BoomerGirl Diary

Philadelphia — John Galvin skulks around a lot of college campuses on a mission: to find the best professors for One Day University, a new venture that caters to adults eager to relive their college days - if only for a few hours - without the high cost, homework or hangovers.

The professors he selects are not always the most brilliant or celebrated, but the ones whose classes are invariably hard to get into. They teach as well as entertain, and never, ever muddle their lectures with academese. "That sets off a bell," Galvin said. "In academe, they love the word normative. I don't know what that means."

Nor would most of those attending One Day U, the start-up that's bringing Ivy League cachet to the workaday world of adult learning.

The daylong seminars feature four smart lectures on a variety of topics by world-class professors in a college setting. Odds are the local night school isn't offering the likes of "Neuroscience: On the Frontier of the Brain, Learning, and Memory."

Continuing education is a $6 billion industry with an array of programs that range from the basics of automotive repair and real estate sales to personal enrichment and spiritual realization, according to William Draves, president of Learning Resources Network, a national association for continuing education.

The business is expected to grow to $8 billion by 2011, as well-educated baby boomers pursue their love of learning into their golden years.

"They've moved on from an interest in professional development to a new stage of life in which they are interested in avocational and leisure programs," Draves said. "Gourmet canoeing is the ultimate boomer course."

It's for them that Galvin, 38, and his partner, Steven Schragis, 51, founded One Day U in 2006. It came to Villanova University last week.

The $219 program goes well beyond the ubiquitous flower arranging and French cinema offerings found at many universities and night schools.

Distinguished professors deliver shortened versions of their most popular lectures in international law, politics, art, music, theater, history or psychology. The program, which includes lunch, runs in 10 cities, including Boston, New York and Washington, and draws 300 to 500 people an event. The average age is 59.

"It's a pretty educated, upscale group," Schragis said.

At Villanova, professors from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Villanova will each give 55-minute talks with 15 minutes for questions. Unlike other schools that just lease rooms, Villanova was so taken with the idea that it offered to partner with the organizers. The school will receive a percentage of the profits in exchange for marketing support. It will host six events a year.

One Day U fits in with the school's mission of "reaching out to people and giving them the notion that education is a lifelong process," said Jack Doody, director of Villanova's Center for Liberal Education, which oversees continuing education programs.

Schragis, the former national director of another continuing education company called the Learning Annex, got the idea for a more upscale, college-for-a-day approach after taking his daughter to Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. The school offered parents 20-to-30-minute snippets of each class.

"People were so excited to be on campus," he said. "The second you get out of the car and walk around it's a different feeling than taking a course at the Marriott."

Schragis, who formerly published the satirical magazine Spy, said that One Day U "guarantees no practical benefit. The audience is not taking these courses to get ahead at work or engage in networking. It's education for education's sake."

While his children were skeptical that people would pay to go to college just for the fun of it, the business has flourished. The company hopes to expand to California and Florida by the end of the year.

Participation in all forms of adult learning grew from 40 percent of the adult population in 1995 to 44 percent in 2005, according to a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics.

And participation rates for noncredit courses don't drop all that much with age: 47 percent of 50-to-54-year-olds; 40 percent of 55-to-64-year-olds; and 23 percent of those 65 and older.

Eduventures, an educational research and consulting firm, said one recent study showed that those over 55 enrolling in noncredit programs spent $920 a year on average in tuition.

Other programs, including the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, the Learning Annex, and Elderhostel, cater to this eager-to-learn group, at least in part because the continuing-education market is underserved by colleges and universities.

The Osher Institute started in 2001 at two colleges and has branched out to 120, thanks mostly to boomers, executive director Kali Lightfoot said.

Diane Sigmund fits the demographic.

The 64-year-old chief judge of Philadelphia Bankruptcy Court has many after-hour interests, including tap and jazz dance, and has taken night-school classes. One Day U appealed to her because of the quality of the instructors.

"It has fabulous professors and fabulous topics," she said.

Finding those professors can be harder than taking a calculus midterm. After landing on campus, Galvin talks to students and teachers, and may drop in on classes or peek at campus Web sites that allow students to rate instructors.

"If you're good at communicating to caffeine-addled, underslept, overpizzaed teenagers, you're going to be great at our events," he said.

Featured at Villanova will be Shawn Achor, who teaches positive psychology, which he says is the most well-attended course at Harvard; sociologist Brian Jones, who won a prestigious teaching award in his first year at Villanova; Andrew Dolbano of Columbia, whose talk is on Melville and Moby-Dick and was named America's best social critic by Time magazine; and Jonathan Steinberg of the University of Pennsylvania, who was the former history department chair and taught for 30 years at Cambridge University. His lecture begins with a simple, provocative sentence: "Who was Hitler and where did he come from?"

No one will say how much it takes to entice an eminent professor to teach what is essentially a gussied-up night-school course. But the more talks they give, the higher their price, Schragis said. Some do two to three a month.

Connecting with an audience of a different stripe is part of the appeal.

"These are people 60 and over, mostly retired and active, and they want something they didn't get out of college when they graduated. I love it," said Steinberg, who admits not every talk is a hit and is rewriting a lecture on Churchill that didn't go over well.

"You learn what it is possible to say in a 55-minute talk on a big subject," Steinberg said.

Achor, who at 29 has already won a dozen teaching awards at Harvard, said he enjoys sharing his ideas outside the halls of academe.

"As I'm talking, you can see wheels turning in everyone's minds," he said. "And they aren't concerned about grades."