Research on Aging

Opportunities for senior adults the world over to participate in formal and informal educational programs have increased dramatically during the past 30 years. At the forefront of innovations in programs for older learners are those that invite members to share in teaching, governance, curriculum development, and future planning. This article traces how a variety of new programs have come about; reviews previous steps to expand and diversify older adult education, particularly in the Unites States and Canada; looks at levels of participation, learner objectives, institutional responses and rationales; and questions the underlying ideological commitments of government, aging organization, postsecondary educational institutions, and private sector groups to meet the needs and wants of today's retirement-age persons. A brief look in the "distant mirror" of China's universities for older people helps crystallize the current situation in the United States.

The concept of human capital implies that education improves health because it increases effective agency. We propose that education's positive effects extend beyond jobs and earnings. Through education, individuals gain the ability to be effective agents in their own lives. Education improves physical functioning and self-reported health because it enhances a sense of personal control that encourages and enables a healthy lifestyle. We test three specific variants of the human-capital and learned-effectiveness hypothesis: (1) education enables people to coalesce health-producing behaviors into a coherent lifestyle, (2) a sense of control over outcomes in one's own life encourages a healthy lifestyle and conveys much of education's effect, and (3) educated parents inspire a healthy lifestyle in their children. Using data from a 1995 national telephone probability sample of U.S. households with 2,592 respondents, ages 18 to 95, a covariance structure model produces results consistent with the three hypotheses.

This study examines the association between educational attainment and grandparenting attitudes and behaviors. The sample of 884 grandparents comes from tworelated studies of rural families, the Iowa Youth and Families Project and the IowaSingle Parent Project. Rather than simply indicating greater or lesser involvement,education differentiates the types of roles that grandparents play. Some facets ofgrandparenting are more common among the less educated (e.g., contact, playing therole of friend), while others are more common among grandparents with highereducation (e.g., discussing the grandchild's future with him or her). The implicationsof these findings are discussed in light of the seemingly contradictory findings ofprevious research.

This study examines how work pathways intersect with the pursuit of education andvocational training at midlife. The authors link two waves of the National Survey ofFamilies and Households (NSFH) to focus on respondents ages 42 to 62 at the secondwave (1992-94; n = 3,417). First, they differentiate work pathways by examiningsequences of employment and nonemployment or unemployment spells. It is foundthat initial inequalities in educational attainment are amplified and increase over thelife course, in a nonlinear manner. Work discontinuity is significantly related to poorhealth, lack of pensions, and life trajectories marked by low socioeconomic status.Gender, race, and life-course events also influence work mobility. In turn, educationalreentry and training at midlife are associated with resources, work pathway type, andearly educational achievement. The interdependence of work pathways and midlifeeducational reentry patterns may further differentiate the trajectories between workand retirement in future older cohorts.

This article explores the allocation and nature of educational experiences throughoutadult life. The authors are especially concerned with the opportunities and barriersassociated with the pursuit of educational experiences during the middle years, inwhich work and family roles are typically well formed or at their peak. On the onehand, they explore a set of social factors that suggest there may be new possibilitiesfor educational experiences throughout adult life and for life-course flexibility. Onthe other hand, they put forward another set of social factors that lead them to take amore pessimistic view of these possibilities. They also consider a third set ofindividual-level characteristics that may serve as either opportunities or barriersdepending on their direction. Researchers, educators, and policymakers must turntheir attention to the roles that these factors play in promoting or preventing educational experiences for adults. This will allow them to better facilitate these experiencesand ultimately build more flexible life courses.