To show her Aging and the Family class just how different they were from the elderly, Jane Rose Njue invited two of her former classmates from Iowa State University to speak. The women said they had enough money to do the things they wanted to do late in life.

“Save, save, save, so you can be like us,” Njue, an assistant professor of family and child studies, recalled the women saying. The two had the money to travel the world because, when they were young, “they were frugal,” Njue said.

This is just one of the classes students can take as part of NIU’s gerontology program. Gerontology, the study of aging, can be taken as either a minor or a certificate, and is open for graduate and undergraduate students alike.

“I think it’s a topic whose time has really come,” said Program Director John Stolte. “You have this huge contingent of people who will be elderly people. And they’re very different people. They tend to be healthier, better educated.”

Stolte is referring to the baby boomer generation, or the large percentage of the population born between 1946 and 1964, who are reaching their “elderly” years at a rapid rate. They are very different than the generation that preceded them and, because of that, Stolte said, the field of gerontology is changing all the time, making it important for students to learn how to adapt to those changes.

Carina Edler, a NIU alumna from DeKalb who graduated in December, got a certificate in gerontology as a graduate student. She wants to put it to use. She’s looking for a job in a “long-term retirement community.”

“The gerontology program helped me understand how it is so important for people to get the most out of life in their older years,” Edler said. “They don’t always know how to do that so it’s important for people like us to show them how to do that.”

Amy O’Dea is working toward a certificate in gerontology for a completely different reason. Growing up, O’Dea had three great-grandparents and five grandparents. It’s safe to say the elderly have been a big part of her life.

“I’m getting the gerontology certificate as a tribute to them,” the cheerful O’Dea, a senior family social services major and president of the Gerontology Student Organization, said. “They were really good role models. I learned a lot of values from them: ‘Fighting the good fight,’ like my grandpa would say.”

As for Njue and her aging class, frugal is not a word often used to describe the “millennial” generation, at least not before the latest recession. The two older women told the class, “All you really need is one pair of jeans,” making the students’ collective jaws drop.

“They view the elderly differently,” Njue said of her students, upon completing the class. “They appreciate their grandparents.”