New government policy to send elderly back to university
LOS ANGELES: A government has formulated a new policy to send all its elderly back to university.
President Xi Jinping has launched a National University for the Aged, amid fears in Beijing that China is destined to become a “super-aged” society.
The university, set up within the state-run Open University of China, comes after more than seven years of efforts to establish a nationwide education system for the elderly that offers both online and offline courses.
It also comes a month after Xi demanded that China “implement a national strategy to actively cope with ageing”.
Last year, there were more than 267 million people in China who were at least 60 years old, nearly a fifth of the population, compared with 263 million children aged up to 15. The gap is certain to widen, as the country is grappling with falling birth rates, and it is feared that 20 per cent of the population will be 65 or older in 2035, making China a “super-aged” society.
The Open University has 339,000 courses for the elderly, including using medicines safely, nutrition, fitness and civil law, as well as more conventional courses such as painting, cooking and computer skills.
Jiang Hong, party chief of the Open University in the northeast city of Dandong, told state media: “Elderly education is a product of our country becoming an ageing society.” The new university was, he said, “a new enterprise full of hope”. The education bureau in Dandong established a university for the elderly in 2019. It offers 15 subjects and 32 classes and has 1,335 students.
There are 30 provincial-level universities for the aged and more than 40,000 education sites in China. The number of online users has exceeded 6.3 million and more than 5.7 million people have taken offline courses, the Open University of China has said. Eventually, each of the 2,843 county-level districts should have at least one university for the elderly.
Policymakers believe the elderly can contribute to society and have launched a jobs site for them. They say elderly education will lead to job opportunities. The universities for the elderly accept students who are 60 years and older.