Addressing the rising prevalence of mental health issues, particularly among young people.

Mental Health

Examining innovations that help young people thrive.

Teaching &amp; Learning

Creating a more just world through higher education.

Access &amp; Inclusion

An end goal for learning and life.

Flourishing

Opinions leading to positive change.

Perspectives

When Eric Wood talks about the future of college mental health, he does so from the front lines. The longtime director of Texas Christian University’s Counseling and Mental Health Center and past president of the Texas University and College Counseling Directors Association has just been elected the next president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (A.U.C.C.C.D.). His tenure will begin in October 2026.&nbsp;



Known for his innovative Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model and award-winning e-book, “A New Narrative for College Mental Health,” Wood is stepping in to lead the nation’s largest organization for campus counseling leaders at a moment when the field, like all of higher ed, is confronting change. We caught up with him fresh off hosting a national symposium on performing artists and athletes and took the opportunity to ask him about A.U.C.C.C.D.’s plans and priorities.



LW: Congratulations on your election as president-elect of A.U.C.C.C.D. What do you see as the major challenges for the organization in the coming year?



EW:&nbsp;We as counseling centers have done a really good job capturing the narrative of how important college mental health is. College mental health has a lot more significance than people realize. If you think about the demographic we serve, the traditional 18- to 25-year-olds, that’s a prime demographic for pretty much anything — substance use, suicide, emerging disorders. It’s also the best time to treat them because if you can treat them then, they may have fewer episodes later, or none at all. Whereas if they wait 10 or 15 years, it's a lot more ingrained and harder to treat.&nbsp;



Colleges and universities have greater access to that demographic than any other health-care system. They live, walk by, and travel by our campuses every day. So the question is: What opportunities does that create if government and other organizations really recognize this?



LW: You’ve become known for T.C.U.’s innovative model of collaborative care. Can you explain what that is and how it ties into your national leadership goals?



EW:&nbsp;We call it the Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model, and it’s reshaping how universities think about their role in mental health. We started it during the pandemic. The mindset had always been that college counseling centers were designed for developmental concerns — the stress that comes from change — not necessarily for students with high mental health needs. But those dynamics have shifted. Now we have students with much higher needs, and our systems weren’t designed for that.



So instead of building hospital-style treatment centers, we built bridges. We partner with community providers who were&nbsp;designed&nbsp;to work with individuals with high needs but who lack the infrastructure and access we have. They come onto our campus, use their programs, and our students stay in school, on our campus, in programs with other college students. It’s a win-win-win: The student’s insurance covers most costs so there’s just the co-pay, and we’ve gotten grants and donors so the treatment centers have the chance for little or no overhead. We’ve trained over 100 schools to replicate various parts of the model.&nbsp;



LW: You mentioned that politics and policy changes are affecting mental health care on campuses. What are you seeing?



EW:&nbsp;If you're in a university that's depending on federal funding, there’s a new level of raised exposure. There’s a perception that if a state or federal funding source doesn’t like something at your institution, they’re going to cut your funding off. People don't realize that even if it had nothing to do with college counseling centers, it is going to trickle down if schools have that cut in funding. When universities face federal or state funding cuts, that trickles down to us. A 20 percent budget cut across campus means a 20 percent cut for the counseling center, too. And yet the demand for services has never been higher.



A lot of the culture-war legislation, like D.E.I. bans, has had unintended consequences. Some states have medical exemptions for those laws, but others don’t. We’ve seen schools cut services that were never meant to be targeted, like gender specific groups with mental health and addiction issues. This is an age group much more likely to seek help on campus than they would after graduation, so when you remove those options, you lose opportunities to intervene early.



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“When policymakers pass laws or set funding priorities, I hope they think carefully about how that affects college mental health.”
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We’re trying to make lawmakers aware that mental health has&nbsp;never&nbsp;been a partisan issue. Surveys show eight out of ten Americans believe schools are responsible for providing health care to students. The narrative we’re pushing is: “Look at the possibilities higher education offers society. Why would you want to limit that potential?”



LW: What other issues are most pressing for college counseling centers right now?



EW:&nbsp;We’re still seeing the ripple effects of the pandemic. And we do know that in this age group one of the things that spiked is their likelihood to transfer. The students entering college now were in middle school during the shutdowns — the classes of 2028 through 2030. That’s a critical cohort with a lot of struggles. They missed key developmental years, and those formative years had a lot of disruption going from middle school to high school, and we see that in their social and academic adjustment carrying over to higher education.&nbsp;



And as digital natives engaged in all the social platforms, they’re used to absorbing all the culture and content and polarizations in society. That’s their reference point, and a lot of them may not know what it’s like to&nbsp;not&nbsp;have that level of polarization. So they’re bringing that to campus. When they see politicians saying certain words or treating each other some way, you're going to see that carry over to how they treat faculty. They see that people just break rules; you see that happening in politics and society, and that carries over into the res halls because that's the frame of reference.&nbsp;



We’re also seeing a higher level of parental involvement. Their parents spent more time with them during lockdowns, engaged in a closer front-row seat to their education, so now we’re seeing that continue — sometimes helicopter-level involvement — in college life.&nbsp;



LW: What’s on your personal wish list as incoming president?



EW: To keep building that narrative and have a stronger voice nationally. We’ve had some success getting attention from politicians and national outlets, but there’s so much more to do. When policymakers pass laws or set funding priorities, I hope they think carefully about how that affects college mental health.



And college is where the developmental concerns play out because this is the prime age. The reason why colleges created counseling centers wasn't because we thought every student had a clinical diagnosis. Most students do not. The centers exist because we define stress as heightened in times of major change, and a major one is when you start college. You only have about four or five of those moments in your life when everything can change. So starting college is one of them — you change where you eat, where you live, your identity, everything — and then graduating college is a second one. So you have so much change bookmarking the college experience. And then you do have associated stressors, like navigating the social environment, and we know that demographic tends to engage in high-risk behavior, so a lot of prevention work is important. That is why college counseling centers exist, and I contend colleges and universities are the best in the world at doing that. But because there's currently a lot more students with high mental health needs coming to campus, the disconnect occurs that we aren’t good at what we're doing. That couldn’t be further from the truth.



The mental health of young people is&nbsp;always&nbsp;going to be a popular, bipartisan cause. We just need to remind people of that and continue the collaboration.



LW: How do you see that collaboration playing out at the national level?



EW:&nbsp;Collaboration is essential. Some states have strong organizations, like Texas, but not all do. One of my goals is to help develop those networks. State laws affect us differently, so we need local collaboration as well as national unity. There’s strength in numbers, whether it’s state collectives, regional conferences, or collaborations across university systems, like the athletic conferences.



It’s also about mutual support. A lot of what’s in the headlines about higher education doesn’t directly involve counseling directors, but it still affects us through funding cuts, political pressures, or staffing shortages. Directors need to come together because having a collaborative amplifies our method, our messages. We need each other to stay resilient.



LW: You just hosted a symposium on athletes and performing arts. What can you tell us about the thinking behind spotlighting those populations?



EW:&nbsp;It really came out of conversations we were having on our campus about performing artists and athletes — two groups that represent the university in powerful ways but have very different kinds of support systems. Varsity athletes get a lot of institutional support, but there are just as many performers and non-varsity athletes who face similar pressures and injuries without the same safety nets.&nbsp;



For example, if a student athlete gets hurt, the university often covers the care, and they can still progress toward their degree. But if a dancer or musician gets injured, they often can’t progress toward their degree because performance is part of their coursework. That difference really highlights why universities need to think more broadly about how they support these students.&nbsp;



So we decided to organize a symposium to explore that. We reached out to experts from Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Harvard — literally the pioneers of performing arts medicine — and every single one of them said yes. We even had ballerina Tiler Peck as a keynote. It turned into a two-day virtual event that drew about 100 sign-ons per session; many of them were in classrooms watching together. It was the first time we’d done anything like it, and it really underscored how much synergy there is between athletic and performing-arts wellness.



LW: How long have you been at T.C.U., and what do you think your election says about A.U.C.C.C.D. and where it’s headed?



EW:&nbsp;I started at T.C.U. right out of my Ph.D. program in 2007 and became director in 2019, so I had one good semester before the pandemic hit. Everything we’ve built since then has been about adapting to change and meeting students where they are.



I’m honored by the role. I think part of the reason I was elected is because we’ve done a good job at innovation at T.C.U., and I think it shows a shift in the narrative about college mental health. For a long time, the assumption was that we as colleges were limited — that if a student had a serious mental health disorder, they needed to go elsewhere, just like you wouldn’t expect a university to perform surgery. But that’s changing. For example, one of our specialized programs is an intensive outpatient program on campus. I’d love to see every residential campus in America have one. The impact would be generational.



So, I think my election signals that people are starting to recognize the potential and the possibilities of what we can do — and that we can do it at a fraction of the cost, using programs that already exist. And why would you want to do anything to ruin that potential? To have my colleagues across the country say, “We want that kind of innovation leading us forward” — that’s deeply meaningful. It tells me people see the potential of college mental health, and they’re ready to invest in it.

Leading the Next Chapter of College Mental Health

Last year, social psychologist Kathleen Ethier was going on 26 years at the Centers for Disease Control and feeling hopeful about the growing response to national mental health concerns, especially among America’s youth.&nbsp;



The Covid-19 pandemic had ushered in new urgency to understand why young people were struggling and find solutions, including ones schools and colleges might help implement.



“In the 35 years that I had spent in the field, I had never seen us all come together in that way,” said Ethier, who was the director of the C.D.C.’s division of adolescent and school health for eight years.&nbsp;



But that was another time and another administration. When Ethier left her post in January of her own volition to enter the private sector, her faith in the progress of her field was slipping. The conversations that had been fueling her optimism seemed to stop. “We were no longer talking about youth mental health,” she said.&nbsp;



Since the beginning of the year, widespread cuts to federal funding for scientific inquiry have been chipping away at the advancement of work on student mental health. Despite the issue’s record of bipartisan support, pertinent research and services have become casualties amid slashes to government agencies, programs, and grants



On college campuses, the fallout is multi-fold, threatening the wellbeing of not only students who struggle with their mental health but researchers and practitioners who now find their livelihoods at risk.&nbsp;



“All of these high points of funding were just taken away,” Ethier said of the shift under the second Trump administration. “Everyone on the other end of that — whether those are school systems or universities or researchers — are all suffering from the loss of those resources, which means the loss of viable alternatives for young people.”



This summer, a group of mostly Harvard University-affiliated researchers released their <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.01.25332818v1.full.pdf">findings</a> on the total cost of mental health- and substance abuse-related grants cancelled between February 28 and April 11: The estimated loss is more than $2 billion from 474 grants across the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.



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On college campuses, the fallout is multi-fold, threatening the wellbeing of not only students who struggle with their mental health but researchers and practitioners who now find their livelihoods at risk.&nbsp;
</blockquote>



While some grants have been reinstated since the spring, others still hang in the balance. An online database, <a href="https://grant-witness.us/">Grant Witness</a>, continues to update a list of all grants cancelled by both the N.I.H. and N.S.F. As of November 3, the tracker marked around 140 grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, spanning less than $50,000 to more than $9 million, as “terminated.”



In an unfortunate but telling irony, Grant Witness co-founder Scott Delaney launched the database after being conditionally laid off from his work as a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where a federal funding freeze had affected his salary. The former lawyer turned climate scientist called Grant Witness a “tool to fight for these grants and to fight for American science.”&nbsp;



“We're losing a huge competitive advantage in global research. We're losing health benefits from research,” Delaney said of some of the concerns motivating his work. He also contributed to the report on mental health-related grant losses this spring.



Those N.I.M.H. grants that remain terminated had been supporting research on a range of populations and neurological and behavioral conditions. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, had a $3.8 million grant cancelled that was funding a longitudinal study following preschoolers into adolescence to determine early risk factors of psychopathology. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, another $3 million grant was cancelled that had been designated to help strengthen understandings of “Aging, Major Life Transitions, and Suicide Risk.”



Certain grants were terminated for backing projects deemed in conflict with the Trump administration’s orders against the promotion of ideas like “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the mental health context, these cancellations could threaten developing understandings of unique factors and barriers affecting the wellbeing of racial, gender, and sexual minority groups. More than one lawsuit is now underway in an effort to reverse these types of cuts to research on “<a href="https://www.aclu.org/cases/apha-v-nih">disfavored topics and populations</a>.” 



Another subset of grant losses has been the result of funding freezes on entire universities. Because these kinds of actions are targeting institutions, rather than particular research areas, mental health is one of countless disciplines implicated.



At Harvard Medical School, Professor Haiden Huskamp had been overseeing multiple training and research projects supported by the N.I.H. when the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion worth of federal funding for the Ivy League institution.&nbsp;



The freeze came in April after Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands from the Trump administration that the Cambridge university considered overreach and an attempt to curb academic freedom. (These same events led to the frozen salary of Scott Delaney from Grant Witness.)&nbsp;



For Huskamp, the fallout meant her research on the impact of telemedicine for the treatment of mental illness and opioid use disorder was put on hold. While Harvard launched a lawsuit to restore the funding, she grappled with the uncertainty of both her work and her team.



&nbsp;“You're in the middle of a project, and you're moving full steam ahead, but you basically just have to stop,” she said. “You worry that, depending on how long it goes, will you have to lay people off? Will you not be able to keep accessing data? Will you be able to pick it up easily?”



After around five months, Huskamp was able to reclaim her funding when a judge sided with Harvard and ruled the government’s funding freeze unconstitutional. But the damage of the delay was done.



Harvard’s researchers may not be completely out of the woods. President Trump has promised to appeal the judge’s recent ruling in favor of the university, while his administration already launched separate proceedings to bar Harvard from all business — grants included — with the government.



For other mental health researchers, the challenge is not having lost grants but rather trying to raise money for the first time in this new funding environment.&nbsp;



At Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, psychology professors Karin Coifman and John Gunstad are seeking support for what they hope will become one of the largest lifetime longitudinal studies ever on college student health, including mental health. For the aptly named Student Life Study, the researchers aim to recruit 10,000 students and collect health data from them throughout their lives.&nbsp;



With an initial $450,000 from their institution to get them started, Coifman and Gunstad knew they would need to raise the rest of their funds — the majority — from other sources. What they couldn’t have anticipated was a confusing standstill at the N.I.H. this winter, just when they started applying for federal grants.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In February, the N.I.H. temporarily stopped reviewing grant applications after the Trump administration blocked the agency from calling the necessary meetings. About 16,000 applications and $1.5 billion in funding hung in the balance as a result. At the same time, more than 1,000 employees at the N.I.H. had been laid off.



Given the upheaval, Coifman held off from reapplying for N.I.H. funding this spring. She only decided to reenter the fray in the fall after she served on a panel to review N.I.H. grant proposals and found things were once again proceeding smoothly.



Still, with the 2026 federal budget up in the air, the potential scarcity of available funds continues to stoke concern. President Trump proposed to slash the N.I.H. discretionary budget by a daunting 40 percent, or $18 billion, although his plans seem unlikely to pass given Congress’ push for funding at current levels or higher.



Preparing for all scenarios, Coifman said she will continue pursuing funding from every possible source: at the state level, as well as from private foundations and corporations. She understands other researchers, feeling a similar crunch, will be doing the same.



“There's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of vulnerability,” Coifman said. “Because we don't really understand the processes and how they're shifting.”



Eric Wood, the director of counseling and mental health at Texas Christian University, called the evolving state of federal funding at universities a “pendulum swing back and forth.”&nbsp;



“I think what most people would want is just stability — just to be able to predict what's going on,” he said. 



