What would postsecondary education look like in a world where true lifelong learning—people engaging in education or training at many points throughout their lives—was the norm?
This week’s episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast, features a conversation with Mauro F. Guillén, the William H. Wurster Professor of Multinational Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Post-Generational Society (Macmillan, 2023).
The book isn’t about higher education; it explores cross-cutting trends—people living longer and healthier lives, and technological changes that shorten the half-life of our knowledge and skills—that promise to blur the “stages” (play, schooling, work and retirement) into which most of us have historically divided our lives.
In the conversation, Guillén discusses the implications of these shifts for institutions and learners and what it would take for colleges and universities to truly operate as providers of lifelong learning for people in a society where one’s chronological age becomes less meaningful and work and learning blend throughout our lives.
Listen to this episode here, and learn more about The Key here.
