For years, "lifelong learning" has been a buzzy term without much substance. There's talk of how continuing to pick up new skills as we age can help us AI-proof ourselves and stave off dementia — but there are few examples of adult learning taking place at scale.

• Now, many American universities are actually making it happen, Alice Park writes in TIME's new cover story, "The New Old Age."

🌴 Zoom in: College campuses across America, from the University of Florida to Arizona State University to Stanford, are leaning into lifelong learning by building facilities for retirement-age adults right on site. New ones are planned for Texas A&M and Purdue.

• The university-based retirement community at ASU, called Mirabella, was the first of its kind. It's a cross between a senior living facility and a dorm, and the residents are in their 60s and beyond.

The money quote: "Everyone benefits," Park writes of Mirabella.

• "[R]esidents are an active part of the university community, taking classes, mentoring students, and serving as teaching assistants."
• "[P]rofessors give lectures at the residence, and several doctoral music students live in the building rent-free, teaching seniors and gaining performance experience by giving concerts several times a week."

📈 Zoom out: These facilities were conceived as part of a wider effort in America — and across the world — to re-engineer society to account for the reality that people are living longer and having fewer children, so older adults are making up a larger share of the population.

• 60 million Americans are now 65 or older, and that number will keep growing.

🔮 What to watch: It's not just when, where and how we retire that's changing. Labor economists and social scientists expect the collision of global aging and technology to shake up the way we work, too.

• David Rehkopf, director of Stanford's Center on Longevity, told TIME the traditional model of working full-time for decades and then retiring is becoming obsolete.

Many of today's jobs can be performed for far longer, as technology continues to take over more labor-intensive work.

• "[W]orkers should flow in and out of the workforce, spending some years working full-time and some years with flexible hours to allow them to raise children, care for aging parents, or pursue other interests," Park writes.

Read the cover package, "The Age of Longevity."

Downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn (bottom) and Jersey City (top) as seen through the window of a plane arriving at LaGuardia on Sunday.