Back to school for the 'silver' generation

A new motivation

Not everyone in this new wave is fleeing a life of pain. For Liu Ping, a 60-year-old former financial auditor from the inland city of Liuzhou in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the motivation was more personal.

She had earned a CFO certificate years earlier that entitled her to attend a graduation ceremony at Cambridge, but then work got in the way.

"I always regretted it," she says.

When she saw an overseas study program that included a few weeks in Cambridge, she signed up immediately.

But first, she was required to attend a "growth camp" in Beijing.

At the camp, participants were asked to create a piece of art expressing their innermost feelings.

Liu, then still grieving her mother's recent death, poured herself into the task. She re-created a sunset scene by the river where she had once pushed her mother's wheelchair — stitching the bridge, the water, the separation.

When she finished, she felt an enormous release. That unexpected emotional breakthrough sparked her interest in art, so she decided to give it a real try at her dream school in Cambridge.

During her stay, the instructor asked the class to sketch something they had seen on campus. Liu chose the canopy of a corridor.

"It was the most complicated structure on campus," the instructor later told her.

She laughed. A career spent in auditing — precision, rules, getting things exactly right — had not prepared her for this.

"I saw the gap between myself and the students who had some foundation, but just finishing was already enough," she says.

Returning home, Liu felt several weeks studying in the UK were still too short. "I hadn't had my fill," she says.

She then bought a sketchbook and pencils.

Now, whenever she sees a beautiful scene, she photographs it and paints from the picture later.

"It's just for my own enjoyment," she says.

While Li and Liu stumbled upon their opportunities, Zi Wenli, a former CCTV director who retired in 2024, went looking for hers, and when she couldn't find it, she built it herself.

Like many new retirees, Zi felt adrift after retiring from China's State broadcaster where she had worked for about three decades.

"I lost all sense of rhythm and purpose, and my social circle collapsed almost overnight," she recalls.

She tried the local senior university, but found the offerings limited for her taste, with calligraphy, folk dancing, and painting "grand peonies". As she had helped design domestic university curricula and cofounded an overseas study agency that sent thousands of young Chinese to Western schools, she asked her own consultants to help her apply to universities like MIT and Stanford.

Yet, they turned her down.

"They told me there was no agency in China that served people over 35," she says.

So she traveled alone to the United States, the UK, and Japan, visiting universities and talking to professors.

In Japan, she met an 85-year-old professor still teaching and his 90-year-old student. In the UK, admissions officers told her that local retirees regularly enrolled in short courses.

She returned convinced. On a whim, on the night of Dec 23, 2024, she went live on WeChat's short-video platform from her living room with fewer than 800 followers. She talked about her idea of "studying abroad after retirement", a notion that older learners, free from the pressure of degrees and job prospects, might have an easier path than younger applicants competing for credentials.

Her phone soon exploded. By the end of the hour-long broadcast, she had received 544 private messages. The question was almost always the same: "How can I go?"

"I realized that night that this wasn't just my problem. I had stumbled upon a volcano of demand," she notes.

Within months, Zi founded the Retirement Study Club, later renamed the Mature Learning Club. In less than a year, it had attracted over 50,000 members nationwide and helped more than 500 retirees enroll in overseas programs, with over 1,000 more holding acceptance letters. Destinations include Japan, Italy, the UK, Spain, and the US, and the lengths of learning programs range from weeks to a year.

"In the beginning, I thought I would just help a few people, but the demand was overwhelming. These are people who have spent their whole lives taking care of others — their parents, their children, their grandchildren. For the first time, they want to do something just for themselves," she says.