same financial resources. They might be divorced or widowed and in need of community. And, Kreisman notes, they also tend to outlive men by about six years.

“So what do they do with that extra time?” she says. “They are inheriting financial resources from a marriage or from family and will control a lot of the wealth in this country because of our longevity. So there are a lot of really interesting facets to looking at women specifically.”

But men can also present similarly challenging circumstances around transition.

The script for Jeff Tetrick’s first pass at retirement pretty much wrote itself. His wife, Chris, had been the primary caregiver for their disabled son for years, and so when Tetrick retired from his job as a finance officer for an insurance company in 2014 at age 64, he jumped in to help. He also managed a two-year major remodeling of their Denver home.

It didn’t seem like a hard transition so much as relief. No hand-wringing about losing his work identity, no wrestling with how to occupy his free time with fulfilling pursuits. 

Then, his world started crumbling. In 2017, their son died. A year later, Chris was diagnosed with cancer and underwent multiple surgeries before dying in the fall of 2023. 

Tetrick felt lost, with no sense of what his life should look like. He bought a motor home and traveled, visiting friends and family and circling back to some of the places he and Chris had enjoyed. He booked a 30-day cruise through the Panama Canal and, in the midst of it, realized this wasn’t the kind of life he wanted.

Not long afterward, he received an email about Retirement Reimagined, whose creators had been his professors when he earned his executive MBA at the Daniels College of Business. 

“Here I am, 10 years after retirement, and I have no idea what that means,” Tetrick says. “My whole life has changed. So I signed up, thinking that, if nothing else, getting out of the house and socializing could be good for me.”

Reconnecting with people, music

The main course and its optional workshops helped him re-establish his social network. It got him meeting and talking with new friends. It helped him focus on what he really wanted to do. It even prompted him to take better care of himself physically, which led him to find exercise opportunities that, in turn, led to further widening his circle of acquaintances.

Once reluctant to eat out alone, he discovered “the world is full of people that will go to dinner with me.” And though he doesn’t like traveling alone, he’s resolved to resume his adventures, figuring “at some point, there might be somebody that wants to come along.”

“Life changes,” Tetrick says. “You’ve got to be flexible.”

Carol Samelson, 75, also completed the Retirement Reimagined program last spring. After “a totally tumultuous last couple of years” in which her husband developed dementia, they moved from their longtime home in the Vail Valley to Denver, where he could receive memory care.

It was there Samelson met Kreisman, who regularly visited the facility with her therapy dog, and learned about the program. After her husband died, Samelson signed up. She credits the course with giving her the structure she needed to identify what motivates and energizes her.

Among other activities, Samelson rediscovered the flute, which she learned to play in the third grade. After abandoning the instrument for a half-century, she has stepped outside her comfort zone to embrace it again through private lessons.

“I played ‘Hot Cross Buns’ the other day,” she says, “but not without a lot of effort. I have been told that we will be doing some performances in the near future, so I better go work on that again.”

Samelson also has channeled her energy into auditing classes through DU’s enrichment program, including courses on the “aging brain,” the Army’s famed 10th Mountain Division and developing camera skills with her smartphone. But she’s also leaned into her musical interests by signing up for classes on spirituals, Willie Nelson and Jimmy Buffett.

Although historically, the enrichment program was aimed at an older, well-educated audience over 60, it has expanded its appeal to all ages through a variety of options, says director Lynn Wells. Most classes, which run four weeks or less and meet once a week for two hours (with one-night lectures on some subjects), are whittled down versions of traditional 10-week courses and taught by DU faculty. 

The program also collaborates with industry experts, nonprofit organizations and even cultural icons like the Colorado Symphony to custom design options that can include, for instance, a field trip to a concert. Enrichment courses run from $25 for a one-night lecture via Zoom to a little over $200, depending on factors like its duration or if there are any additional costs like art supplies or tickets to performances.

“We are finding curious learners even in their 40s and 50s, because our programming speaks to everybody,” Wells says. “We still have mostly an older audience, but we’re casting a wider net. Lifelong learning in general is healthy no matter what age you are.”

Older students inspiring teachers

It’s worth noting that the benefits of going back to school can benefit more than just the post-career student. Instructors often find that older students who show up for their classes populated by traditional undergraduates create an entirely new and enriching dynamic.

Jim Walsh, beginning his 28th year at CU Denver, is a historian who teaches in the political science department, where he describes the interactions of students in their 60s and 70s with those in their teens and 20s as “incredibly rewarding.”

Many of his current auditing students — like McQuaid, who’s taking Walsh’s class on the Irish diaspora — migrate from the Change Makers program. But Walsh says he’s welcomed older students into a dozen or more classes that he’s taught over the years, and has noticed that they tend to come in waves. Another one appears to be cresting this semester.

He’s noticed a “feeling each other out” period between the older and traditional students at the beginning of a term. Older students bring social capital to the room because they’re more experienced and perhaps come from more privileged economic backgrounds. But eventually, the generations engage.

“Once that happens, it’s really wonderful to watch,” Walsh says. “It’s just the way that I think education should be. You know, this way that we engineer education by putting people of the same age in the same room is a bit short sighted.”

Gregory Walker has taught a variety of music-related courses at CU Denver since 1991. One recent course that has attracted some of the older students from the Change Makers program looks at the history of rock ‘n’ roll — a subject that, for some students, touches on their life experience in particularly vivid, and nostalgic, ways.

It’s one thing to lecture about the British Invasion. It’s quite another to welcome students whose lives were shaped by the evolving culture of rock ‘n’ roll.

“This is a soundtrack to so many of our lives,” Walker says. “And as a result, they’ve just got so many cool perspectives to add to class discussions. And I think the other more typically aged students look at older students with wonder and curiosity watching these topics brought to life.” 

That said, it’s impossible to generalize, Walker adds. Sometimes his older students sit back and just take in the classroom discussion. Others decide to do tests, assignments, projects, whatever.

And those who do more than just observe, he notes, tend to produce some of the strongest test results as well as the kind of projects that he finds himself using as examples for subsequent classes.

“They’re just thinking way beyond what it is to get a good grade,” Walker says. “Funny, how that works out. You have to chalk it up to these nontraditional students, these older students, just embracing challenge. And that’s inspirational.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.