When Auditors Become the Business Model

After her husband died last fall, Sylvia Carmel found a philosophy course at the liberal-arts college beside her retirement community. She is 83, and by every account the class has been good for her; in one session, retirees who had lived through the segregation era reportedly made that history feel real to the 19-year-olds beside them. I do not begrudge her any of it. Goucher College’s arrangement with Edenwald Senior Living, as the Wall Street Journal reported , is worth a closer look for what a struggling college is quietly doing to the word enrollment . So let me state it plainly: auditors are welcome; but auditors are not enrollment. These retirees are real learners, but they are not students in the degree-granting sense, and a college that blurs the two is not innovating—it is redefining its mission to survive. The issue is not that retirees are entering college classrooms. It is that tuition-strapped colleges may be turning auditors into a substitute student body, and calling that institutional renewal. I say this as someone who has spent years insisting that life experience belongs in a classroom. Some of the best students I ever taught were veterans—older than their peers, carrying more of the world—and they made every room better. The concern arises only when a college’s balance sheet starts to depend on them. Read past the warm anecdotes and the architecture is plainly financial. Goucher’s enrollment has fallen by a bit over a third in a decade , to 1,460. The college will earn $7.5 million leasing land to Edenwald , money that helps fund a new $50 million science center without new debt; the retirement community’s new apartments, from half a million to nearly two million dollars, have already sold out. Some professors now live at Edenwald, free or cheaply, in exchange for teaching its residents. And the president projects that within a decade, “lifelong learners” over 65 could be a third of the college’s enrollment. That last figure is the tell. A third of “enrollment” that sits no exam, writes no paper, and earns no degree is not enrollment in any sense a registrar once recognized; it is an audience, recategorized as a student body because the real student body has shrunk. This is what happens when a tuition-dependent liberal arts college loses confidence in its core product—the education of 18- to 22-year-olds—and goes looking for another. The retiree next door, prosperous and underserved, is the obvious customer. Goucher has found him. And serving him spares the college the harder reckoning: whether it can still persuade an 18-year-old, wary of debt and unsure of the payoff, that the degree is worth the years. And what he is buying differs in kind from what an undergraduate is enrolled in. The degree student submits to something the auditor never must: assessment, a discipline, the judgment that the work is not yet good enough. That submission is the substance of an education, not its bureaucratic residue—the old principle, as Weber put it , that the lectern is no pulpit and the teacher’s authority is disciplinary, not personal. Auditing for pleasure asks none of it. That is a fine thing to offer. It is simply not a degree. Goucher half-senses the confusion without naming it. New residents attend an orientation , not on how to read a hard book, but on campus manners—the technology, and “the contemporary conventions regarding gender, pronouns, race and ethnicity”—so they can be acclimated, an administrator says, to “our campus culture.” They are being inducted into a culture, not a discipline: guests to be hosted, not students to be formed. The college knows, at some level, which is which. And Goucher is not alone. About a hundred colleges have struck some version of this deal, and the number is expected to double. I write as a professor at one of them. This past winter Sarah Lawrence announced an expansion of “lifelong learning” —non-credit extension courses and a “Signature Learning Community” for adults 55 and older, under a new executive director of lifelong learning—and our president framed it, warmly and without irony, as proof that “learning is not confined to a single chapter of life.” She is right that it isn’t. But a degree is confined that way, on purpose, and the warmth of the language is precisely how the drift escapes notice. None of this makes such programs worthless; lifelong learning is a genuine good, and a college may run it at the edges. The widow in the philosophy class is not the problem; she may be the best part of the story. The problem begins when her presence becomes a business model, and when a college, desperate to survive, starts calling audience-building enrollment and mission drift renewal. The post When Auditors Become the Business Model appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .