Age 60+ and curious? Ohio State has a seat for you

Kathleen Shanahan-Aughe ’85 MA shows up early for class in Hagerty Hall one brisk but sunny morning in October. She looks like most of her classmates, wearing jeans and carrying a backpack and water bottle. But Shanahan-Aughe also brings with her some unique assets: six decades of life experience, a successful career and the wisdom earned from raising three children to adulthood.

Shanahan-Aughe, 64, is one of the roughly 300 Ohioans each semester who take advantage of the opportunity to audit courses tuition-free through Ohio State’s Program 60. Available on a noncredit basis to those 60 and older, Program 60 captured Shanahan-Aughe’s attention as soon as she became eligible. “I had just turned 60, and I was still working, but once I found out about it, I said, ‘How cool. What a perk of turning 60!’ I signed up for my first class then.”

At first, Shanahan-Aughe chose only virtual or asynchronous classes, to avoid the long drive from her home in Dayton. After she retired, however, she enrolled in her first in-person class in spring 2025 and walked into a college classroom as a student four decades after earning a master’s degree in public policy from Ohio State. She liked it so much, she signed on for another this fall—a Comparative Studies course titled Banned Books and the Cost of Censorship.

Her initial trepidation about being the oldest person in the room melted away in the warm welcome from the students and professor. “I have sometimes been a little nervous because I was conscious of being the ‘mom’ or the ‘grandma’ in the room, in the students’ eyes. But everyone has been great. No one has treated me as anything other than just another student.”

Former Ohio State President Harold Enarson first established a tuition-free audit program for retirement-age Ohioans back in 1974, after reading about a similar program in Denver. The enthusiastic response led the Ohio General Assembly to pass a bill, two years later, requiring all state-supported colleges to offer similar programs.

Programs at other universities may vary, says Kris Wethington ’95, Program 60 coordinator. “Here, there is no tuition, no general fees, no application fee. The only costs they incur is if there are course-specific fees (e.g., lab fees or art supplies), textbooks and, if they’re on the Columbus campus, parking.”

Program 60 is one way Ohio State meets its land-grant mission, Wethington says. “We are charged with being available and accessible to the residents of Ohio. Not everyone had the chance, in their youth, to attend college. Or they did, and they loved it, and now that they’re retired they have the time and they want to keep their minds sharp.”

In 2025, the College of Arts and Sciences assumed administration of the program. Administrators are working to streamline the program and provide more guidance to students in choosing Program 60 classes. Some classes are not appropriate for the program, especially classes that involve clinical components, such as medicine and nursing. Classes with prerequisites require a waiver from the professor, while others may be open to Program 60 students but small class sizes and a priority for degree-earning students make it difficult to get in.

“Most professors give permission for Program 60 students to audit the class.  If a request is denied, lack of space is the usual reason,” Wethington says. “Studio classes in music and art can be tricky.”

Program 60 students do not earn credits, accumulate a grade point average or apply completed coursework toward a degree, but that doesn’t worry Pam Hunt ’78, ’80 MS. Working her way through college in the 1970s, Hunt says, she was forced to be laser-focused on degree requirements “and just trying to survive and get a degree so I could live.”

Now retired, 71-year-old Hunt has taken 22 courses since 2018, selecting offerings from a range of departments, including sociology, history, social work, the classics and a creative writing class “that was kind of life changing, really.” That class involved small groups of students critiquing one another’s work. She was hesitant at first to share her writing. “But it was amazing. All those students were so supportive of everybody, and everyone was so close.”

The intergenerational experience is exactly what makes the program so valuable, for both the Program 60 students and their degree-seeking classmates, says Ashley Hope Pérez, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies for the Department of Comparative Studies.

“For the students auditing the class, it’s an opportunity to see the level of engagement and curiosity and commitment that I see in my undergraduate students,” Pérez says. For those students, “it gives them a sense of, here is someone who could be doing anything with their time, and they chose this. It shows they can value even more highly what they have the opportunity to do.”