Wood is also sensitive to what he believes to be growing perception of higher education as generally unstable. This narrative, he worries, could prevent not only researchers but clinicians like himself from wanting to work at universities, if they think the job security is precarious.&nbsp;



“People wanted to work in higher education because you get so many different avenues, where you can explore different treatments; you have different populations of students,” Wood said. “But now I think people are saying, ‘Would I just have more freedom working in private practice?’”



“That obviously disadvantages our students if we can't fill a position,” he added, referring to job openings for counseling staff.&nbsp;&nbsp;



According to Sara Abelson, an assistant professor at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, graduate students who once planned for careers in research are similarly reconsidering their paths. Lately, they’ve been expressing their skepticism about the availability of future opportunities.&nbsp;



“What can I do with my timing? How can I not come out as a new trained researcher in the current moment? Is it a safe and stable field to go into?” Abelson said students have been asking her.



So while Abelson has personally avoided funding cuts to her work, she maintains a front row seat to the fallout for not only colleagues but the wider mental health field. The message she said she and fellow staff are hearing is to “play it safe — pick something safe and do it perfectly.” She worries about how innovation in mental health work will suffer — about the capacity to make headway on behalf of all students going forward, and not just some.



“There's no doubt that it is impacting the field,” she said of the funding upheaval.&nbsp;



“It's impacting the mental health and wellbeing of those who are the focus of the grants and those leading the work, and it’s going to have lasting impacts.”



You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:mames@learningwellmag.org">mames@learningwellmag.org</a>&nbsp;with comments, ideas, or tips.

Uncertainty Weighs on Mental Health Researchers

In a scene from the new series Overcompensating, two impossibly enthusiastic orientation leaders address a circle of wide-eyed first years. “Welcome to college, where you can have a fresh start!” one proclaims. “And you can be whoever you want to be!” the second finishes. A third leader, disabled and in a wheelchair, rolls her eyes at them and questions aloud in signature deadpan: “Can you?”



The show’s protagonist is Benny Scanlon, who begins college with a quest to fit in and quickly learns it comes at a cost. His pursuit of social success leads him to not only hide his gay identity but perform his vision of what is acceptable — masculinity, straightness, wealth — in the most extreme way possible. The façade begins slipping almost immediately, as his efforts to imitate who he imagines everyone else to be battle against his instincts to be who he really is.&nbsp;



For many in real life, the college experience offers an opportunity to self-discover beyond the confines of home for the first time. Even those who have lived independently before will find themselves starting fresh to some extent, needing to present themselves in a new place to new classmates. From the photos they put on their walls to the clothes they wear on the first day of class, they are cultivating, maybe even curating, an image of themselves — an identity.



Some will look forward to the opportunity for reinvention, while others struggle to determine who they want to put forward — and not just at the start. Either way, this process of identity formation is coming to the fore with the start of their adult lives. And it carries implications for wellbeing, especially as the developmentally crucial college years tend to coincide with <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5848432/">the emergence of mental health disorders.</a> With a strong sense of identity <a href="https://modernminds.com.au/journal/latest/self-identity-and-mental-health-building-a-strong-foundation-for-well-being">linked to overall wellbeing</a>, the role of college as a laboratory for self-discovery may indeed be one of its most important.



For those approaching college eager to reimagine themselves, the relief could be immediate. Living away from the people who know them and the family, places, and activities typically associated with them may feel liberating. That’s the case in Overcompensating for Benny’s fast friend, Carmen, who’s ready to move on from her perceived identity in high school as a socially invisible “no one.” She represents all those who have wanted to shed reputations they view as having pigeonholed them: “jock,” “nerd,” “troublemaker,” or “no one.”&nbsp;



Others may anticipate college as the place not to become someone completely new but to fulfill some part of themselves formerly untapped or suppressed. Unlike the Benny character, some LGBTQ students enter college excited to be able to express and explore that side of themselves more deeply. Beyond queer students, the general diversity on college campuses may offer those hoping to explore some latent background or interest — a spiritual tradition, academic discipline, professional venture —more opportunities to do so than ever before.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



The act of attending higher education itself, or a specific institution, can also play a role in building a sense of self. That is, being a college student or a college-educated person becomes an important identity marker. First-generation college students could derive pride from that new status, as well as meaningful connection among those who share it. At schools with certain branded reputations or key programs — a passionate sports fandom, elite academics, even widespread appreciation for the outdoors — students may embrace these qualities and begin to absorb them into their individual self-concept.



The pursuit of identity often stems from being drawn to a broader whole — to belong. Identity and belonging are like two sides of a coin, both connoting a sense of purpose and meaning important to wellbeing, though one is derived from oneself and the other from connections with others. The lines between them are also blurry, as people derive individual purpose from engagement with others and membership to a group. This is often the case in college, where students’ search for themselves tends to land them in communion with others: affinity groups, newspaper offices, Greek life. Especially for those from marginalized backgrounds — LGBTQ students, first-gen students — access to peers and mentors who share their experiences can be a key catalyst for identity formation.



Of course, there are tempting pitfalls in the process of seeking identity and finding belonging at college, particularly if students do so at the expense of who they know themselves to be at their core. For all the opportunities universities offer to explore new or untapped facets of self, dominant social forces may offer a path of least resistance: becoming someone acceptable but not necessarily authentic. In a new, potentially more competitive environment, the crush of uncertainty and insecurity can close in and push many to feel they need to prove their worth.&nbsp;



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There are tempting pitfalls in the process of seeking identity and finding belonging at college, particularly if students do so at the expense of who they know themselves to be at their core.
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This tug and pull extends into the academic domain, where imposter syndrome is prominent, specifically among students accustomed to academic success who find themselves in the company of others equally proficient. The sense that their talents are ‘less than’ because they are no longer superlative can leave young people feeling unsure of themselves and the way forward. A similar effect may spread among high-performing students from marginalized groups who fear being perceived as undeserving of their achievements. Again, contending with how they see themselves compared to how others see them is part of the difficult work of becoming who they are.  



Identity formation can feel like an education unto its own, but if students realize later that certain turns led them in the wrong direction, that doesn’t mean taking them was wrong. Although some may arrive at college fully formed, assured of who they are or plan on becoming, many more will likely find identity formation to be an unpredictable and ever-evolving course — one in which self-discovery has no end point and builds from knowing who they are as much as who they are not.  For Benny and Carmen in Overcompensating, their valiant efforts pretending to be other people still leave them careening towards one apparent inevitability: themselves.

Who Are You?

Allie Jutton graduated from high school in 2022 with a pile of Advanced Placement credits and few options to put them to use at the kind of small liberal arts college she wanted to attend. But she knew she could save a lot of time and money if she could find a school that counted her A.P. work toward her degree.



Jutton, who grew up in Lakeville, Minn., landed at the University of Minnesota Morris. It offered the small college feel—just shy of 1,000 undergraduate students—and a well-publicized Degree in Three program, which could save students like her about $20,000 by graduating in three years, instead of four.



Jutton was sold. And now she’s graduating with a degree in psychology and a minor in gender, women, and sexuality studies and plans to attend Minnesota State University, Mankato in the fall for a master’s in mental health counseling.



“I came in with a lot of general education courses already done, like statistics, history, geography, and English,” Jutton said.​​ “It was cost-effective for me and my family, and it allowed me to get my degree a little faster.”&nbsp;



At Morris, the Degree in Three program isn’t a new concept. Students with the drive and desire have always had the option to finish the standard 120 credits to earn a bachelor’s degree in a shortened time frame. However, it wasn’t until 2024 that the college openly advertised that all of its 32 majors could be completed in three years, if students chose to do so.



Morris is one of almost 50 institutions that have joined the College-in-3 Exchange, a nonprofit organization advocating for more undergraduate degree options that take less time to complete. The collective includes a diversity of institutions, from Georgetown University and the University of Miami, to Merrimack College and Portland State. When the incubator started in 2021, a dozen institutions signed on—and the group has grown each year.



“Higher ed needs to be reimagined in all kinds of ways, and this is a very practical way to create a catalyst for rethinking undergraduate education,” Lori Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota Rochester, said. She founded College-in-3 alongside Robert Zemsky, professor at the University of Pennsylvania.



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“Higher ed needs to be reimagined in all kinds of ways, and this is a very practical way to create a catalyst for rethinking undergraduate education."
</blockquote>



Nationwide, about 64 percent of students who start a degree program finish it within six years, with an average loan debt among borrowers of $29,300, according to the College Board. In 2023, Carrell testified to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development about how the College-in-3 concept could improve student retention, degree completion, and career launch, either by developing accelerated 120-credit degrees or creating new curricula that reduce the credit requirement to 90.



“Accreditors have opened their doors to this,” Carrell said.&nbsp;



Not for Everybody



While financial wellbeing is an obvious benefit of earning a degree in three years, the College-in-3 movement continues to head off concerns about less-desirable repercussions for students, like increased stress, feelings of overwhelm, or a rushed college experience.&nbsp;



Jutton shared those concerns, initially. Her fears were eased after mapping out the course work with her advisor, taking into account the credits she brought with her from high school. Still, Jutton worked two jobs while in school, as a resident assistant and also as an assistant in the student engagement and events office. During her second year, she took 20 credits each semester. It was a lot at the time, but Jutton believes the experience also gave her skills that she’ll use forever.



“It taught me valuable life lessons. I’m really good at time management and my organizational skills are better than they were coming into college,” Jutton said. “I was able to recognize when I needed help and ask for it, as well as set boundaries for what I can and cannot do.”



As more institutions are joining the College-in-3 Exchange, they are also considering how to design curricula that take student mental health and wellbeing into account, Carrell said.



“The worry that you’re just going to rush students through and turn degrees into credentials, instead of deep, transformative learning? Nothing could be farther from what we’re doing,” she said.



Janet Schrunk Ericksen, chancellor at Morris, said that since the college started actively promoting the three-year option in February 2024, it’s been well received. The Degree in Three program features prominently on the website, and Ericksen said that it receives more page views than any other part of the site. Visitors also spend more time looking at the information.



“We serve a large percentage of students from historically underrepresented populations—low-income, first-generation students,” Ericksen said. “Giving them this path is important.”



Ericksen acknowledges, however, that completing a 120-credit bachelor’s degree in a condensed timeline isn’t for everybody. It’s easier for those who can use A.P. credit or pursued dual enrollment in high school, earning some college credits before arriving on campus. Most students also take a summer class or two along the way. She believes that certain degrees also lend themselves to quicker completion than others. Physics, for example, requires foundational knowledge before moving on to the next levels, so the major might be more challenging to finish in less than four years.&nbsp;



“It’s not going to work for students who change their major six times or who want a triple major—and we have a fair number of those,” Ericksen said. “But the students who are really focused, they’re saying, ‘Yes, this is what I want, and it’s great to have a clear path.’”



An opportunity for experiential learning&nbsp;



Institutions like Brigham Young University - Idaho, which serves an older population of working adults taking online classes, are finding that eliminating elective courses and reducing degree credits to 90 or 94 are helping students complete programs in majors like business management, applied health, and family and human services. The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, an accrediting body, approved the truncated programs in 2023.



Still, not everybody is sold on the validity of a 90-credit degree. Some higher education experts and faculty members are concerned that it will create a two-tiered system and that employers may not value the degrees equally.&nbsp;



But Madeleine Green, executive director of the College-in-3 Exchange, said the timing for higher education to make such changes is “propitious.”



“For all the questions that are out there about the value of a degree, employability of graduates, the cost of higher education, those are all factors that I think have propelled institutions to think about alternative pathways,” Green said.



Designing three-year degree programs with industry partners is leading to better outcomes, Carrell said. At the University of Minnesota Rochester, for example, students in health-related majors are offered paid internships at the Mayo Clinic, as well as job interviews upon graduation. The partnership has also helped the faculty design a tight curriculum that ensures that students are prepared for the workforce, while building in strategies like block scheduling, success coaches, and capstone experiences that contribute to student wellbeing.



“To know that there are these dire workforce shortages in healthcare deserts and we’re producing people who can go out and serve communities sooner is very, very satisfying,” Carrell said.



Peh Ng, chair of the division of science and mathematics at Morris, said the students she’s helped guide through three-year degrees aren’t missing out on the hallmark experiences of college, like undergraduate research, study abroad, and internships. Still, those who arrive at Morris without having earned any college-level credits have a much more challenging time finishing in less than four years—and often they don’t.



“A three-year program is really not for every student, but if a student tries it and it doesn’t work, then they finish it in four years. So at the end of the day, it bodes well for four-year graduation rates,” she said.&nbsp;



Ng is among the faculty members who don’t agree with reducing credit requirements, especially in STEM fields, where she said the difference between taking 12 courses and seven is “huge.”



“You can’t have two tiers of programs,” Ng said. “I am a strong proponent of not changing the requirements.”



Jutton agrees with Ng—she wouldn’t have wanted to take a lesser load, she said. As she prepares to graduate, she has few regrets. Sure, another year may have afforded her a more robust social life, but she also found friendship and camaraderie among like-minded peers who were also on the fast-track to degree completion. Although Jutton will be younger than many of her graduate school cohort, she still feels prepared to move on.



“I think the biggest thing for me was finding supporters, like my career counselor and the faculty,” Jutton said. “I haven’t met someone who does not believe in me here and that was really important for me to be able to do the degree in three.”

"College-in-3"

Not many academics find mainstream success with the publication of their first book. Anthony "Tony" Jack, Ph.D. did.



In his award-winning debut, “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged” (2019), Jack explores how elite colleges and universities tout mounting diversity but tend to recruit students of color from private and preparatory high schools rather than local, more distressed ones. His second book, “Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price” (2024), tracks the fallout of the pandemic for students with little to no support at home, and how institutions failed to anticipate and respond to their needs.



From&nbsp;assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Jack joined the faculty at Boston University in 2023 as an&nbsp;associate professor of higher education leadership.&nbsp;At B.U., he is the inaugural faculty director of the Newbury Center, a resource office for first-generation students across undergraduate and graduate programs. From his perch as researcher, educator, and student affairs insider, he offers a unique understanding of the challenges facing high-needs students, as well as those supporting them. He’s also committed to being part of the solution — one that hinges on scholarship and student services working together.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;To start, could you give a bit of background on your research and areas of expertise up to now?



TJ: In my first book, “The Privileged Poor,” I discussed an overlooked diversity in higher education. Universities were doubling their efforts to recruit lower-income and first-generation college students, and many universities had actually almost doubled the number of Pell-eligible students who they were admitting. But my question was always: Where are they getting those students from? And what I show in my first book is that they were actually going to get their new diversity from old sources: boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. And I called those students the “privileged poor,” lower-income students from boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. And I called their peers who went to low-income — typically distressed — public schools the “doubly disadvantaged” and showed how students' trajectories to college shaped their trajectories through. 



One thing in that book that I wish I was able to engage with more was how the inequality at home so often comes to campus. “Class Dismissed” was born out of a pebble-in-a shoe-type moment, where all the presidents of universities were like, “I didn't know our students didn't have internet at home. I didn't really know what kind of communities they were coming from.” And I'm just like, but you do. Your admissions officers know. From their personal statements — because you make them pimp out their poverty — you know where they come from. You know what they're returning to. “Class Dismissed” was a response to that. What was important for me to bring to “Class Dismissed” is to say that COVID exacerbated the very inequalities that students were suffering with in silence. 



LW:&nbsp;And you are now involved in translating some of those lessons into practical supports, right? At the Newbury Center at B.U.? Could you say a bit about what goes on there and what it means to be the "inaugural" faculty director?&nbsp;



TJ: The Newbury Center is this amazing opportunity to put my research into action because the Newbury Center is a resource center for first-gen undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. There usually isn't this coordinated, university-wide effort to support students who are first in their families to go to college. And so the Newbury Center is unique in that sense. And it's a really amazing opportunity, as well as a monumental task. Because we have people who are coming in at 17 and 18, and we also have people who are coming in at 30 and 40.



