Age-Friendly Campuses

Historic shifts in age demographics are reshaping societies and challenging institutions of higher education to respond to aging populations through new approaches to teaching, research, and community engagement. Student populations are also becoming more age diverse, with adults looking to higher education for lifelong learning opportunities to enhance their personal and professional development as they age. Age-friendly campuses can also create opportunities to support age diversity beyond the physical campus environment and generate an impact that extends into neighboring communities. The call for higher education to be more age inclusive warrants a guiding framework and set of principles such as those provided by the pioneering Age-Friendly University (AFU) initiative. Empirical tools are also needed to help institutions distinguish and evaluate age-friendly practices and appraise the perspectives of students, faculty, and staff, as well as identify gaps and opportunities for growth. This chapter looks at the expanding need for age-friendly campuses, describes the utility of recent empirical approaches, and makes the case for building broader campus-community connections to deepen and sustain the emerging age-friendly ecosystem and address ageism.