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Retirees are being invited to live and take classes alongside younger students. Jon Marcus reports
Ruth Silin particularly likes the poetry courses she takes at Lasell College, a small university near Boston where she lives on the campus. When she is not in class, she keeps busy with extracurricular activities, most recently producing and modelling in a student fashion show.
But Ms Silin differs from her classmates in one important way: she is 95 years old, and among a small but growing number of affluent retirees being invited to live on or near US university campuses and avail themselves of the educational opportunities and facilities.
“I loved the fact that it was on a college campus and associated with a college,” Ms Silin said. “It’s a wonderfully stimulating thing. When you reach this age, you don’t want to just be surrounded by other grey-haired people.”
For the universities, which are often property rich, these older students can contribute more than just diversity: they can be a source of badly needed revenue and, potentially, generous bequests.
Ms Silin, for example, is among 220 retirees who live at Lasell Village, which is part of a small college with an enrolment of about 1,700 that manages the development and receives lease payments. The senior students pay an entry fee of between $440,000 (£341,000) and $1.4 million, depending on...