Universities: Educare for Elders

“I love an exam,” bubbles Elma Fox, a University of Kentucky student. “I want to find out what I know.” Helen Ellner, a classmate, confesses that “I get so engrossed in class that I never know what time it is.” Coed Isabel Cottingham concurs: “I adore this give-and-take with professors.”

Has the University of Kentucky found a formula to make education unusually fascinating? Not really. What it has found is a group of unusual students: all are at least 65 years old. In the first program of its kind in the nation, Kentucky offers free tuition to all students—even those from other states—who are members of the Medicare generation. Started in 1964 at the urging of the university’s Council on Aging, the program, which might well be called Educare, has attracted 160 students. It will add another 25 next fall and will honor its first graduate this summer. She is Mrs. Amanda Hicks, 67, who turned to teaching school and operating a 450-acre farm after her husband died in 1940. She chuckles at the turnabout fashion in which her grandchildren keep warning, “You better get to your studying, Grandma.”

No More Johnnies. Kentucky’s elders have more zest than many of the campus youngsters, are fired with an eagerness to expand their interests, refine longtime hobbies, or even start new careers. Mrs. Ellner, 68, a onetime Ziegfeld Follies star still proud that “my legs were insured for $50,000,” is studying sociology, expects to work with delinquent girls. A widow, she decided that “the show must go on,” concedes that “there will never be any more stage-door Johnnies for me—but there won’t be any rocking chairs either.” She dramatizes the point by pressing her palms flat on the floor without bending her knees.

Miss Fox, 70 years old and only 4-ft. 11-in. tall, studies biology, but enjoys her modern-jazz dance class best. Leaping with the kids, she boasts: “I can do everything the rest of them can do, except hop on one foot.” Mrs. Cottingham came to class at the urging of her husband, Wayne, 70, who retired as an Associated Press editor in Manhattan to study the stock market under the university’s economists. Ernest Jones, 66, a bearded Northwestern lumberjack who frittered away a $6,000 bankroll before he heard about the Kentucky program, is studying German and recreational leadership. He figures that younger students learn faster, but argues that “we can be more persistent” and says yearningly: “I’d sure like to go to Oxford.”

Bored by Nudes. The older students present administrators with a few new problems. They may drop out for a time because they prefer to winter in Florida. One cut classes for a brief time because she had “to take care of an elderly lady.” Retired Army Captain John A. Short wanted to take a woodcarving class but had to pass an introductory art course first. It included sketching live nudes—and it bored him.

Educare leads to such joys as that of Mrs. Frank Murray, 72, whose enrollment in a creative writing class helped her to sell a short story to American Girl. Says she: “I wish more people our age would come and bump heads with this brighter younger generation.” In going back to college, declares Grace Snodgrass, 78, a retired librarian, “I feel as though I had opened an old and familiar book and begun at the first page again.” It is the enthusiasm of the students that most delights Program Director Earl Kauffman, who points out that 1,000 Americans reach 65 every day and that there will be close to 24 million in that age group by 1975. The program costs Kentucky little because no special classes are held, and it could easily be copied by other states.