My inclusion is to put research more central to the endeavor: How do we support our undergraduates to go to study abroad? How do we make sure that we understand the best practices to help them get internships — to get opportunities to extend learning beyond the classroom? Those are the kind of things that I'm able to do and support with research. During the summer, we actually help students who take on unpaid or low-pay internships with stipends. It is so stressful to be able to have this amazing opportunity to work in a field that you love, but you can't afford to live where the internship is. We can help fill that gap for lower-income students. Not as much as I would hope, but that's also why I'm helping to expand the center so that we can help more people. 



LW:&nbsp;So had you heard of the Newbury Center when you were at Harvard, and it became sort of a driving force for you to move over and get more involved?&nbsp;



TJ: The Newbury Center is still a very young center. Five years. The ability to craft its trajectory from early on was an attractive piece to get me to think about going from just being a producer of research to now also being tasked to create policy and advocate on behalf of students across the country. 



My work on food insecurity is a huge piece, where I can actually engage with deans. I was doing that in addition to my work at Harvard, but now it is part and parcel of my advocacy work at B.U. My work on mental health has shifted from being a finding that I have about how students do or do not seek help to now being able to invite directors of mental health services to campus as part of an annual conversation. 



LW:&nbsp;It's interesting that you say that. I was thinking about that dual role you’re playing as a professor and then in more of a student services role at the Newbury Center. Did that feel like kind of a natural balance for you to strike? Was there ever any kind of hesitation or feeling like you needed to stay in one lane?&nbsp;



TJ: No, for me, from the very beginning, my philosophy was: Why just write about it when you can do something about it? 



In “Class Dismissed,” I have this line: “Now that we know what we know, what are we going to do about it?” Don't just relegate a very, very important possible policy change — one that could fundamentally change the everyday existence for tens of thousands of students across the country — to a paragraph at the end of the paper. Why not give more life to it? It's ethical research. It's theoretically informed. It's empirically rich. Why not add that fourth element? And then also to write in an accessible way so that a president, a professor, a dean, a parent, can learn about what the children in their life are going through. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
"In 'Class Dismissed,' I have this line: 'Now that we know what we know, what are we going to do about it?'"
</blockquote>



LW:&nbsp;Right. On that note, what&nbsp;are&nbsp;young people going through right now? This is a broad question, but what are your major concerns at the moment for students, especially first-gen or low-income ones?



TJ: The thing that's top of mind right now? I mean, where do we go? We can talk about affirmative action, withholding of funds. It's just a lot, to be honest. But one thing that I think people need to realize is happening on campuses in this McCarthy-era-style politics that we find ourselves in — what we are seeing — is labeling what were once good student affairs practices as “benefits.” And any limiting of that newly labeled benefit to a particular group is seen as unconstitutional. That is a very different way of doing student affairs. Student affairs was saying, “Hey, we are here for everyone, but we also know that we have to take particular steps to welcome different groups. And we do that by allowing — supporting — affinity groups and hosting these different offices because we know that our campuses were literally not made for people here, who are here now.” 



Now that work is said to be giving an undue benefit to someone else and discriminating against, essentially, a white man, which is now the reference point for any kind of support service that you have. And that list is going to get longer and longer. It's going to go just from being a white student to a white male student to a white Christian male student to a white rich male student. And it's just going to keep getting longer and longer until that reference is a very narrow person, who is not the modal group on campus, and yet all policy and all practices are going to be seen as: Are you not allowing this person to feel comfortable here? 



LW:&nbsp;Have you been experiencing that firsthand through the Newbury Center or otherwise — restrictions to your work or your ability to support people?



TJ:&nbsp;To be honest with you, it's a day to day thing. We don't know when we're going to get another “dear colleague” letter. We don't know when another executive order is going to come out. We don't know if any university is going to keep fighting it through the justice system, knowing that the Supreme Court is what it is. And so we're waiting day-by-day to figure out: Can we continue to do the work that we do across the country?



LW:&nbsp;But so far, do you feel like — notwithstanding daily challenges or pivots — you've sort of been able to maintain the level of support that you had in years past?



TJ: So far. 



LW:&nbsp;And in terms of your student interactions, what are you hearing from them about the things that they're most nervous about? How do you guide them through that, if that's part of your role?&nbsp;



TJ: It's generalized anxiety about what is next — what's going to be possible. And so what we are trying to do is still encourage students to put themselves out there — go for every internship, go to study abroad, pick out your favorite spot in the library that you are going to be known for at your 20-year reunion: “I would always see you in the library right at your favorite window.” They can still make memories and take advantage of all the things that college provides. That is incredibly important. That's just huge. 



LW:&nbsp;What else are you thinking about going forward with this school year? What are you anticipating will be the biggest challenges both for your own work and also for the students that you support?&nbsp;



TJ: If it's two things that rob people of so much, it is scarcity and precarity. Right now, everything that we are trying to do is to make ends meet with less and in less time. And to be honest with you, this is the year that I want to be fully present for students and hear from them — learn from them — so that, as I craft out my next project, it is one that is going to not only expose what they went through but think critically about the policy and practice changes that can help support them going forward. 



LW:&nbsp;Is that something that you feel hopeful about? The idea that the policy change could really happen and make a difference?&nbsp;



TJ: First-gen-as-pawn is something I'm really grappling with right now because a lot of people are flocking to first-gen — to recruit first-gen. But they're not ready. They're still not ready.



LW:&nbsp;Not ready to support students once they actually come to campus?&nbsp;



TJ: Yeah, yeah. Those are some things I want to just grapple with. 



LW:&nbsp;In terms of a future research opportunity or just in general?&nbsp;



TJ:&nbsp;Well, for me, everything is going to be tied to investigating it. Students' voices inform the policy suggestions that I present to colleges because I believe that in students' voices are the keys to success and a more equitable future.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Is it encouraging to see other actors or organizations with a similar outlook and doing similar work?



TJ:&nbsp;It's absolutely encouraging. Because that means that people are intentionally invested in making campuses not only more accessible but equitable. They would probably never be equal. But to have a more equitable space — people who are being intentional about removing some of the hurdles that disproportionately hurt, humble, and quite frankly, sometimes just destroy those who believe in education the most. Not as, “Oh, I have to go because my family has always gone.” But literally the people who believe in it because they believe in the power that they can completely transform their life.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;So still feeling like that's possible?&nbsp;



TJ: I'm a first-generation college student myself, so this work is inherently personal, as well as it is professional. I do believe in the power of research to change things. I do still believe in the power of education to be transformative. I believe in the power of research to make that transformative experience more accessible to more people. 



One thing I would love is a push for more researchers to write in an accessible way and not ignore general audiences. Because it's important — especially now in this age of misinformation — for more people to actually understand what goes into research and how our findings are not manipulated. We need to stop talking at people and have conversations with people. And so I don't think that work is any less theoretical just because people can understand it.&nbsp;



You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at <a href="mailto:mames@learningwellmag.org">mames@learningwellmag.org</a> with comments, ideas, or tips.

A Voice for High-Needs Students

At Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., the word “character” was not always a positive. The liberal arts college, which serves a large indigenous population, was once a federal Indian boarding school, notorious for coercive character formation aimed at extinguishing indigenous cultures. Now, as it addresses its painful past, Fort Lewis College is centering character education within a reconciliation initiative that goes beyond atonement to institutional change.&nbsp;&nbsp;



With a grant from Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.), Fort Lewis College is launching a Reconciliation Center — a campus-wide, interdisciplinary effort that values truth-seeking, engages students in experiential learning and problem-solving, and promotes the mutual respect needed to have the difficult conversations that lead to progress. Campus leaders hope that by overlaying institutional and individual aspects of character onto its reconciliation framework, Fort Lewis College will help all students navigate a better future.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“If we are to move forward as a society, we need to do so with intellectual curiosity and cultural humility so that we build community and belonging — not just for indigenous people but for everyone,” said Mathew Schaeffer, who is the Fort Lewis College reconciliation coordinator, an alumnus, and a citizen of the Hopi tribe.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Schaeffer recalls 2023 as a seminal year for him and for the institution itself. The state of Colorado had released a report investigating the experiences of students within the federal Indian boarding school system, which included Fort Lewis College. The school was established in 1891 as a cultural integration project in line with the country’s assimilation era after the frontier wars. The school, which closed in 1911, punished indigenous students for failing to abandon customs such as longer hair or speaking in native tongue. Part of their mandate was to eradicate what was considered the “bad character” of tribal people in favor of western, colonial mores.&nbsp;&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“We have a collective responsibility to each other and to all our students to tell the truth, to learn from that, and to move forward together.”&nbsp;
</blockquote>



Two years earlier, the college had removed placards on campus which inaccurately and harmfully depicted the original school as a positive experience for indigenous children. It was the first step in a process that led to the inclusion in the school’s strategic plan of a four-part reconciliation framework including: tribal nation building, language reclamation, health and wellness, and indigenous culture and knowledge systems.&nbsp;



When the report on Colorado boarding schools came out, Schaeffer, who was then a student, was compelled to find out how well the reconciliation effort was understood and operationalized on campus. He conducted qualitative research on the subject as his senior thesis. His conclusion — that most campus members had only a vague understanding of this work — was presented to the then-president.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



“What I found was that there was an appreciation for the work people were trying to do in this area, but there was confusion about how to apply it and what it meant for their day-to-day,” Schaeffer said.



Paul DeBell is a political science professor at Fort Lewis College and was the principal investigator on the E.C.I. grant project. When Schaeffer’s research came out, he had been teaching a political psychology course with students who were interested in having deeper conversations across lines of difference. While the reconciliation work was more familiar to him, he wasn’t surprised that his colleagues had trouble internalizing it.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“People would say to me, ‘You do political theory, so you get this. But I’m a chemistry professor, what does this mean to me in my classroom?’” he said.



DeBell added there were still pockets on campus where this work was done passionately, often involving students in experiential learning or service learning in the community. These reconciliation activities came under the purview of then-Vice President of Diversity Affairs — now President of Fort Lewis College — Heather Shotton, Ph.D. DeBell and Shotton had worked together on “difficult conversations” given their respective positions and came together again to pursue the Wake Forest E.C.I. grant opportunity.   



Funded&nbsp;by a large grant from the Lilly Endowment, the E.C.I. helps colleges and universities place character education at the center of their missions and practices in various and diverse ways. After receiving a capacity building grant from the E.C.I. to build out the idea for the Reconciliation Center, Fort Lewis College was awarded a nearly $1 million institutional impact grant this July to launch it.&nbsp;&nbsp;Character education became what DeBell called “the common element among all these spaces.”&nbsp;



The Inclusion of Character



“For us to be an institution of good character that serves Native American students and all of our students, we needed to be very thoughtful, respectful, and transparent about our past,” DeBell said. “Shaving off parts of history that make us feel bad is not demonstrating good character. But in the same respect, we also wanted to think of this as an opportunity for all of our students to build on their own character traits — to think about their own position in our society and the world.”



DeBell and Schaeffer agree that one of the most valuable benefits of being awarded the grant was the ability to name, frame, and communicate what reconciliation looks like at Fort Lewis College.&nbsp;



“Thinking about reconciliation from the perspective of character development gives us a common language and helps translate it to people who might not see themselves as a part of reconciliation,” said DeBell, who noted even the word “reconciliation” is open to broad interpretation.&nbsp;



For a school with a cautionary history around character, what reconciliation should&nbsp;not&nbsp;look like at Fort Lewis is the imposition of character. Not only does the Reconciliation Center recognize indigenous people’s standards of character — historically excluded from western understanding of the subject — it encourages students to explore what good character means to them. In this sense, the character/reconciliation work offers students a new avenue for self-discovery, empathy, purpose, and meaning.&nbsp;&nbsp;



According to its grant report, the Center will “embed a Community Bridging Institute where students will work shoulder-to-shoulder with faculty and staff mentors to hone their dialogue skills as they learn to navigate conflict, embrace multiple perspectives, and move between western and Indigenous ways of knowing.”&nbsp;



One of the key pillars of the character and reconciliation work at Fort Lewis College is curriculum innovation and student impact, which leverages the school’s asset as a liberal arts college with a deep learner-centered pedagogy.&nbsp;&nbsp;Building off of a strong commitment to experiential learning, activities within the Center include undergraduate research projects with faculty mentors and an Educating Character Fellowship Program, where students and faculty will explore the intersection of reconciliation, character education, and personal meaning.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The Center just hired its inaugural director, Rosalinda Linares-Gray, who will begin building the scaffolding around the Center’s initiatives and activities, many of which are already underway. The first step is to organize those efforts and connect the people who are involved, letting them lead the way. Having a home for this work helps further one of the initiatives founding goals: to foster a campus culture where reconciliation is understood as a collective responsibility.



DeBell and Schaeffer believe the establishment of the Center has already helped in this regard, and many of the activities within the project plan include the direct engagement of faculty and staff. But they believe the most effective way of gaining buy-in across campus, or across the country, for reconciliation work is to present it as a public good — a benefit to all.&nbsp;



Asked if he worries how the Reconciliation Center might be perceived by political forces determined to root out anything resembling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, DeBell admits to having some concern, but only if the initiative is misunderstood.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“We have a collective responsibility to each other and to all our students to tell the truth, to learn from that, and to move forward together.”&nbsp;



In April of this year, Heather Shotton was named President of Fort Lewis College, making history as the first Native American to lead the institution. 



You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org">mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org</a>&nbsp;with comments, ideas, or tips.

Character and Reconciliation

Seven years ago, Sam touched down in the United States, alone. Just 17, she had left her mother and siblings behind in West Africa to live with her father in New England, where he waited with her new green card.



But Sam’s arrival was one of the first and last parts of the move to go as planned. Her father became abusive, and after the pandemic descended, she moved in with a teacher who’d grown worried about her welfare. From then on, Sam’s education became both anchor and bridge to a better life.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“I got that security from my teachers,” she said.&nbsp;



College presented another respite from home, although it ended up coming with its own set of challenges, especially financial. From her first day on campus, Sam felt lost. She struggled to make friends in a dominant social culture that seemed to require an entrance fee she couldn’t pay. For her chronic health issues, she could barely afford transportation to appointments, let alone medical bills.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Every year, Sam said, she wrote letters to the university administration explaining her financial shortcomings and appealing for leniency. The process started to feel dehumanizing, she said, as she found herself trying to prove “my story is sad enough to give me some aid.”



Yet she pushed on, often powered by a simple but effective refrain: “I don’t want to be poor.” Halfway through her first year, she caught a break when she was connected to the&nbsp;<a href="https://thewilynetwork.org/">Wily Network</a>, a non-profit based in the Boston area that provides holistic support to students navigating college without family assistance. The Wily Network helped Sam cover basic needs and went to bat for her before her last semester when it looked like she wouldn’t be able to make the final payment.&nbsp;



Sam graduated this May, against all odds, and just in time to avoid some of the added fear students like her are experiencing, as the Trump Administration plans major changes to higher education and related social services. Months of speculation surrounding cuts to federal financial aid and public assistance, the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) resources, and the removal of immigrant and international students have left learners already at the greatest disadvantage haunted by the precarity of their situation. As the overwhelming uncertainty continues, it is these students who hang in the balance — those who rely on college for their safety and welfare and are one policy move away from losing it all.&nbsp;



Keeping It Together



As the executive director of the Wily Network, Judi Alperin King, Ph.D., has had a front row seat to the host of new challenges her students have been managing in recent months.



The ground had always been shaky for those the Wily Network serves, Alperin King said, but at least they knew more or less what to expect. “Now that shaky ground is unpredictable.”&nbsp;



“You cannot see the cracks in the foundation, and they just keep appearing,” Alperin King said. “Every day there’s a new crack, but it wasn’t in the place you thought it was going to be.”



