Promoting Age Inclusivity in Higher Education: Campus Practices and Perceptions by Students, Faculty, and Staff

Population aging presents opportunities and challenges for higher education. Increasingly, age-diverse student populations are entering into or returning to postsecondary education; meanwhile, campuses are workplaces where faculty and staff are aging-in-place. Yet, age bias and discrimination continue to exist in institutions of higher education. As encouraged by the Age-Friendly University (AFU) initiative, higher education should foster age-inclusive environments. However, empirical measures are needed to document what it means to be age inclusive. To this end, the present study used the Inventory and Campus Climate Survey (ICCS; Silverstein et al., Silverstein et al., The Gerontologist 62:e48–e61, 2022), based on social-ecological theory, to assess age-inclusive practices and awareness of these practices across seven campus domains, along with personal beliefs regarding age inclusivity, as predictors of perceived age-friendliness. AFU network institutions in the U.S. (23 campuses) provided data from a total sample of 1549 faculty, 2582 staff, and 2700 students. Confirmatory Factor Analysis established the proposed structure of the Age-Friendliness and Personal Beliefs scales of the Campus Climate Survey. Model testing revealed that campus constituents, regardless of role, were largely unaware of age-friendly practices reported by campus administrators, and that the degree of fit between actual practices and constituents’ awareness of them predicted perceptions of age inclusivity. Constituents differed in their assessment of which age-friendly practices most contributed to their own sense of age inclusivity, with physical environment playing an important predictive role across all groups. The findings indicated that, even among institutions that endorse AFU principles, there is an overall disconnect between practices and perceptions that can impede the impact of age-inclusive efforts for age-diverse individuals who might benefit from them.