Back to School

Leon Kaplan is getting tense. With a deadline fast approaching, he is madly trying to buff up his term paper on John Updike's Rabbit at Rest. The pressure isn't entirely new to Kaplan he's taken plenty of exams before and passed in many papers but it's been about six decades since he was a bright-eyed Yale undergraduate in the class of 1940.

Now Kaplan, 86, is one of 210 student

Retirees living and learning at Lasell Village in Newton, Mass. he and his wife Harriet, 84, moved in shortly after the $40 million retirement community opened in may 2000 on the campus of Lasell College. After living in an 11-room mansion in nearby Brookline for 53 years, the couple was lured to Lasell by the desire to rejoin a scholarly community reasonably priced health-care insurance was an added incentive. The Kaplans put down a $400,000 entrance fee (90% of which will be refunded when they leave) and pay a $4,000 monthly residence fee for an 1,100-sq.-ft., two-bedroom, two-bath apartment. The deal requires them to take 450 hours of college work a year. "We didn't want to sit around watching TV and playing bingo the way some people in rest homes do," Kaplan says.

Just a few hundred yards from the tiny dorm rooms where his younger classmates reside, Kaplan reaches up to a handmade bookshelf and dusts off his 1940 Yale thesis on F.D.R. up until now the retired furniture maker has avoided Lasell writing courses. Kaplan skims his old thesis to remind himself how he used to Polish his prose. Having lived through 11 presidencies and the birth of three grandchildren since he penned that last paper, he reviews his work with a critical eye. Then he sets it aside, closes his laptop and puts pen to page the old-fashioned way. It may be his first paper in 64 years, he says, but that doesn't mean it can't be his best.

Across the country, more than 50 Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) like this one at Lasell have opened their doors since the mid-1980s. The Kaplans are among thousands of seniors retiring to these college-affiliated communities. For many older Americans the desire to continue learning and growing intellectually still burns bright some are even earning degrees after long and productive careers. And they're happily cracking open their nest eggs for a condo tucked inside the ivory tower. "People retiring these days want to stay sharp, and this kind of connection with a college is enormously attractive," says David Schless, president of the American Seniors Housing Association.

In 2003 more than 7,000 new apartments and cottages were built in CCRCs across the country. Lasell Village has a waiting list of more than 100 people. And with the senior population expected to double over the next 30 years, experts like Schless project exponential growth in the number of such communities. By 2006 new retirement communities will have sprouted up alongside at least six major colleges and universities, including the University of Texas, UC Davis, Purdue, Stanford, Denison, Penn State and the University of Florida. The Stanford center, called the Classic Residence by Hyatt, in northern California won't open until May 2005, but 305 of the 388 units have already been sold. Starting at $600,000 a unit, prices rise to $3.9 million for a 4,200-sq.-ft. three-bedroom apartment.

Norma and Setsuo Dairiki chose the Stanford community because their three children live in the area and because they wanted to be close to Setsuo's alma mater. The 81-year-old retired engineer is eager to take music and theater classes at the college and watch the school's basketball and football games. In 1942 the Dairikis were sequestered in a camp as part of the U.S.'s wartime internment of the Japanese, and Setsuo missed his Stanford graduation. "We could only take what we could carry," Norma, 77, says of their experience. "We brought one suitcase and stayed in a horse stable, where we used hay as our mattress," she says. After their release, Setsuo went on to study at Harvard and had a long career as an electrical engineer. To move to the new Palo Alto residence, the Dairikis are giving up a nearby 6,000-sq.-ft. home with an indoor swimming pool. "All these years later, we're happy to be back at Stanford to retire comfortably here."

Some retirees going back to school may seem overqualified to be ordinary students. William Kerrigan, 85, is one of nearly 50 former professors among the residents of Kendal at Oberlin, a retirement community, linked to Oberlin College, that opened in 1993. When he isn't studying, Kerrigan attends concerts at Oberlin's conservatory and gives lectures at Kendal on international affairs. Kerrigan was Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and a founding director of the International Federation on Aging. He moved to Kendal to be surrounded by people engaged in learning. "My colleagues here are more passionate about matters of the mind than country-club folks interested in golf and tennis," he says.