Earlier this summer, one of Alperin King’s students flew across the country and drove deep into a rural territory, only to arrive and discover the internship that led him there had been cancelled. The work he’d been hired to assist was defunded amid the slew of cuts to federally funded programs, spanning climate and cancer research, foreign aid, and D.E.I. initiatives.



Other students had found out they lost their jobs before relocating for them, Alperin King said. This one hadn’t been so lucky.



With the student’s call alerting them to what happened, the Wily staff spurred to action, trying to figure out how exactly to get him to the airport from an area, apparently, without access to Ubers or even taxis. From there, he would need money for a ticket to Boston, a place to live when he got there, groceries to eat, and income to support himself until school started up in the fall. Without Wily on standby, he might have found himself stranded.



Some developments, like internship-ending cuts to programs and research, are affecting students in real time. Others simply loom, making everyone squirm.&nbsp;



At any given time, top of mind for students assisted by the Wily Network is whether they’ll continue to be able to pay for college. Concerns have been churning around the fate of federal financial aid since Trump first began promoting the closure of the Department of Education and then signed an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/improving-education-outcomes-by-empowering-parents-states-and-communities/">executive order</a>&nbsp;to that effect in March 2025.&nbsp;



Assurances from Education Secretary Linda McMahon that aid would continue didn’t assuage worries, especially as the initial version of Trump’s bill overhauling domestic policy included reductions to the maximum award for federal Pell Grants, which prop up more than six million students with the highest financial need.



This month, the bill that passed Congress and Trump signed into law didn’t include the Pell restrictions that had stoked the most fear, although there are other implications for financial aid. Among them are the elimination of Pell eligibility for students already receiving full scholarships from their institutions, as well as the expansion of Pell to cover shorter-term workforce training programs. In addition, the bill sets limits around the lifetime amount of federal aid students can receive for graduate school and winds down the number of loan repayment plans to two.&nbsp;



Perhaps raising the most alarm are the law’s cuts to public assistance programs, namely Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. In 2020, an estimated 3.3 million students qualified for SNAP. But even if the changes don’t impact students directly, a trickle-down effect could. As states look to trim their budgets to fill the new gaps left in health care and food assistance, sector experts have warned higher education could take a hit that cuts back student support services or ramps up tuition costs.



The Trump bill’s changes to Medicaid and SNAP also involve denying eligibility to certain legal residents, including refugees and asylees. These restrictions come on the back of a larger crackdown on noncitizens in the United States.



From a higher education standpoint, these efforts have included the high-profile detention of international students, legally in the United States, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for their involvement in pro-Palestine advocacy on campus. The Trump Administration has also threatened to bar entry to international students who go to Harvard University as part of an ongoing power struggle with the Ivy League institution.



Any student originally from outside the United States or with family members from outside may be feeling vulnerable. Even Sam, armed with a green card upon arrival almost a decade ago, said she often can’t sleep at night from worrying about her status in the country. Learning about the recent detainment of an undocumented high school student by ICE in the town where she now lives didn’t make her feel better.&nbsp;



“I think for me, I have always been scared,” she said. “I’m legal. I paid a lot of money to be here, but if you’ve never dealt with immigration before, it’s one hell of a beast.”&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“I think for me, I have always been scared."
</blockquote>



While policy confusion stirs up fear for high-needs students around their ability to stay on campus or in the country, the support services once designed to help them navigate this type of uncertainty are also taking a hit.&nbsp;



Social worker Jamie Bennett, Ph.D., leads the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.fosteringsuccesscoaching.com/">Fostering Success Coaching Institute</a>, which trains staff at groups like the Wily Network in best practices to assist high-needs students. Through her partnerships with these organizations, on and off college campuses, Bennett has gained first-hand insight into the kind of pressure they now find themselves under. At least two have undergone “mass layoffs,” Bennett said, due to funding cuts.



At a recent event Bennett hosted, free of charge and ironically focused on practitioner wellbeing, she guessed about 20 percent of those she had expected didn’t show. “Either they had lost their job or they were taking on responsibility from colleagues who were being laid off, so they couldn’t join,” she said.



For the most part, Bennett has been able to stave off any fallout for her work. But she imagines cutbacks for her partners could reduce her own services down the road. “That’s going to impact our ability to keep offering as many trainings as we do,” she said. “If they don’t have the funds to send their folks to professional development, they don’t come to us.”&nbsp;



The Wily Network’s efforts have been affected, as well, as the flurry of cuts to university departments and resources leave even veteran advocates like Judi Alperin King unsure of how to help students. “In some ways, we’ve lost our power,” she said of her and her staff of "coaches." With boundaries different from those of therapists and mentors, coaches take on wide-ranging tasks, from troubleshooting social problems and locating academic resources for students to acting as the emergency contact they wouldn’t otherwise have.&nbsp;



“We knew what to do. Not every situation, but a lot of situations, they were predictable, and we could say, ‘Okay, here are the three steps you can take to support yourself through this,’” Alperin King said. Now those steps may no longer apply.&nbsp;



Although neither Alperin King nor Bennett’s organizations receive federal funding, concerns have still emerged about whether they can completely evade government scrutiny. Both leaders have heard rumors that their group’s nonprofit status, which falls under the purview of the Internal Revenue Code, could be at risk should any of their activities draw higher concern, most likely in relation to the promotion of D.E.I.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Those warnings haven’t stopped either from maintaining commitments to D.E.I., whether in spirit or explicitly on the company website and other materials. Bennett is firm on upholding her organization’s founding ideals. “We will say what we feel is just and what we feel is aligned with our values. Which are aligned on equity. They’re aligned on inclusion. They’re aligned on everybody’s voice matters.”&nbsp;



While not overly concerned about her own job security, Bennett does worry about how that kind of stress, combined with increasing student needs, may affect the emotional wellbeing of other service providers. It’s critical, she said, for them to be “well and resourced and feel like they’re equipped to do their work, as they meet with students who have really complex situations and trauma.”



“If we start to see the support of them drop off, then it makes me nervous for what students will start to notice,” Bennett said.



At the Wily Network, one coach has begun to find her background in hospice care unsettlingly relevant to her current role supporting high-needs college students.



“You don’t really coach people at the end of life. You just sit with them, like, ‘Yep, death. Death is death,’” she said. Working with young people facing the unknown where their degree and future are concerned has started to feel like a similar experience.



“It’s more of an existential suffering,” she said.



The same coach has been struggling under the increasing weight of her students’ challenges. Guilt is a dominant emotion, stemming from the understanding she can distance herself from issues surfacing in higher education, from her job, in a way students can’t.&nbsp;



“I feel like my empathic distress for students is harder to manage because, I mean, what’s going on is hard for me, but I feel like I have a home. I have a job. I have a lot of ‘knowns’ in my life that ballast against what's going on,” she said.&nbsp;



Student mental health has always been a prime concern for coaches, but now the uncertainty and fear fueled by real and perceived policy changes seem like the ultimate pile-on for young people already emotionally tested by years of striving and struggling.&nbsp;



Alperin King knows her students are among the most resilient in higher education. She once used that fact to recruit new coaches, advertising the joys of championing talented students uniquely capable of battling through barriers — all the way to and through college.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Students without family support who make it to college have a history of defying expectations. People like Alperin King and her colleagues are now asking, “Do we really need to raise the bar?”&nbsp;







LearningWell used the pseudonym "Sam" and withheld other names in this article due to subjects' privacy concerns. 



You can reach LearningWell reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Without a Net

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California-based Jennifer Klein is a single mom and freelance sign language interpreter whose income varies from one month to the next. When her daughter began applying to four-year colleges last year, the cost to attend was always going to be front and center. But Klein is also remarried, which changes the math in the eyes of FAFSA (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Figuring out what school her daughter could afford to attend was a confusing landscape.



Given a lack of easily accessible information on college affordability, Klein and her daughter did what many families do: applied to schools of interest and hoped for the best when it came to scholarships and aid. “I told her to apply wherever she wanted and we’d see what happens,” Klein said. “I just jumped in and filled out FAFSA, having no idea if that was helping or hurting.”



Klein’s daughter is a high-performing student, so they had that in their corner. After whittling down her list and sending out applications to colleges in the West Coast region, Klein’s daughter received good news: The University of California, Davis offered her the prestigious Regents Scholarship, worth $7,500 per year. The state of California also chipped in $7,400 through its Middle Class Scholarship, bringing the $46,000 sticker price down to approximately $30,000. Additionally, Klein took out a Parent PLUS loan to help round out the remaining costs not covered by savings and income.



In the grand scheme of things, the Kleins had an easy ride. But for lower-income and first-generation students who have had little to no exposure to the complex college affordability equation, there’s often a sense of helplessness. High schools may not have the resources to adequately inform these students about monies available to them. Left with not much more than the sticker price they read on a college website, many students give up and fall through the cracks, never knowing what funding might be available.&nbsp;



According to the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nasfaa.org/news-item/36182/NCAN_Unclaimed_Pell_Grants_Totaled_4_4_Billion_for_the_High_School_Class_of_2024">National College Attainment Network</a>, these students left $4.4 billion in unclaimed Pell Grants in 2024, which represents an increase of $400 million from the class of 2023. “So much comes down to students and families knowing what to expect from college costs so that they can prepare for the future,” said Brendan Williams, vice president of knowledge at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.uaspire.org/about/mission">uAspire,</a>&nbsp;a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the economic mobility of underrepresented students by creating financial solutions to diverse postsecondary pathways. “When they miss out on understanding the funding available to them, these students and families think college isn’t affordable.”&nbsp;



Even when introduced to some of the funding avenues, students and their parents can find the FAFSA, financial aid, and scholarship applications processes confusing. Most people, according to an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.strada.org/reports/cost-confusion-americans-misconceptions-of-college-costs">NCAN survey</a>, significantly overestimate the cost of both public two- and four-year institutions.&nbsp;



“Most first-gen students assume they can’t afford college or that they’ll have to go into massive debt to afford it,” said Shellee Howard, C.E.O. and professional certified college consultant at <a href="https://collegereadyplan.com/">College Ready</a>. “There’s also a lot of negativity surrounding college affordability on social media, which discourages students before they even have a chance to succeed.”



There’s also the issue of language barriers in some cases, which adds an extra hurdle for some first-gen students and their families. The result is that too many students are missing out on opportunities. At a time when&nbsp;<a href="https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/projections2031/">recent research</a>&nbsp;points to the fact that by 2031, 72 percent of jobs&nbsp;&nbsp;will require post-secondary education and/or training, that’s a giant loss for students — and the economy as a whole.&nbsp;



A Landscape of Confusion&nbsp;



In an ideal world, all high school students and their families would receive detailed information and assistance about the costs of college and ways to make it affordable. The government’s Federal Student Aid&nbsp;<a href="https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/what-is-sai">website</a>&nbsp;would be easy to navigate and FAFSA/the student aid index easily understandable. But that’s not the world in which students live.&nbsp;



“The system is broken,” Howard said. “It’s a huge problem and has existed for years.”



Howard was a first-gen student herself and today is the parent of four children who have all navigated the college application process, graduating debt free with her help. “If a family has an education and the finances, they hire a consultant to help them,” she said. “But if they are first generation, they have a long runway to start the process and don’t know what resources exist.”&nbsp;



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For lower-income and first-generation students who have had little to no exposure to the complex college affordability equation, there’s often a sense of helplessness.
</blockquote>



One federal resource, housed under the Department of Defense Education Activity and designed to help students with college readiness, is the AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program. Its stated goal is to support students in the “academic middle” —those who have the potential to succeed at increasingly higher levels but may need additional support to fully realize their potential. The program’s centerpiece is a toolkit to support future-ready skills like time management, organization, and critical thinking. It also touches on financial literacy, with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dodea.edu/curriculum/advancement-individual-determination-avid">85 percent</a>&nbsp;of students who participate submitting FAFSA, compared to an average of&nbsp;<a href="https://educationdata.org/financial-aid-statistics#:~:text=One%20calendar%20year's%20worth%20of,including%20%2440.651%20billion%20in%20grants.">61 percent</a>&nbsp;in the 2023-2024 academic year.&nbsp;



At its best, AVID is a nationwide program facilitated by high school guidance counselors that students can take as a subject or in a study hall. According to Howard, however, not all AVID programs are created equal, and many are not integrated into curriculum. “At some schools, you may have a very motivated teacher who ensures AVID is easily available, and those students have a big advantage,” she said. “At others, students have to seek out the program and assistance.”



The affordability problem — or lack of financial literacy surrounding it — extends beyond first-gen and low-income students, however. Evelyn Jerome-Alexander, a college counselor with&nbsp;<a href="https://magellancounseling.com/college-counselor-evelyn-jerome-alexander/">Magellan College Counseling</a>, frequently works with middle-class families. “The families who hire me and my team generally appear on paper to be able to afford the somewhat obnoxious sticker prices of the most well-known colleges,” she said. “Many just grit their teeth and ‘find a way’ to pay for college. My focus is helping them realize there are so many opportunities for their kids to get a great education without taking money from their retirement accounts.”&nbsp;



Jerome-Alexander finds that most high school counselors don’t have the bandwidth to help students go beneath the surface with college affordability because much of the equation is highly individualized. One issue is the federal&nbsp;<a href="https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/what-is-sai">student aid index</a>&nbsp;(S.A.I.), she said. “The S.A.I. sees an income level but doesn’t understand your expenses and what you have to spare for education.”&nbsp;



One family Jerome-Alexander worked with, for instance, had a nice six-figure income. After going through the S.A.I. via FAFSA, they received no financial aid. On the surface, this would appear logical and realistic for such a high income. “But they also had a special needs child that requires very big expenses and will well into the future,” she said. “FAFSA doesn’t care about that or about how much you spend on education.”



This was a case where Jerome-Alexander’s guidance to complete the College Scholarship Service Profile application — which colleges and universities use to award non-federal institutional aid — made a big difference for the family.&nbsp;



But families who can access counseling services like Jerome-Alexander’s and Howard’s are the lucky ones. Lower-income and first-gen students depend on their schools, web searches, books, and more resources they may not realize are available.



Programs to Help&nbsp;



Like uAspire,&nbsp;<a href="https://myintuition.org/">MyinTuition</a>&nbsp;is a non-profit with a mission to help mid- and low-income students understand the cost of college and find their most affordable option. Created by Phillip Levine, a professor and economist at Wellesley College, the organization runs on the theory that there’s an information problem when it comes to college costs. “To make a good decision about college, you need to know how much it will cost,” he said. “We haven’t made that easy in America.”&nbsp;



While the federal government requires that all public higher ed institutions post the cost of college on their websites, the truth is that very few students actually pay full price, Levine said. “If you have a very high income, you’ll pay that number,” he said. “But most people are not in that category.”



Most people, however, don’t understand that fact. Net price calculators can be difficult to find and use; there’s a good deal of confusing jargon in college-cost speak; and even FAFSA can deter people nervous about sharing their tax information. This is where community-based non-profits hope to fill in the gaps.&nbsp;



MyinTuition has created its own fiscal tools to help aspiring college students understand their real costs. Right now, the organization is partnered with about 70 colleges and universities. “It’s not perfect, but it provides a ballpark estimate and range, which is a huge advantage,” Levine said.&nbsp;



Getting tools and information dispensed to students and their families will continue to be one of the biggest barriers, and Williams from uAspire sees lost opportunities here. “I can’t reiterate how important it is that college costs are family conversations,” he said. “High school is a time when you have a captive audience, but often, even when there are informational meetings, they take place when many low-income parents might be working.”



Today, uAspire operates in Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area, working alongside high school counselors. Where they don’t have a physical presence, Williams and his team are deploying to high schools in a “train the trainer” format. Williams hopes to keep building out his model, continuously working to close the financial literacy gap.



