LifeCourse Associates works with higher education clients to attract, engage, and energize Millennial students—and to navigate the ongoing shift from Boomer to Gen-X college parents and faculty.  "People all over the world seek Mr. Howe's advice about Millennials," the Chronicle of Higher Education explained in an October, 2009 cover story featuring LifeCourse President Neil Howe. "The list of those who swear by his work is long."

Our clients have included hundreds of universities, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and state colleges. We have also served every major higher education association in the country, from AACRAO and CIC to CHEMA, NACUBO, and ACUHO-I. We tailor custom presentations and workshops to individual college constituencies, such as faculty, recruiters, university leadership, counseling, healthcare, and student organizations. We also speak and consult frequently with professionals who offer services to colleges, including food services, information technology, credit cards and student loans, on and off-campus housing, and security.

In 2003, in association with AACRAO, we wrote Millennials Go to College, which laid out our in-depth generational strategies for higher education.  The book became a bestseller and, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, was mentioned as “favorite summer reading” by university presidents. The second edition of our book, which came out in 2007, includes a summary of original survey results on the contrasting priorities of the soon-to-be-dominant Generation X college parents with the Boomer parents who preceded them. The full survey results were released in a separate volume, Millennials Go to College: Surveys and Analysis. We completed the higher education suite of products with a companion Implementation Guide to help colleges develop an action plan to prepare for, and benefit from, generational trends on campus.

For centuries, universities have provided the stage upon which each rising generation gets to introduce their new collective personality to the world. Just since the postwar era, colleges have constantly been at the forefront of each new youth mood—from the conformism of the 1950s to the radicalism of 1970s to the free-agent pragmatism of the 1990s. It is hardly surprising that colleges were among the first to seek out our generational solutions when they first learned that Millennial students were about to arrive.

LifeCourse founders Neil Howe and William Strauss began speaking to the higher education community about Generation X students in the early 1990s, before Xers were even known by that label. Later that decade, LifeCourse told universities to prepare for the imminent arrival of an entirely new generation of Millennial students. Sure enough, in the early 2000s, everyone involved in college life began noticing a new crop of students that was very different from Gen X. Today, interest in generational trends on campus has skyrocketed. As Millennial students and their hands-on parents bring sweeping changes, we continue to help colleges to navigate the new generational tides.