According to the NYTimes.com, Starting Over, With a Second Career Goal of Changing Society, Harvard has started a program to teach them.

More ambitiously, if successful, Harvard professors say, it can serve as a model for schools at other universities. Many at Harvard believe “that developing this third stage of education must be part of the evolving mission of leading universities”.  Good goal.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at the Harvard Business School who heads the program notes: “We want to make the case to the world that experience matters.”

If the students resumes are any indication, this experiment should be a blazing success: the incoming students include a ” former astronaut, a former senior official at the United States Agency for International Development, a physician-entrepreneur from Texas, a former public utility official from California, a former health minister from Venezuela and a former computer executive from Switzerland.

They gathered at Harvard on Thursday to begin the yearlong program intended to help them learn how to be successful social entrepreneurs or leaders of nonprofit organizations focused on social problems like poverty, health, education and the environment. Their interests include sickle cell anemia, women’s education in Africa, health care quality and water conservation.”

I think it sounds like a great idea and I hope it will be a solid success.  I predict it will be.

David Gergen, 66….. you know, that same fellow you see on the panel of talking heads at CNN, having advised 5 presidential administrations and therefore pretty unruffled but keenly observant of all unfolding political dust ups, crises and news stories….. is also a professor at  Kennedy School of Government: “All of us are motivated to some degree by that fact that we’re at or near this stage in our own lives,” Gergen says, “We want to know how to go through this and how to help others to go through this to have more of an impact”.

I think many of us want this as well, so hopefully we will end up with a model of how to do it. Thanks, Harvard.