An Uncertain Future&nbsp;



The wild card in all things related to college affordability is change at the federal government level. Step by step, the Department of Education is shutting down. The department, which has long administered the federal student aid program, is transferring the&nbsp;<a href="https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/what-are-trio-programs">TRIO</a>&nbsp;programs, for instance, which provide post-secondary education services for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The D.O.E. is also offloading the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ed.gov/grants-and-programs/grants-higher-education/historically-black-colleges-and-universities-hbcus-and-predominantly-black-institutions-pbis/title-iii-part-b-strengthening-0">Title III Part B program</a>, which provides grants to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, as well as the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ed.gov/grants-and-programs/grants-special-populations/grants-economically-disadvantaged-students/gaining-early-awareness-and-readiness-undergraduate-programs-gear">Gaining Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs</a><a href="https://www.ed.gov/grants-and-programs/grants-special-populations/grants-economically-disadvantaged-students/gaining-early-awareness-and-readiness-undergraduate-programs-gear">.</a>



The $1.5 trillion federal student aid program will likely land with the Small Business Administration, which has no experience managing the program and has experienced its own&nbsp;<a href="https://ticas.org/media/student-loan-system-failure-is-inevitable-with-transfer-to-small-business-administration-putting-millions-at-risk/">40 percent staffing</a>&nbsp;cuts this year.&nbsp;



And then there is the Big Beautiful Bill. “The bill is vague and there are many misconceptions surrounding it,” Howard said. “It has both advantages and disadvantages.”



In the plus column, Howard believes, is the fact that the bill allows more flexibility for 529 plans. Families will now be able to use&nbsp;<a href="https://www.savingforcollege.com/article/big-beautiful-bill-education-savings-529-plans">529 plans</a>&nbsp;for credentialing programs and trade certifications. They will also be able to apply funds to tutoring, testing fees, and continuing education programs required to obtain or maintain professional credentials.&nbsp;



Yet as it stands, the bill is also gutting&nbsp;<a href="https://www.aft.org/news/how-big-beautiful-bill-harms-higher-education">$300 billion</a>&nbsp;from higher education, eliminating the most affordable repayment options on student loans. By some measures, the bill will mean that a typical college graduate will pay nearly $3,000 more per year in student loan payments.&nbsp;



Other changes from the bill include the elimination of&nbsp;<a href="https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/big-updates">Grad PLUS</a>&nbsp;loans, which cover expenses for graduate-level programs, and new caps on Parent PLUS loans beginning in 2026. Klein, who is using a Parent PLUS loan, remains unaffected, as the program grandfathers in borrowers prior to July 1, 2026.&nbsp;



While the future remains uncertain, Levine said there is some bi-partisan agreement that understanding college costs is too complicated and creating a significant barrier to entry for too many eligible students. Whether this results in any sort of reform in today’s environment is anyone’s guess. For now, however, Levine has this thought: “At the end of the day, we want students applying to schools that are the best fit for them academically and geographically. If their decision is based on affordability, that’s a constraint. If they can afford it and don’t realize it, however, that’s a failure in the system.”&nbsp;

The Information Gap in College Affordability

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Since its founding in 1863, Boston College, like many Jesuit institutions, has practiced “whole person” teaching, powered by the belief that one learns in multi-dimensional ways well beyond subject matter knowledge and vocational training. Over the last 20 years, B.C. has devoted particular time and resources to developing its approach and becoming a leader in the larger field, known as “formative education.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



The university in Chestnut Hill, Mass. now has a formative education department within the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and has recently launched a campus-wide Transformative Education Lab (TLab), an interdisciplinary research and innovation hub dedicated to advancing the theory and practice of formative education.  



“We’ve been building up a particular vision of what education for undergraduate students should be about,” said Stanton Wortham, dean of the Lynch School. “Formative education is this notion of integrated or holistic approaches that are not just intellectual and not just vocational but include an interconnected set of social, emotional, ethical, and spiritual questions and developments.”



Wortham said the lab is designed to clarify and promote formative education so that it may benefit other institutions, both K-12 and higher education. Its first mission is to share best practices, through the literature and by convening people who are doing this work. Secondly, the lab will focus on the research on the method itself, with an intention to distinguish it from other practices such as social and emotional learning or character education.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“All of those things are good but what we are doing here is different and has something special to offer,” Wortham said. “The purpose of the lab is to articulate that and present it to people more broadly.”&nbsp;



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“What we often do with children is just teach academic material, mostly through memorization, when what we need to do is ask them what kind of person they want to be.”
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According to Wortham, formative education has four distinctions: It focuses on intrinsic ends, developing dispositions that stay with us for life; it centers both individual and community development so that young people are disposed to contribute to the common good; it is holistic, acknowledging the multiple dimensions within which young people develop — emotionally, relationally, civically, ethically, and spiritually; and it includes an&nbsp;emphasis on purpose, on discerning what we are called to do.



Deoksoon Kim is a Lynch School professor in the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society department and a strong believer in how the right kind of education can change people’s lives. As the inaugural director of the TLab, she seeks to seed within other institutions a method she believes can lead to personal growth in a way that other pedagogies cannot quite match.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



“What we often do with children is just teach academic material, mostly through memorization, when what we need to do is ask them what kind of person they want to be,” Kim said. “As an educator, I really wanted to make differences in people’s lives and in the world. This work really gave me a deeper sense of who I am and what I want to be doing.”



Kim has an ambitious blueprint for the TLab that includes three major strategies announced at the launch. In an effort to jump start and share new ideas, the TLab will hold a K-12 Formative Education Grant Competition which identifies and supports promising practices in schools, after-school programs, and community-based learning environments.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In summer 2026, the TLab will host an intensive professional development institute designed to prepare K-12 educators and leaders to implement formative education practices in their teaching and leadership. And in October 2026, the TLab will hold its inaugural conference on formative education, bringing together scholars and practitioners from around the country and the world in both K-12 and higher education.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Kim said developing the TLab to help expand the formative education pedagogy within higher education is a major goal. It is part of what she hopes will address a narrow focus on academic standards that she and others believe has “gone too far.”



“This is a great kind of a movement we are in — one that broadens education to be about meaning, character and purpose,” Kim said. “This is what we need to do to transform higher education.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org">mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org</a>&nbsp;with&nbsp;comments, ideas, or tips.

The Art and Science of Formative Education 

In early November, a swirl of accusations and counter-accusations erupted in social media from the University of Miami. A disagreement between two students, one of them a prominent campus influencer, became fueled by commentary and reaction videos from strangers across the country. It swelled into a conversation about cruelty that led to the dean’s office and eventually to a national news story about young adult influencer culture and social status. But it roiled with something even larger and darker for young adults figuring out their place in the world: what it means to&nbsp;matter&nbsp;or not.



The incident, covered in The Washington Post, highlighted a core truth about the social waters young people swim in today. Popularity — if it can even be reduced to a single word that sounds so&nbsp;80s, so&nbsp;geeks and jocks, so&nbsp;John Hughes movies&nbsp;— is no longer about just being cool at school. For this generation, social standing is shaped by a temperamental mix of in-person dynamics, the curated worlds of social media, and the invisible pull of moral and emotional expectations among peers. What makes it noteworthy, however, is this: The more psychologists and social scientists learn about wellness, the more so-called popularity is understood as something not outgrown after the mercurial adolescent years. The way a young person chases social standing — and comes to think of themselves during these years — has an impact upon social maturity and wellness for life.&nbsp;



“The dynamics of popularity affect our relationships, our careers, our success in meeting our goals, and ultimately our happiness,” said psychologist Mitch Prinstein, author of “Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World.” As director of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Prinstein has researched adolescent and young adult social dynamics for decades. And he believes the new landscape of popularity includes multiple categories.&nbsp;



“There is likability, and there is status,” he said, “and there is now an online popularity that looks a lot like status, but it’s reinforced with actual quantified metrics that tell you exactly how popular you and every post and comment you’ve ever made may be.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



As some cold countries are said to have 50 words for snow, the digital age may need an expanded vocabulary for popularity.



Status, or Perceived Popularity



A generation ago, the popular students were those with visible influence: the athletes, the charismatic leaders, the beautiful people and style setters. Prinstein calls this “status popularity,” built on visibility, dominance, and the ability to set social norms. It’s less about being well-liked than being noticed and acknowledged as powerful. It often emerges in adolescence but continues to matter into adulthood, especially in environments that reward hierarchy, competitiveness, and performance.&nbsp;



This is the terrain of old-school status that still exists, where the superficially strong survive and bullies thrive. Physical attractiveness still carries an advantage; in young adults, so do subtle cues of wealth or access, like coming from certain zip codes or private schools, having a luxurious vacation home or fancy car.



Students are remarkably clear-eyed about this. One junior who described her sorority as “top tier” recognized that social circles sometimes coalesce around people with access to attributes of wealth and connections. But even in that environment, access doesn’t buy genuine affection. “People hang out with some kids because of the things they have access to — like money, drinks, drugs — even if they don’t like them that much.” Clothes can matter as barometers of style, she said, but the more subtle the better, lest you be seen as trying too hard, or “too Gucci.” Those might be your party friends, but “you wouldn’t trust them with your secrets.”



Athletic success can function as modern status currency as well. Ben, a recent graduate of Northeastern University, noted that athletes who are recognized as being on the path toward professional fame can have name recognition on campus — though he was quick to add that if they are jerks, they might be more notorious than popular, per se. Tessa Garcia, a therapist who works with adolescents and young adults in the San Francisco Bay area, called athletic achievement one of the “most intense” forms of comparison, for better or for worse, because “it’s concrete — it’s right there, publicly seen, how many goals you scored or missed.”



On many campuses, Greek life reinforces a hyper-visible hierarchy. For some students, Greek life becomes a social safety net, perhaps after struggling to make connections elsewhere. But it can also be a gauntlet of scrutiny and self-doubt, of striving for “top-tier” houses that offer the QR codes as door entry to the best parties. Garcia compared parts of the sorority rush process to “getting recruited for a sport — except your sport is your identity.” Appearance, enthusiasm, and social-media presence are evaluated as if they were performance metrics.&nbsp;



Donna Steinberg, a longtime college mental health counselor in New Hampshire who has worked with Dartmouth students, sees this emotional toll up close. “Freshmen are going to the frat parties, trying to belong,” she said. “By sophomore year they have to decide whether to pledge, and the Greek system can look like pure tiers and ranking. They can be crushed by rejection,&nbsp;and they have to make sense of it somehow. Usually, they patch themselves up by the time they become seniors, but that sense of questioning why can stay with them.”



The New Status Economy Online



If traditional status operates through in-person visibility, digital status popularity operates through metrics: follower counts, likes, shares, and algorithmic amplification. This form of popularity is volatile, public, and precarious. Any interpersonal conflict can become a public spectacle, and any student’s reputation can be remade or destroyed in real time, at least for those who put stock in digital popularity.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
If traditional status operates through in-person visibility, digital status popularity operates through metrics.
</blockquote>



Online popularity looks a whole lot like status, Prinstein said. But instead of being inferred through social cues, it is quantified with numbers. Students now live with a permanent scoreboard next to their names.&nbsp;“Things like follower counts play a really big role, and that could be because you're a good content creator and you just happen to attract a lot of people to your content, and that has nothing to do with your social skills. And that alone is enough to give you high status in your particular online niche.”



The University of Miami controversy illustrates how quickly online status can ignite conflict — and how swiftly it can smolder in public humiliation. Students who were previously known only within their campus community suddenly found themselves scrutinized by thousands of strangers.&nbsp;Some aspiring influencers who want to monetize this milieu choose majors in marketing, communications, and digital media, giving academic clout and higher stakes to the personal side of content creation and brand building.



For some undergraduates, courting this attention is intentional, but can be fleeting. Because online status can be gained or lost overnight, students may find themselves constantly monitoring, adjusting, curating, and performing — an emotional drain further removing them from the “real world” of interaction. It shapes perceptions — who is seen as aspirational, who is judged, who is excluded. Prinstein worries that social media collapses the nuance of human relationships into flattened, reactive fragments. “Your humanity is 128 characters long. You’re as good as your last post.” Young adults internalize this without realizing they are aligning their behavior with a system that rewards controversy, beauty, or performance more than kindness or integrity.&nbsp;



And yet, the paradox is striking: Online popularity is everywhere, yet often irrelevant to the relationships that make college life meaningful. Someone cultivating an influencer persona isn’t necessarily an authentic person others want to call friend.&nbsp;



“You see these people trying to be influencers, posting day-in-the-life videos. Usually, it’s considered kind of… cringey. Like it’s trying too hard,” said Sophie, a senior at the University of Virginia. The reaction, she said, is often skeptical: “We know you. You’re not living that life.”



Zoe, a sophomore at Vanderbilt, sees similar disconnects. “Someone can be huge on TikTok,” she said, “but on campus nobody cares. It doesn’t translate.”



Some students recognize this, and speak about the difference between the friends you “go out with to clubs” and the friends you “go grocery shopping with in pajamas.”&nbsp;



Interestingly, many students emphasize the shift from status-based judgments in high school to authenticity-based judgments in college — a form of social standing that depends less on being admired and more on being someone others feel comfortable around. Once you find your people, Sophie said, there’s really no such thing as popularity anymore.&nbsp;



“Honestly,” Ben agreed, “I don’t think there is really the idea of popularity in college these days, or at least not at Northeastern. There are fraternities; there are sororities; there are athletes and theater kids and everything in between. But nobody really looks at a different clique and feels like they’re less. Do you know a lot of people and do fun things? It’s not like high school. There’s no prom king.”



Warmth, Empathy, and the Social Skills that Last&nbsp;



Likability — or sociometric popularity — reflects the degree to which someone is genuinely well-liked, trusted, and valued by peers. It emerges from warmth, empathy, emotional intelligence, and kindness. A young person who embodies these traits is often recognized early as someone other kids want to be around and parents want their children to spend time with.&nbsp;



That degree of natural confidence might be the most organically attractive factor of all: the confidence to be kind to others without worrying how cool it makes you look or not, or whether being nice to someone who isn’t cool will be a social liability. “Being a generally likable person — someone who is a really good communicator, a good listener, and someone who’s interesting, — is what honestly makes you well-known and well-liked by the greatest number of people,” Sophie said.&nbsp;



Zoe echoed this. Being outgoing and confident is naturally attractive, she said. If you are comfortable in your own skin, and interesting, it makes others want to be in your orbit. And it also gives you more latitude to be different. “People are attracted to people who’ve got spice and pizzazz. One of my guy friends is a huge history geek. He went to a museum during his fraternity formal road trip to New Orleans,” she said. “People really respect when you got something that's a little bit edgy to you because it shows that you have a personality. There's more than just what meets the eye. It's endearing and alluring because it's like, ‘Oh, I want to hear more about this person.’”



Prinstein considers likability the most important of the popularity types, noting that it predicts our health, our marriage, our salary, our parenting skills, even our age at death. Unlike status, which can be addictive but hollow, likability forms the basis for stable, meaningful relationships across the lifespan and decreases the chances that we’ll be lonely — a real wellness risk as we age.



Educators’ Takeaway: Recognize the Forces at Work



College students today are navigating an exceptionally layered social reality. For educators, counselors, and other adults who work with young adults, understanding this complexity is essential to being able to provide guidance that resonates with them.



Adults who grew up in an era before social media may underestimate the emotional force of public scrutiny, said Garcia, who emphasizes that these students are “the first generation growing up with themselves being exposed in ways previous generations weren’t.” And the punitive repercussions of social media situations like those at the University of Miami have to be recognized as a significant risk to wellbeing. Acknowledging the legitimacy of these pressures is the first step toward helping students manage them.



