The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a letter from UMBC Erickson School Dean Judah Ronch on strategies for attracting students to aging-services programs. In response to the November Chronicle article “Despite an Aging Population in U.S., Fewer Programs Are Training Gerontologists,” Ronch discusses the need to emphasize the expanding opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship that exist in aging-services to attract potential students.
UMBC, which has a strong gerontology program, has increased majors in management of aging services by 50% in two years while programs at other schools struggle to engage student interest. Ronch argues, “we need no further scholarship to understand the demographic facts… Our society and every service and institution in it is about to be strained, possibly to the breaking point, by the 76 million baby boomers who began turning 65 on January 1.”
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