Edenwald Senior Living, a not-for-profit continuing care retirement / life plan community in Towson, MD, is partnering with Goucher College to become a university retirement community, a growing national trend geared toward retirees who are interested in senior living communities that are associated with higher education institutions.
“What they used to get, which was being cared for in a retirement home, they don’t want that anymore. They want to be engaged in the community, they want to take classes, they want to go to cultural events, they don’t want to be segregated from the rest of society,” Edenwald President and CEO Mark Beggs stated in a Towson Patch article posted on the company’s website.
Edenwald and Goucher will be the first partners in Maryland to adopt this concept, according to Beggs. The college joins the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Stanford University in California, the University of Texas at Austin, Arizona State University, Berry College in Georgia, Purchase College in New York and other educational institutions across the country that are partnering with senior living providers.
Love & Company, a resource partner with UniversityRetirementCommunities.com, has been working with Edenwald and the college to formalize their partnership. Other resource partners with the website include Carle Consulting LLC, LCS Development, Perkins Eastman, Greystone and The Kendal Corp.
The website, which launched last September, was the brainchild of Andrew Carle, a former senior living executive and lead instructor for the graduate concentration in senior living administration at Georgetown University. Carle is a 2024 McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards “Industry Ally” honoree.
“For decades, the Edenwald retirement community has towered over the Goucher College campus, on land purchased from the college many years ago. Edenwald residents have enjoyed their proximity to the campus loop and to the trails that wind through the college’s acres of woods,” the Baltimore Fishbowl reported.
Edenwald residents regularly attend theater productions at the college, according to Beggs, and now the natural relationship between the two organizations will be broadened and formalized with the addition of college classes developed specifically for lifelong learners and study-abroad trips.
The project, expected to break ground next year, would provide financial benefits to Goucher, the Baltimore Fishbowl reported.
“Edenwald plans to lease land from the college to build three new residential towers of up to 12 stories in height, a total of 127 apartments. Edenwald residents looking to audit classes at Goucher would most likely pay tuition — at a rate still to be determined,” the media outlet reported.
“When you start to realize what’s occurring demographically across the country,” Beggs told the Baltimore Fishbowl, “with an aging population and a shrinking [traditional-age] student population, Goucher understands that bringing in an older student is one of their strategies towards success.”