Because likability predicts long-term well-being, educators can foster it through intentional shifts in group discussions, promoting collaborative rather than competitive norms, and creating structured opportunities for students to form meaningful relationships.



In environments where Greek life, varsity athletics, selective majors, or elite internships are status dynamics that carry enormous weight, educators and counselors can help students make sense of these systems and disentangle personal worth from external ranking. For students who may feel “crushed” by rush rejection or other status-based competitive pressure, compassionate reframing can prevent temporary disappointment from becoming lasting harm.



Popularity today is a complex and sometimes contradictory matrix of status, visibility, and genuine connection. Students may be admired online but lonely on campus, or socially powerful in one community and invisible in another. They may chase influence without realizing they are sacrificing belonging — or believe they are failing socially when they are actually cultivating the kind of friendships that endure. 



Prinstein’s research underscores that these distinctions matter. For educators and other adults, the work is not to dismantle popularity but to guide students toward the version that sustains them. In a world where social media can amplify every misstep, and where the stakes of visibility feel impossibly high, helping students build the skills of authentic connection is not ancillary to their success — it is central to it.&nbsp;



“Likability and status can go hand in hand. In fact, about, I think, a third of kids who have high social status are also very likable,” Prinstein said. “We should be investing lots of time and energy in helping kids to appropriately navigate a social world in real life instead of chasing metrics that end up not lasting. Even kids who are having the hardest time with peers can do really, really well with one trusted mutual friend and positive friendship. We need to help those who are suffering by helping them to have an actual relationship with a real human offline.”&nbsp;



Prinstein emphasizes moving away from metrics: encouraging students to invest in the relationships that ground them, rather than the platforms that distract or distort — and to appreciate that status doesn’t have to build at the expense of authenticity. You can have status and style and still be the friend people choose to go grocery shopping.

The New Face of Popularity

James Forten was nine years old when he stood among the crowd outside the Pennsylvania State House to hear the newly signed Declaration of Independence read aloud for the first time. In 1776, he was a free Black boy, for whom the universal human rights laid out in the Declaration were far from promised, nor intended to be so as a result of the forthcoming revolution. Forten still fought for America. At 14, he joined the Continental Navy and, upon being captured by the British, chose imprisonment at home over an offer of release to England. He survived the war and went on to grow a flourishing sail-making business. It made him one of richest men in Philadelphia and funded wide-ranging abolitionist efforts, including William Lloyd Garrison’s famous paper, “The Liberator.”



Those who tune into the latest documentary from prolific filmmaker Ken Burns, “The American Revolution,” will learn about Forten in the final episode. His is one of many lesser-known stories in the six-part, nearly 12-hour series and, perhaps, a favorite of Burns, who invoked the young revolutionary during a panel discussion at New York University last week: “He does not for a second believe these self-evident truths don’t apply to him,” Burns said emphatically of Forten’s immediate grasp of what the Declaration of Independence could mean. “He knows they apply to him.”



To Burns, Forten seems to offer a model for how today’s young people, too, might pull from foundational American ideals to shape their own vision of the future. The documentarian was at N.Y.U. as part of a campaign to promote his new film among students at colleges and universities. On November 19, the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-revolution/campus-conversation-event">“Campus Conversation”</a> brought together Burns, his co-director Sarah Botstein, two experts featured in the film — law professor Maggie Blackhawk of N.Y.U and history professor Christopher Brown of Columbia University — and a moderator, politics professor Patrick Egan, also of N.Y.U. They asked each other: At a time when students might feel removed from — or repelled by — their nation’s early and flawed history, how could this film’s fresh telling be helpful to them, even inspiring?



Coinciding with the event was an announcement from its host school: The day prior, N.Y.U. launched its new <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2025/november/nyu-launches-the-berkley-institute-for-civil-discourse-and-civic.html">Berkley Institute for Civil Discourse and Civic Solutions</a>. It’s one of the latest centers of its kind, designed to promote engagement with diverse perspectives, in an ongoing trend towards building them on college campuses. Egan, the moderator of the Burns conversation, is the institute’s inaugural director.



Early American history would certainly be fertile ground for civil discourse centers interested in taking up and sorting through topics fraught with controversy. “The American Revolution,” for one, does not shy away from challenging, sometimes disturbing truths; their inclusion is part of an explicit mission to offer a complete portrait of this moment in history. The patriots of the 13 colonies may have bravely defended their freedom from tyranny, the film reveals, but they also hanged British representatives in the streets — poured hot tar over one in particular and covered him humiliatingly with feathers. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence asserting the necessity of liberty for all, while being attended to by an enslaved valet, the young son of Jefferson’s father-in-law and one of his slaves. George Washington, who also owned hundreds of slaves, was the revered general who led his forces to victory and recruited them in part by promising each enlisted hundreds of acres in Western, Native-populated land that wasn’t his to give away.&nbsp;



At N.Y.U., Burns captured one of the most central and slippery contradictions of early America — as both anti-colonial mission and burgeoning empire at once. “We called it the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, and we knew where we were going,” Burns said in reference to plans for westward expansion.&nbsp;



Confronting these contradictions may be how “The American Revolution” draws in today’s college students. In moving beyond a traditional or glorified rendition of the founding, the documentary digs up details that feel less tired or overfamiliar. Even more, it presents a period whose intense divisions are evocative of American life in 2025 and how people at every level of society, not just the top, drew from the emerging notions of equality and democracy to push for personal understandings of justice.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“The people who wrote it down may not have been representative of us, but the people who have put it into motion — even until today —&nbsp;are&nbsp;us. And it still is something that a lot of us are pushing for and that young people do care about it.”
</blockquote>



Yasmeen Rifai, a junior studying politics at N.Y.U., attended the conversation with Burns and said she appreciated its inclusion of “all the other groups that are so often left out.” What resonated with her most was the discussion of how those at the margins adopted and repurposed certain foundationally American ideals, for example, from the Declaration of Independence.



“The people who wrote it down may not have been representative of us, but the people who have put it into motion — even until today —&nbsp;are&nbsp;us,” Rifai said. “And it still is something that a lot of us are pushing for and that young people do care about it.”



Young people in particular were central to the revolutionary movement, said Christopher Brown, the Columbia history professor who participated in both the panel and the documentary itself. So despite ongoing cycles of older generations grumbling about the politics of younger ones, a youthful inclination to fight for the future appears to be as old as the country itself. “Political activism is part of our culture. It's part of what freedom is about,” Brown said in an interview with LearningWell. “So I also think that the Revolutionary Age is a little bit of a reminder that this is a country that was founded in political division and was energized by political mobilization rather than political quiescence.” That goes for politics across the aisle, he said.



Young people may find the applications of Burns’s film are not only political or intellectual but also personal. In the style of “formative education,” engaging with the liberal arts, history included, is a way of exposing students to different ideas and traditions they can then use to reflect on their own, larger values — moral, spiritual, and otherwise. Stanton Wortham, an anthropologist and dean at the Boston College Lynch School of Education, said this process of reflection is what he and others in the formative education field call “discernment.”



“It's a projection of yourself into a historical situation,” Wortham said of the practice for students of history. “That gives you a chance to develop not just intellectually because you're learning new things and learning how to reason and look at evidence and so forth, but it also gives you a chance to engage with this ethical challenge that somebody else was facing and think about your own values and what your own values would lead you to do.”



The purpose of the approach, then, is not to tell students what to believe, but rather to expose them to the kind of provocative questions that let them consider for themselves. When it comes to the American Revolution, questions of tyranny and rule, justice and violence, might emerge. “A lot of people got killed. Was that okay? Was it okay that a whole bunch of people got killed for these particular ideals because they imagined a particular way of life was right?” Wortham said he might ask students of the period. “Does that apply today? There are lots of people today who are living in situations that are unjust, so should we be supporting people who are fighting back against what we or they consider as unjust things?”



Of course, all the ways students could interact with Burns’s new film are not a promise that they will, in fact, do so. Yasmeen Rifai, the junior at N.Y.U., had yet to see the series at the time of the campus event, although she said the conversation did make her want to start. Christopher Brown said former students now in their 30s and 40s have written to him to say they saw him in the documentary, though more recent ones have not. 



Amanda Garvey is only a first-year at N.Y.U. but already knows she wants to pursue a major in history. She attended the conversation with Burns last week because, she said, she loves the American Revolution. Originally from Bucks County, Penn., she grew up a short drive away from where George Washington once famously led troops across an icy Delaware River and towards a crucial victory in the war for independence.&nbsp;&nbsp;



By Garvey’s discernment, the panel discussion illuminated an important and enduring legacy of not just crisis, but possibility. “What's happening right now, it's kind of a crazy time. I think the idea that these people were fighting for what they truly believed in — I think it still can be applicable today,” she said.



“Not everything is lost. There’s still hope, and I like that.”



You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:mames@learningwellmag.org">mames@learningwellmag.org</a>&nbsp;with comments, ideas, or tips.

History for Fresh Eyes

Gone are the days when state-of-the-art dining and fitness facilities alone could sweep prospective college students off their feet. When it comes to campus life, Gen Z has a new priority: mental health care.&nbsp;



The Princeton Review is taking note. For the last two years, the company best known for its college admissions services, including test preparation books and tutoring, has been evaluating schools based on support for student wellbeing.&nbsp;



On Wednesday, The Review, in partnership with the Ruderman Family Foundation, published the results of its second&nbsp;<a href="https://sftp01.princetonreview.com/public/file/ucwlej4lpuy1733wzln_ha/the_princeton_review_mental_health_services_report.pdf">Campus Mental Health Survey</a>, along with a Mental Health Services Honor Roll, which highlights colleges and universities with model commitment to student mental health and wellbeing.



This year’s survey found broad gains in mental health services compared to last year, indicating a shift towards more comprehensive, preventative models of care. The 2026 Honor Roll also lists 30 institutions, up from the previous 16.



“I'm really pleased with the results of the survey,” said Mark Reed, the director of the health service at Dartmouth College, a new addition to the Honor Roll. “It reflects the investment that people are making nationally to support the mental health and wellness of our college students.”&nbsp;



Between fall 2024 and spring 2025, two separately polled groups participated in the survey: administrators who reported on the state of mental health policies and programs on their campuses, and students who reported on their sense of the availability of services and awareness of how and where to find them.



The administrators represented 540 different colleges and universities, more than twice as many as in the 2024 survey. Their responses reveal growth since the previous year in the portion of schools with a variety of mental health services.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
This year’s survey found broad gains in mental health services compared to last year, indicating a shift towards more comprehensive, preventative models of care.
</blockquote>



The percentage of schools with return-from-leave support programs increased by 18 points, for example; and the percentage of those with counseling centers with accreditation or following accrediting guidelines increased by 15 points.



Other notable areas of growth include the incorporation of wellness in residential life (now at 93 percent of schools), the adoption of for-credit or non-credit wellness education (70 percent), and the existence of a website consolidating information about campus mental health offerings (96 percent).



More than 31,000 students also responded to questions about their perceptions of mental health programming on campus. The percentage of students who agreed mental health services are readily available on their campus went up by five points; the percentage that agreed their institutions prioritize student mental health went up by another five.



79 percent of students said they know where to access resources on campus, although that figure reflects only a one-point increase from last year.&nbsp;



Eric Wood, the director of counseling and mental health at Texas Christian University, another school named to the Honor Roll this year, believes the growing investment in mental health services reflects an understanding that these concerns impact not only where students choose to go to school but whether they persist to graduation.



“Protecting student retention is also one of the hallmarks of college mental health, so these findings are consistent with the notion that one way to address enrollment concerns is to invest in campus mental health services,” Wood wrote in an email.&nbsp;



At Dartmouth, Mark Reed said the broad implications for student success are one reason the president, Sian Beilock, has made campus wellbeing her “number one priority.”&nbsp;



“She's made that sort of a key component to the academic success of Dartmouth — that if we don't have the health and wellness of our community, then we really can't be at our best,” Reed said.&nbsp;



The Honor Roll schools, like Dartmouth and T.C.U., stood apart for their compliance with three main criteria: an administration that supports mental health through policies and programs; students who enjoy a quality of life that is healthy and “attentive to wellbeing;” and initiatives that empower students to address their own mental health (e.g. peer-to-peer offerings).



College ranking systems — most famously that of U.S. News &amp; World Report — have been subject to controversy in recent years due to suspicions that narrow guidelines can end up neglecting otherwise quality schools deserving of recognition.



Wood views the Honor Roll as breaking the mold. He wrote it was “refreshing to see information based on details provided by schools as opposed to arbitrary national rankings that position schools against each other and don’t provide information about the survey samples.”



Wood hopes that schools — both named to the Honor Roll and not — will use the resource to connect and collaborate.



“College mental health is not a competitive world, and counseling center directors often share and borrow programs and ideas,” he wrote.



You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at <a href="mailto:mames@learningwellmag.org">mames@learningwellmag.org</a> with comments, ideas, or tips.

Princeton Review Releases Latest Findings on Campus Mental Health Services

This September, The Wall Street Journal ranked Bentley University the 12th best college in America. Its criteria included considerations such as the institution’s impact on salary and how quickly the degree will pay for itself. While pleased with the bankable metrics, leaders at the Boston-based business university will tell you their real differentiator is fostering the personal formation of their students.  



“We put a lot of emphasis on technical fluency and quantitative literacy, but what really makes the difference in the marketplace is the ability of our students to think critically, to communicate extemporaneously with comfort and poise, and to exhibit confidence, not hubris,” said Brent Chrite, President of Bentley University.



Helping students gain and demonstrate these attributes is the thinking behind BentleyPlus, a competency development program focused on encouraging experiences that lead to dispositions such as resiliency, purpose, and agency. While reflecting the business university's high regard for the liberal arts, BentleyPlus is a separate and intentional effort to get students to understand that marketable skills are not confined to the classroom. 



BentleyPlus began as a pilot in 2021 and is now a university-wide effort combining career readiness with dimensions of wellbeing. The program involves four major pillars, starting with an introductory program where first-year students select two out of 11 competencies to work on throughout their time at Bentley. The competencies, such as ethical reasoning, leadership, and work ethic, are organized into three buckets: cognitive skills (Think), intrapersonal skills (Develop), and interpersonal skills (Act).  



Students are then encouraged to pursue co-curricular experiences that help them develop these competencies — not by adding more to their plates but by making what they’re doing more meaningful. BentleyPlus advisors meets with students three times a year to help them reflect on their experiences and articulate their value. An awards ceremony with a BentleyPlus certificate completes the program.&nbsp;



While a nod to the university’s holistic pedagogy, BentleyPlus also reflects a concern, among employers nationwide, about the lack of “durable” skills in entry-level employees — everything from communication and collaboration to grit and work ethic. Another factor driving the project is the persistent emotional and mental health issues college students and recent graduates are reporting, including disengagement with work and school post-pandemic.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
While a nod to the university’s holistic pedagogy, BentleyPlus also reflects a concern, among employers nationwide, about the lack of “durable” skills in entry-level employees.
</blockquote>



As vice president of student affairs, Andrew Shepardson has his eye on all of these phenomena. He sees BentleyPlus as more evidence of the university’s long history of student-centered education. In 2014, Gallup released the groundbreaking Gallup Alumni Survey, originally known as the Gallup-Purdue Index, showing the influence of certain college experiences on career readiness and wellbeing. Shortly afterward, Bentley became one of the first schools in the country to enlist Gallup in conducting its own alumni survey. 



As with the national research, Bentley’s alumni reported higher levels of wellbeing correlated to experiences like “having professors who make me excited about learning,” “having someone who cared about me as a person,” and actively participating in extra-curricular activities.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“That information was huge for us in terms of sending a strong message to our students and faculty,” Shepardson said. “You may be a finance major fixated on working at a hedge fund, but you would really benefit from taking a discussion-based humanities course or working on an initiative off campus.”



