My grandmother spent the last several years of her life living off a fixed income happily occupied with continuing education classes at the local state universi

My grandmother spent the last several years of her life living off a fixed income happily occupied with continuing education classes at the local state university. It seemed like a pretty appealing lifestyle to me. It occurred to me that you might even mainstream the idea. Instead of building retirement communities around golf courses, build them around universities. If I'm not mistaken, I think I've seen small advertisements for such things in the back pages of the New Yorker. Given the costs of modern universities, and the current identity crisis they're facing, this might be a new business model for them, especially if wealthy foreign students are to no longer be admitted to the country. At the same time, I'm reminded of an exchange from an episode of This American Life about how in some parts of the country state disability payments have become a de facto retirement and welfare system: Ethel Thomas: You asked me a while back what would be the perfect job. I thought about it, and I said that the perfect job, it would be like I would sit at a desk like the Social Security people, and just weed out all the ones that come in and file for disability. Chana Joffe-Walt: At first, I thought Ethel's dream job was to be the lady at Social Security, because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But no. After a confusing back and forth, it turned out Ethel wanted this woman's job because she gets to sit. That's it. And when I asked her, OK, but why that lady? Why not any other job where you get to sit? Ethel said she could not think of a single other job where you get to sit all day. She said she'd never seen one. I brushed this off in the moment. I was getting in my car. It was getting late. And also, it just did not seem possible to me that there would be a place in America today where someone could go her whole working life without any exposure to jobs where you get to sit, until she applied for disability and saw a woman who gets to sit all day. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/490/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/490/transcript