Academic gerontologists are sounding an alarm: As more Americans reach old age, universities are not producing enough specialists to meet their needs.
In recent years, programs such as those at Appalachian State University, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and San Diego State University have been reduced in size, folded into other departments, suspended, or eliminated outright.
Gerontologists say such retrenchment, combined with low enrollments in remaining programs, means that too few graduates are being trained to run elder-service agencies or to develop social and wellness programs. Nor are they being encouraged to pursue graduate study in gerontology, in such subjects as how best to prevent falls, the reasons elderly people stop driving, and the effects that climate change might have on them.
Meanwhile, baby boomers are beginning to retire en masse.
“We’ve known about these demographics for 60 years,” says Janet C. Frank, an adjunct associate professor in community-health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Fielding School of Public Health, and until recently head of the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. But “the dismantling of budgets in higher ed has taken a toll on us,” she says, “exactly at the time we should be ramping our programs up and encouraging more people to join the field.”
The gerontology association’s leaders hope to invigorate the field by creating an accrediting body within three years. With the blessing of its parent organization, the Gerontological Society of America, the group is seeking comments on the proposal from members as well as grants to hire staff members.
A consistent set of nationwide standards, advocates say, will help college programs grow stronger—drawing more students and becoming less susceptible to cutbacks. Ms. Frank and others also say accreditation will enhance gerontology’s reputation, establishing it as a discipline in its own right rather than a specialty tied to other fields, such as nursing, psychology, social work, and sociology.
Skeptics say that accreditation is not the answer, and that it may present more problems than it solves.
Years of Cuts
As of 2010, Americans 65 and older made up the largest portion of the population in the nation’s history, around 13 percent. That proportion will creep up toward 20 percent by 2050, when nearly 90 million Americans will be 65 or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“In the ’70s and ’80s, everyone thought gerontology would be a cash cow,” says Donna L. Wagner, the new president of the gerontology association, who is associate dean for academic affairs at New Mexico State University’s College of Health and Social Services. “We thought with baby boomers on the way, we couldn’t go wrong. It hasn’t turned out that way.”
Although a handful of new gerontology programs have popped up in recent years, their numbers have not been enough to counter the trends of the past decade or more. A 2012 study found that, from 2000 to 2010, while the number of doctoral programs in the field grew to nine from six, the number of programs over all—including degree programs at all levels and programs offering certificates that augment degrees in other majors—fell 11 percent, to 675 from 756. Ms. Frank estimates that the number has since fallen further, to 650.
Associate-of-arts programs, which produce many of the field’s hands-on service providers, have been particularly hard hit, decreasing by nearly half, according to the study.
“There’s some scientific evidence that people with specialized training in aging give better care,” says Robyn Stone, senior vice president for research at LeadingAge, an association of 6,000 assisted-living centers and nursing homes. But “right now it’s easier to find warm bodies than well-trained professionals,” particularly given the low wages offered to caregivers.
Raising educational standards for the field could enhance gerontologists’ standing both within academe and on the job market, says Ms. Wagner. Accreditation “would reduce the number of administrators who hire people who say they can teach gerontology but who really can’t,” she says. “For some reason, if you have a grandmother, there will be some people who think you can teach a course on aging.”
Not everyone who teaches aging or works with the elderly believes that a broad set of standards will solve gerontology’s problems. Some worry that accreditation will create tensions among the range of professions that practice some aspect of gerontology.
“Professionals of many types see there’s a need for society to do more to find people who work with older Americans,” says Kenneth F. Ferraro, a sociology professor who directs Purdue University’s Center on Aging and the Life Course. Many of those who came to the field from other disciplines and have attained some specialization in gerontology might feel threatened by those who came from programs specifically accredited in gerontology, he says.
“The diversity in the nature of college gerontology programs is also an issue,” he says. “How do they all fit under one set of standards?” If standards are diluted enough to encompass all types of programs, “you’d end up with a vanity accreditation.”
Advocates for standards disagree. Rather than protect weak programs, says Ms. Frank, accreditation “will probably expose them.”
Programs in Trouble
No one disputes that many gerontology programs, with fluctuating enrollment and a lack of funding, are in trouble. When the baccalaureate program in gerontology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston saw its enrollment plummet from around 20 students to 13 a year ago, the provost, Winston E. Langley, decided to pull the plug. Controversy followed, largely because the university offers robust certificate programs (currently with 32 students), a master’s program (106), and a Ph.D. (52) in the field, none of which were cut.
Mr. Langley put together a panel to see how the baccalaureate program could draw more undergraduates. He now says he will restart the program as a combination of online and classroom courses, possibly by late next year, but with significant changes. For one, he envisions gerontology as an issue of social justice, one that could be taught alongside disability studies.
“If one looked at human development, including that of the elderly, from the standpoint of wellness or inclusion, or of their civil rights, I believe we could draw more people in,” he says.
That emphasis on wellness also reflects a shift in old-age research, which in recent years has begun to explore “positive aging"—the benefits, whether financial, cognitive, or otherwise, that come with the years.
UMass-Boston is also considering a name change for its Gerontology Undergraduate Program. “The term ‘gerontology’ isn’t as appealing as one might suppose,” Mr. Langley says. “Young people will want to be involved in this area once they more fully understand what it is about.” He cites programs elsewhere that have been renamed “wellness studies” or “life-course studies.”
Others in the field agree that more needs to be done to attract a new generation of students.
“We have to work really hard at that,” says Maria Henke, associate dean at the University of Southern California’s Davis School of Gerontology. Founded in 1975, it is the nation’s largest and oldest institution offering such degrees at all levels. “Most 18- or 19-year-olds aren’t interested in aging. Most don’t even know what gerontology is.”
But some gerontology-program heads argue that rebranding programs or polishing their image will take gerontology only so far. Those close to the bachelor’s program at UMass-Boston, for example, say it long suffered administrative neglect. Faculty members retired and were not replaced. Much of the program was reduced to low-cost online teaching, with students meeting once per week in a virtual classroom.
Program heads say students would benefit from more hands-on courses, more opportunities for research, and, of course, more money from their administrations to help gerontology programs thrive.
Future for Researchers
Even with a new emphasis on positive aging, many Ph.D.’s in gerontology report difficulty in continuing their work.
In 2006, after earning a Ph.D. in a gerontology program run by the University of Maryland at Baltimore and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Kelly Niles-Yokum accepted a job as director of the gerontology-studies program at the Colleges of Worcester Consortium, a group of institutions in central Massachusetts. It wasn’t what she was looking for, she says, but she had little choice.
“What I really wanted to do was get into a higher-ed program on a campus, but I found that chairpeople in other departments that deal with gerontology, such as sociology, couldn’t get permission to hire someone from outside their discipline,” Ms. Niles-Yokum says.
The provosts in the Worcester Consortium, citing budgetary pressures, voted to end the gerontology program in 2009. Ms. Niles-Yokum found a job as an assistant professor in the department of behavioral sciences at York College of Pennsylvania. “It took me three years,” she says. “And there’s only a minor or concentration in gerontology” at York.
Too often, she thinks, colleagues have a hard time seeing her and other gerontologists as professional equals.
“If we go through with accreditation, we’ll certainly need to have programs that meet the standards,” she says. “But doing so might close that gap between classic sociologists and psychologists who have some interest and expertise in aging, and people like me, who view everything through the lens of aging.”
A colleague jokes to her that being a gerontologist is a bit like being Frankenstein. “We’ve been put together by teachers from a variety of disciplines to become geros, and we have that worldview,” she says. “But we can’t find a home.”