Shepardson said that while students regularly participate in co-curriculars, he noticed they can struggle to articulate how these experiences transfer into skills in the marketplace. He recalled one example of a senior who became flummoxed when asked in a job interview how his experience as president of a club had helped prepare him for the position he was seeking.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“He made no connection between this significant leadership experience and what might be expected of him in the real world,” Shepardson said.&nbsp;



A natural partner for BentleyPlus was the team from the&nbsp;Pulsifer Career Development Center, who, as front-liners, recognized the importance of curating durable skills in addition to academics. “Our career folks thought this was phenomenal,” said Lauren Hubacheck, assistant vice president for student affairs. “They said, ‘We can do all the career development work with our students, but you all are connecting tangible stories that show skills like dialogue and leadership.’”&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



While focused on competency building, BentleyPlus eventually took a stronger turn towards wellbeing, as Hubacheck and Shepardson began to see this as the through line in all of the work they were doing.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



“Employers were telling us that the greatest number of leaves of absences were with entry-level employees and for wellbeing purposes,” Hubacheck said.&nbsp;



In talking with his staff and colleagues around the country, Shepardson was hearing about disengaged students whose anxiety was keeping them from talking with their professors or connecting with other students.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“It became apparent that wellbeing was the higher order,” Shepardson said. “We needed to give students a clear understanding that their ability to work on a competency was not going to be successful if they didn’t have that wellbeing piece in place right from the beginning.”



This year, BentleyPlus 2.0 was launched with its own strategic plan; a full-time associate dean, director, and assistant director; and a commitment from leadership to promote wellbeing in all aspects of university life.&nbsp;



The Underlying Competency&nbsp;



Rebecca&nbsp;Jimenez&nbsp;is the newly hired associate dean of wellbeing&nbsp;and&nbsp;BentleyPlus. She said she had her first “pinch me” moment when working the negative mindset table at orientation, where students were asked to select from an array of cards displaying unhelpful concepts like blame and self-doubt.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“I said to them, ‘Let’s work on how to change that,’ and they loved it. They did the exercise with such intention. I thought, Wow, they really care about this stuff.”&nbsp;



Jimenez&nbsp;had been working on what she calls “wellbeing communications,” an effort to help people understand what wellbeing means in their lives and to arrive at a definition that incorporates all of its associated elements. Often confused with wellness (mindfulness and yoga), wellbeing can mean different things to different people. After extensive research, Jimenez created a new wellbeing narrative for the university that is part of the BentleyPlus strategic plan.&nbsp;



“Wellbeing at Bentley is a dynamic balance of personal and community wellness, where students feel supported, connected, and empowered to flourish,” the plan now states. “It’s about caring for oneself, making intentional choices, nurturing meaningful relationships, and engaging in environments that promote joy, purpose and belonging.”&nbsp;



As part of the BentleyPlus first-year program, students take a wellbeing self-assessment and develop wellbeing goals to be addressed over time with their advisors. Right now, all of the BentleyPlus advisors are student affairs professionals, but the enthusiasm they convey in working one-on-one with students has attracted the interest of other community members, including faculty.&nbsp;&nbsp;



For&nbsp;Jimenez, bringing BentleyPlus into the classroom is an important next step.&nbsp;



“Not only can we make wellbeing front and center in the classroom, we can help faculty connect what they are doing with wellbeing outcomes. We can help them say out loud to their students: ‘What we’re doing here is critical thinking.’”&nbsp;



As with the pilot, the new version of BentleyPlus has the strong backing of career services. Staff there suggested that first-year students participate in the wellbeing self-assessment prior to a popular career development course, acknowledging that wellbeing work proceeds career prep. Perhaps most significant is the new way they encourage graduating students to consider their career choices.&nbsp;



With support from BentleyPlus, they now ask: “Does the organization you are interviewing with align with who you are as a person? Do they value building relationships and connecting with others?”&nbsp;



These may just be the questions today’s employers are waiting to hear.&nbsp;



You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org">mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org</a>&nbsp;with comments, ideas, or tips.

BentleyPlus

Questions and Answers with Wendy Kopp

Faculty and staff at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va. don’t typically have resources for new campus initiatives that aren't absolutely necessary.&nbsp;



But when students at the formerly Methodist-affiliated school requested a renewed focus on spiritual life, administrators were able to answer those prayers. Renovations began on the college’s chapel, which was empty and in disrepair, to forge a revamped, interfaith space for not only religious gatherings but meditation, lectures, and performances.



The explanation for the sudden deepening of Randolph’s pockets is a share of a $3.275 million investment from the Endeavor Foundation. The two-year grant, which started in November 2023, funded the collaboration of 13 different small liberal arts colleges to develop new ways of enhancing student mental health and wellbeing. Last month, Endeavor announced it has committed another $5.22 million to launch a second phase of the project over the next three years.&nbsp;



At a time when many are counting liberal arts colleges out, questioning their focus on broad intellectual development over vocational training, Endeavor is betting on them for the same reason. Its support of Randolph and peer institutions stems from a belief that their “whole person” educational approach and close-knit, engaged communities are uniquely poised to help young people find the sense of purpose and belonging that so commonly elude them. And by working together, the theory goes, the schools may push their innovation and impact even further.



“Ultimately, our hopes were to generate initiatives that would strengthen these institutions — that would showcase the liberal arts and the power of a liberal arts in a world that's increasingly skeptical for various reasons of its value,” said Ashley Kidd, the program director of grants and research at Endeavor.



In 2016, Endeavor first united small liberal arts colleges after noticing a trend of “really wonderful, community-engaged” schools struggling against declining enrollment and finances, Kidd said. The foundation invited presidents from some of these at-risk colleges to discuss institutional issues and other developments, and the convening became an annual tradition.



Over the following years, Endeavor awarded various presidents small to mid-size grants to tackle discrete projects on their campuses. Toward the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, though, the foundation approached the larger group with a proposition: to form a collaborative of their schools with a focus on one issue of their choice.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“The conversation turned to: ‘What do you really all need? And if we were to invest a larger sum of money in something that was a collaborative project or two, what would be the primary initiative or initiatives on your plate?’” said Lori Collins-Hall, who was involved at that point as interim president of Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vt.&nbsp;



“The presidents very quickly gelled around student mental health and wellness, and from there, the collaborative was born,” she said.&nbsp;



13 colleges from Maine to New Mexico, Ohio to North Carolina, signed on to join what has since been named the Endeavor Lab Colleges (E.L.C.) Collaborative. Collins-Hall also left her post at Sterling and became the E.L.C.’s project director. Beyond Sterling and Randolph, the initial member institutions included Antioch College; Bennington College; Blackburn College; Northland College; Prescott College; St. John's College, Annapolis; St. John's College, Santa Fe; Unity Environmental University; Warren Wilson College; and Wells College.&nbsp;



Not all would make it. Wells and Northland have since closed, while Unity Environmental left the collaborative after structural shifts, including an emphasis on remote learning, meant it no longer shared the profile of the other member schools.&nbsp;



Bennington College in Bennington, Vt. was particularly influential in the presidents’ decision to coalesce around wellbeing. Shortly before choosing this focus, the leaders had heard from Bennington President Laura Walker on the results of a study she commissioned to assess student needs and institutional gaps around mental health on her campus. That report, Walker said, “became kind of the foundation for not only our work at Bennington but also the work of the Endeavor project.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“The presidents very quickly gelled around student mental health and wellness, and from there, the collaborative was born.”
</blockquote>



Next, the presidents agreed on four areas to direct their collective and respective institutional energies: infusing curricula with wellbeing-related content; helping students explore their sense of purpose and meaning; creating experiential learning opportunities, especially in nature; and enhancing clinical and nonclinical services, like counseling and peer support.



The majority of the first Endeavor grant went towards compensating faculty and staff, who came from all levels across the institutions, in their joint work to determine the best ways of approaching and executing the collaborative’s priorities. The remaining money was split among the schools for practical capacity building according to distinct institutional needs.&nbsp;



Randolph dedicated funds to not only the redesign of its chapel but the addition of a comprehensive telehealth service, TimelyCare, as well as mental health training and professional development for staff. A minor in contemplative studies, an interdisciplinary field exploring the human contemplative experience, also took off.



Bennington, meanwhile, invested in the renovation of its fitness center and a revamp of the first-year career preparation course. The college’s standing interest in the arts also inspired a pilot course combining art engagement with mental health processing.



“It was a wonderful mix,” Bennington’s President Walker said of the class. “The students reported they had increased motivation, reduced isolation, and positive changes to mental health. And because so many of our students are artists and creative, it also gave them the sense that they had power to change people's lives and their mental health through their art.”



For both Randolph and Bennington, another perk of the Endeavor partnership has been the ability to leverage the funds to raise money from other sources. By pointing to dollars already secured for, say, bolstering interfaith programming at the chapel or building out career services, the schools have garnered even more support for their efforts.&nbsp;&nbsp;



By the end of phase one, the collaborative’s ideative efforts had resulted in the transformation of the initial four priorities into five fine-tuned initiatives to guide future work: Cultivating Curricular Review and Innovation, Building Models of Community Care and Resilience, Center for Purposeful Life and Work, Mapping Belonging, and Nature Rx.



Mapping Belonging and Nature Rx evolved from the commitment to experiential learning, where Mapping Belonging uses reimagined campus maps to cultivate student belonging to the place and its history, while Nature Rx helps connect students to the school’s outdoor spaces.



Unlike phase one, when colleges might use their individual funding to pursue whichever of the priorities was most compelling to them, this next stage will urge every school to tackle each of the five initiatives. According to the president of Randolph, Sue Ott Rowlands, this part of the new grant is especially important.&nbsp;



“We're not just going to pick and choose what we do,” she said. “We're going to commit to all of the five areas, and that's going to push us — make us really expand our engagement and thinking and open up a lot of opportunities for our students.”



Also in the second phase, the collaborative efforts of the colleges will continue to grow. Currently, a working group of faculty from across the participating schools is spearheading each of the five initiatives, while the chief academic officers of every college also work together.



Part of the mission of the working groups is to devise a way of assessing the impact of their particular initiative. On a larger scale, each institution will measure how the whole of the Endeavor-funded work is affecting campus by conducting pre- and post-surveys on student wellbeing, as well as that of faculty and staff.



Despite the colleges’ limitations resources-wise, Bennington President Laura Walker said she’s been excited to have access to the wealth of “real talent” on their other campuses. “I think one of the best things about this project has been the collaboration among colleges and the support group,” she explained.



Collins-Hall said she thinks most participating faculty and staff have been similarly “jazzed” to work together and come to meetings. “I have people who have been doing this for two years on a biweekly schedule who are excited to be back for year three. That doesn't happen with any committees in higher education.”



At Randolph, one of the unexpected challenges of Endeavor’s support has been acclimating faculty and staff to the idea that there are now resources to pursue projects that were once off the table — that they no longer need to stretch every dollar to the extent they might have before.



“It was a very interesting process to say, ‘No, wait, we can do that. We have Endeavor funds to help us with that,” President Ott Rowlands said.



Now she’s telling her team: “Think a little bigger.”



You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:mames@learningwellmag.org">mames@learningwellmag.org</a>&nbsp;with comments, ideas, or tips.

Collective Wellbeing

When asked about the state of higher education in America today, University of Michigan’s president,&nbsp;<a href="https://president.umich.edu/about/biography/">Domenico Grasso</a>, is unabashedly ambitious about what needs to be done and who needs to do it. “As the most comprehensive and distinguished university in the world, the University of Michigan bears a profound responsibility not only to lead in scholarship and innovation but also to serve as a thoughtful compass in challenging times,” he wrote in a recent white paper.&nbsp;



Grasso is leading Look to Michigan, a multi-faceted, multi-year mega-plan that is at once a capital campaign,&nbsp;media&nbsp;blitz, and strategic realignment aimed at optimizing Michigan’s inner and outer strengths. With five priorities, including the establishment of the American Dialogue Center, Look to Michigan assumes a leading role in demonstrating to the American public why higher education is such a valuable asset at a time of diminished support and extreme politicization. As the title suggests, Michigan asks, “If not us, then who?”&nbsp;



Launching such a bold, public agenda may seem unusual for&nbsp;a president&nbsp;serving in an interim capacity, but Grasso vowed he was never going to be just a placeholder when he took over the role from former President Santa Ono. Grasso is the former chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, a branch of Michigan that serves largely first-generation students. He’s a staunch believer in the life-changing power of higher education.&nbsp;&nbsp;



As a Michigan alum, and a rabid Wolverines football fan, Grasso is as comfortable talking about Michigan’s&nbsp;waste production during home football games&nbsp;as he is running the&nbsp;Prez Quiz during T.V. timeouts, when students answer trivia questions to win U-M swag. In this interview with LearningWell, President Grasso offers his perspective on the many issues he and his peers are dealing with and why he believes the best defense is a good offense.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;As a Michigan alumnus&nbsp;and a chancellor here for many years, how did you feel when you were chosen to be president of the University of Michigan?&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;I would first say that I was surprised because I did not expect it. And I did not seek it. But of course, it was an honor because Michigan is, in my mind, the best university in the world. We have 110 programs in the top 10. We have a world-class medical center that’s unrivaled. We have an athletic enterprise that is&nbsp;second to none&nbsp;as well, and all that is together under one roof with three campuses that have different missions and constituencies. It’s just a terrific place.



LW:&nbsp;Speaking of the three campuses, U.M.-Dearborn, which you oversaw as chancellor, is very different from Ann Arbor. Have your experiences at Dearborn influenced your new role?&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;One of the things that I experienced at Dearborn is that it has a very close-knit family of students, faculty, and staff. Everyone is super nice. They are not internally competitive with one another. They come from modest means; they are authentic and are there to improve their lives. Many of them are very humble while also having a great deal of talent,&nbsp;and that always impressed me.&nbsp;



The University of&nbsp;Michigan at Ann Arbor is a very high-powered school. There is a lot of, I would say, energy on this campus that we all benefit from, but I’m trying to bring some of the values — the empathy, the family-like interactions — I witnessed at Dearborn here to this campus.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;I read your LinkedIn post with a message to your students about civility and kindness. Is that part of what you are talking about?



DG:&nbsp;I am a staunch advocate of the First Amendment, and I’ve said that in multiple places. But being a staunch advocate of the First Amendment doesn’t mean that we have to give up our kindness and civility in exercising our&nbsp;First&nbsp;Amendment rights.&nbsp;This is one of the things that I would like to bring to campus: the ability to talk across differences and perspectives in a way that we are truly trying to reach common ground and not just trying to preserve our own particular views.



LW:&nbsp;How do you go about doing that?&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;It’s not easy. I think that the first thing to do is to model it. I have a lot of people around me with very strong opinions. How I interact with them models how to interact with people that may have differing opinions from you. Before this semester, a number of my senior staff and I met with every single Jewish group that we could find in southeastern Michigan. And we also met with every single Muslim and Arab American group, all part of an effort to encourage a peaceful and collaborative reentry into the fall semester.&nbsp;



So far it seems to have paid dividends because we have not had a lot of the acrimony that we had on this campus in the past. People want to be heard. They want to express their opinions, and they want to be taken seriously. And that’s what we’re trying to do. For me, it’s about this concept of intellectual empathy: trying to understand other people’s perspective. Not just tolerate it but to really understand it. You want them to find their voice but also have open ears.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;You are hitting the ground running with the announcement of the Look to Michigan campaign. What is that all about?&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;We have our $7 billion capital campaign, which we recently launched, and a strategic vision&nbsp;we are now calling Look to Michigan, which is consistent with our capital campaign but different.&nbsp;



There are five pillars of Look to Michigan. The first is transformative education: the need to deliver life-changing education focused on students’ agency and purpose, empowering them to lead with integrity, intellectual empathy, and rational thought. The second is human health and wellbeing, which has to do with all sorts of things for which Michigan is so well known, from health equity to&nbsp;cutting-edge&nbsp;medical care and transformative medicine.&nbsp;



The third one is civic engagement and democracy. Here, we are launching a civil discourse center, tentatively called the American Dialogue&nbsp;Center. The&nbsp;fourth pillar is energy and climate change, and the fifth is advanced technologies — everything from AI to nanotechnology. We’re investing $1 billion over 10 years — a hundred million dollars a year — in these initiatives. This isn’t a&nbsp;check-the-box&nbsp;to get everything done in a year or two. This has a 10-year shelf life, and we’re only in year two. It’s a vision&nbsp;that spans&nbsp;a decade and is centered on these core initiatives.



