Learning is a Lifetime Habit

As law profs, that title doesn’t surprise us. Learning is something we continually do (and so too, hopefully, our students). The Pew Research Center released a new report, Lifelong Learning and Technology. The report looks at learning from a variety of points, including learners who learn for employment and learners who learn for personal reasons.

As far as age for the personal learners, the report provides a breakdown for the percentage “of adults in each group who participated in at least one of a variety of activities in the past 12 months related to personal growth and enrichment….” for those age 65 and older, the percentage engaged in personal learning was 72%. For professional learners (“[a]mong employed adults, % of those who took a course or got extra training in the past 12 months for job-related reasons…”) the percentage for those 65 and older was 47%.

The study doesn’t just look at age of the learner, but looks at a number of variables, including education, income, ethnicity, race, access to and ownership of tech devices and internet, etc. A pdf of the report is available here.