Life After Retirement: Back to School?

Harvard has recently launched a new one year academic program to serve the growing number of retired professionals who aren’t ready to lead lives filled with early bird specials and afternoon golf games, but instead want to involve themselves with creating social change.

The program, called the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, is a collaboration among five of the university’s professional schools — business, law, government, education and public health. It is seen as a next stage for universities, beyond undergraduate and then graduate and professional schools.

If successful, Harvard professors say, it can serve as a model for schools at other universities, creating case studies and course material.

“This is about deploying a leadership force to have an impact on major social problems,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at the Harvard Business School who heads the program. “We want to make the case to the world that experience matters.”

The idea is to allow this new tier of graduates to build on their existing skill sets with the end goal of assuming leadership positions in non-profit organizations that are becoming increasingly large and complex.  As opposed to completing a traditional dissertation, the participating fellows will be tasked with creating a business plan that will conceivably carry enough influence and direction to be implemented into an existing organizational framework.  Though the first group of students is relatively small at only fourteen, the hope is to continue scaling up for the future.

[via NY Times]