LW:&nbsp;These are not just internally facing initiatives. This is also a public campaign, correct?&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;Absolutely.&nbsp;One of the&nbsp;main&nbsp;focuses&nbsp;of the Look to Michigan campaign is to regain the public’s trust in higher education. The University of Michigan was founded in the public interest in 1817, and it’s remained there ever since. A lot of schools have been struggling to make&nbsp;a case as compelling as ours in this regard, but here&nbsp;it is in our institutional D.N.A.&nbsp;



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“The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, in large&nbsp;part because we have the world's greatest universities. If we do anything to threaten that, we're threatening the future of the United States.”
</blockquote>



The Look to Michigan campaign is also a&nbsp;media&nbsp;campaign. This month, we’re going to have&nbsp;full-pageads in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Atlantic, and other publications — digital, print, audio, social media. And it’s going to explain that we are committed to the public interest and why that matters to every citizen in this country.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, in large&nbsp;part because we have the world’s greatest universities. If we do anything to threaten that, we’re threatening the future of the United States, and we have to make that point very clear. Some of my colleagues at Princeton and Harvard are saying the same thing, but this is Michigan’s chance to move into the passing lane and to be the leader in reacquiring the public trust in the mission and purpose of higher education.&nbsp;



We have 7,000 faculty members. I want each one of them to consider themselves public intellectuals and ambassadors for this cause. I want them to&nbsp;explain their work to the general public in terms&nbsp;everyone can understand. They have to be able to translate what we do in a way that a farmer in Nebraska, a textile worker in New England, or an&nbsp;office&nbsp;worker in the southwest will understand. As part of the campaign, we’re going to use digital storytelling to&nbsp;connect to the public good and explain why Michigan is so special&nbsp;—&nbsp;unique — in this area.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Does it help your message that you are such a highly regarded public university?&nbsp;&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;We are a public university, but I want us to stop using that as a qualifier because I don’t want us to be the best public university in the country or in the world. I want us to be the best university in the world that is in the public interest.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;How much of this is to fend against what’s going on in Washington? Or is it more of a long time coming?



DG:&nbsp;I think it’s the latter. In certain ways, it is a defense against&nbsp;criticism that has been directed at higher education. But we should have been doing this whether it was Trump or Obama or whoever in the White House. I think we need to have a better social contract with the American people as to why higher education is so valuable, so worthwhile, and so worthy of investment and trust. The erosion of it started many, many years ago — well before MAGA. I watched this happen, and I thought it was devastating for universities and for America, and I thought that Michigan was&nbsp;well-positioned&nbsp;to take the lead on reversing this trend.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;That’s a lot to take on for an interim president.



DG:&nbsp;I told the&nbsp;board of regents&nbsp;right at the start&nbsp;that&nbsp;I was not going to be just a placeholder. Either we were going to move the university forward or I wasn’t interested&nbsp;in&nbsp;the job, and everybody agreed with that.



LW:&nbsp;I am guessing that the “attack on science” is not going over well at Michigan.&nbsp;&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;No. We are a very&nbsp;science-focused&nbsp;school, and a lot of great things have come out of the University of Michigan. Science comes from “scientia,”&nbsp;which is the Latin word for knowledge, and it’s hard to argue against wanting to obtain knowledge. I know people think there are different views of it, but the whole scientific method — the&nbsp;Enlightenment — was all designed to help us improve the human condition, not to determine the human condition. For us to walk away from that at this point in time would be devastating for the future of humanity.



LW:&nbsp;Is it difficult to keep everyone on campus calm among such uncertainty in higher ed?&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;Everybody&nbsp;is concerned about the future because every time we open up a newspaper or a website, another school,&nbsp;or another&nbsp;nine&nbsp;schools,&nbsp;is in the hot seat. Everybody is a little bit on pins and needles, but I don’t want that to influence our commitment to who we are and to what we do.



LW:&nbsp;You’ve been a Wolverine for a long time as both a student and administrator. Now that you are head of the pack, are you having some fun as well?&nbsp;&nbsp;



DG:&nbsp;It’s a lot of work — an enormous amount of work&nbsp;—&nbsp;and it is&nbsp;all-consuming,&nbsp;but it is also so much fun. As graduates — my wife Susan is a graduate three times over — we have such a sense of love and affection for this university,&nbsp;and it is terrific to be here in this position. It’s surreal,&nbsp;and it’s just been a wonderful experience.&nbsp;



You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org">mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org</a>&nbsp;with comments, ideas, or tips.



//

Looking to Michigan

Despite her long career in academia, Hilary Link is a bit of an anomaly in higher education. Since becoming president of Drew University in 2023, she has been working hard to embrace change by seeking advice from the outside world. 



At a time when many in the sector are battening down the hatches, Link is throwing the doors wide open, viewing this challenging time as a watershed moment for higher ed. In November, Link will continue her <a href="https://drew.edu/university-advancement/events/innovation-convening/">Presidential Innovation Series</a>, for which she invites leaders at the forefront of innovation and disruption in their industries to lead conversations that will help steer the future of higher education.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Link has instituted her own major changes at Drew, a small school in Madison, N.J. with an iconic, leafy green campus and devotion to the liberal arts. Recruited to shore up the institution’s financial position, Link has worked with the Drew community to reimagine its pedagogy to better accommodate industry’s demand for job-ready graduates. At the same time, she emphasizes what should not change, like the ability of the liberal arts to help develop the human skills needed to navigate a complex world.&nbsp;



In this conversation with LearningWell, President Link shares what she is learning and how she is going about crafting a “dream future” for Drew — one in which, she said, “everyone can be 100 percent themselves.”&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW: You are both a president and a thought leader in higher education. What motivated you to start the Presidential Innovation Series and your upcoming convening “The Future of Higher Education”?



HL: As a scholar of Renaissance Italian Literature, I was trained to analyze texts, see patterns, employ words and visuals — as a window into other cultures and societies. I have always loved the meta process of stepping back from the text or artwork in which you are immersed to ask, “What is really going on here? What does this work tell us about the cultural, linguistic, artistic, religious, political context in which it was produced?”&nbsp;&nbsp;



My scholarly work focuses specifically on theories of artificial perspective, so I embrace the concept of shifting where one stands to better understand the “big picture.” I see the convergence of being a president and being a thought leader in the higher education sector in similar ways. I have now been president at two institutions and dean of another, and while that work is all consuming, I always push myself to step back and puzzle over the “bigger picture.” How can what I am seeing at Drew University translate across the industry? What does my reading and careful analysis of this institution — like with a text or artwork — tell us about higher education in general and also this moment in our country, our world, our society? The fun for me of planning, crafting, and hosting the Innovation Series or speaking at a public convening is the chance to step back from my day-to-day work about Drew and learn from experts both inside and outside of higher ed — to help me and others see “the big picture.”



LW: In the series, you engage partners outside of higher education. What have you learned from that, both for higher education and for Drew University specifically?



HL: I have always been an interdisciplinary scholar, thinker, and do-er. My dissertation was on ekphrasis — written descriptions of visual works of art — which is a true convergence of art and literature. I have always felt that I saw new and different things in texts because I saw them through a visual lens, and vice versa. Similarly, as I have been on an “innovation journey” for Drew over the past 18 months, I have learned so much from innovators and disrupters in fields related to education but also completely separate.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Often, the “aha” moments come from the concept of “far transfer” that David Epstein talks about in “<a href="https://davidepstein.com/range/">Range</a>,” one of my favorite books. I see how someone has evolved or transformed their sector, and it makes me see a higher ed-related problem in new ways; it makes me get creative about how we might do something similar in a very different context. The panelists at our November convening are just a sample of some of the fascinating people I have had the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by, and I am excited for other higher ed leaders — and really anyone interested —&nbsp;to learn from them and bring new ideas or ways of thinking back to their campuses or fields.



LW: You are an advocate for new models for liberal arts education. What needs to change? What changes have you made at Drew in this regard?



HL: Since arriving at Drew, I feel like I have been on a journey to understand where the rapid changes in our world are pushing higher ed, and quickly. I started by having deep conversations with anyone who would speak to me — innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, educators —&nbsp;and then crafted a white paper of my dream future for an institution.&nbsp;&nbsp;



But then I put that aside because I knew this couldn’t be driven only by what I thought. Universities are complex organisms, and if we had any chance of evolving, these ideas had to bubble up more organically. So I brought in a brilliant scholar, <a href="https://learningwellmag.org/article/living-a-life-worth-working">Dr. Michelle Weise</a>, who spent a year leading some of our most innovative faculty and staff on their own discovery journey. Michelle exposed them to many different models for education, introduced them to people thinking in very different ways about “K-Gray” education, and pushed them to iterate and ideate in really liberating ways.&nbsp;&nbsp;



At the end of last year, we hosted a design-thinking charrette for about 40 campus members, and everyone agreed that any new direction for Drew needed to focus on the following human skills or qualities that we already value and prioritize: resilience, commitment to a common good, complex problem solving, and creativity and curiosity.&nbsp;



Three future-oriented visions emerged for higher education, and groups of faculty and staff spent the past summer designing around those four values to arrive at possible prototypes to present to the community. We encouraged them to think big and challenge existing systems, while focusing on specific challenges Drew needs to solve. It was up to them to define those challenges. While the groups landed in very different places, their prototypes actually gravitated around the same critical features, which was a surprise: student-enabled, personalized/individualized learning; intentional, structured mentoring; applied learning; and accessible, lifelong learning based in problem-based/experiential frameworks. While we already do these things in small ways, the groups were telling us that this is where we need to go big. The coolest part? All of the prototypes in certain ways overlapped strongly with my original “white paper” vision, which further convinced me we are on to something.



The challenge now is finding the space where we can prototype these big, system-changing ideas while protecting the excellent learning experience our university has long provided and will continue to provide for current, traditional students. One idea is to create an incubation hub at Drew where we can play with the most compelling concepts, allowing a small group of students to collaborate with us in shaping a new educational pathway that includes all four critical features from the work of our staff and faculty. This approach can allow us to rapidly learn and find the clarity we need to move forward in the accelerating changes around us. This can of course be tricky. We know we have to move fast, but higher education’s DNA is to move only after deep, comprehensive thinking on matters; it’s how we have been trained as scholars.



I also think it is important to remember that institutions like Drew and higher ed in general do plenty of wonderful, transformative, and life-changing work already, and we see its effect in our current students. So I want to emphasize not just what needs to change but also what needs not to change about Drew and similar institutions: Even as liberal arts colleges might shift from disciplinary majors to more thematically organized knowledge focusing on the problems facing our world, the benefits of a liberal arts approach are amplified, not reduced. The broad interdisciplinarity that develops individuals who can think for themselves, face the uncertain and unknown, and contribute meaningfully to local communities and society at large remains. We’re essentially remixing our strengths for a new audience who are already arriving with different interests and needs.



LW: There’s strong evidence showing that how someone experiences college affects their wellbeing long after they graduate, particularly if they have had mentors and hands-on learning. Do you take that into account in thinking about policies on campus?



HL: I love that you asked that question! In fact, as we have been leaning into redefining the liberal arts for the future in ways that incorporate and employ technology and A.I., we have doubled down on those two concepts: the “human in the loop” —&nbsp;or even better, “at the helm” — or the need for strong mentoring in a new educational model; and the need to interweave applied learning, inquiry-based curriculum, and problem-based approaches with content acquisition. These are things that technology cannot do for us, yet, and these are the aspects that I believe must drive education forward. Those of us in higher ed and those of us who parent young people know all too well the challenges in mental health, isolation, lack of resilience, and need for community young people present with today.&nbsp;&nbsp;



At Drew, we are trying to re-imagine higher education in ways that make it not just financially sustainable but that give young people the tools to engage with big global challenges, to learn through applying their knowledge, to have more say in what, when, and how they learn, and to give them a sense of human connection and relationship that they crave. We of course do many of these things already, but not systematically and not sustainably. We are pushing ourselves to be more intentional here — to shift and evolve so that we give students not just the tools to be well throughout their lives but also a desire to keep coming back to us in meaningful ways as they grow and evolve.



LW: Do you see this as a seminal moment for higher education?&nbsp; Given the attack on higher ed, do you think the sector can move out of its defensive position and into a position of strength?



HL: I absolutely see this as seminal moment and a moment when most institutions have no choice but to lean hard and fast into innovation: different ways of teaching, less traditional definitions of a “student,” new modes of delivery and crediting experiences and applied learning, and more flexible ways of creating a sense of community. As the author and Drew Honorary Degree recipient David Epstein writes in his forthcoming book, “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” institutions that embrace this moment of scarcity, overreach, and challenge to be creative and resilient and that reinvent themselves for a future that is already here, will thrive.&nbsp;



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While it is easy to fret and feel defensive and “batten down the hatches” while we hope for and wait for things to change or improve, I see this as a watershed moment.
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While it is easy to fret and feel defensive and “batten down the hatches” while we hope for and wait for things to change or improve, I see this as a watershed moment. If we can come out of these challenges having heard and thoughtfully tried to address some of the public critique about higher ed and particularly the liberal arts — too politicized, too costly, broken, offering no value for workforce preparation — we can envision entirely new prototypes and models for the sector that are accessible, affordable, more relevant to all, and better suited to equipping future generations to control what they learn and when, in order to apply what they learn to solve big global issues. I have been beating this drum for more than a decade, but I think the sector is now being squeezed and pushed so much that real and lasting change can happen.



LW: What do you love about Drew?



HL: From the moment I stepped on campus as president, I fell in love with the tranquil and beautiful campus, the open, thoughtful, unpretentious and welcoming students, the inspiring faculty, and a community that cares deeply about each other and the institution. I love that Drew is a little quirky and that it holds space for everyone — no matter who you are. I love that you can be 100 percent yourself here. And I love that at a moment of deep crisis for the higher ed sector as a whole, this community has been open to change, willing to lean into where the future is leading us, and incredibly thoughtful about what we do well, as well as where we can be more agile, focused, and open to new ideas.

Learning and Belonging at Drew University

When a group of us recent graduates from Georgetown University were asked to be Hoya Fellows, we weren’t sure what to think.&nbsp;As Fellows, we were expected to weigh in on strategies and policies that affect Georgetown students, an area that we believed did not often involve listening to students. Students are seldom invited to be true active participants in the complex decision-making processes that dictate their campus experience. Most of the time we aren’t even familiar with how the process operates. As recent graduates ourselves, we wondered how much impact we could really have.&nbsp;



Our degrees did not qualify us to oversee university initiatives, let alone challenge the culture of a centuries-old institution like Georgetown. But the school’s vice president of student affairs, Dr. Eleanor Daugherty,&nbsp;trusted in our abilities to make an impact.&nbsp;Dr. Daughterty, who had invited us into the process, had years of experience studying adolescent development while working in higher education, but she admitted she was far removed from knowing firsthand what the adolescent world is like. “I am the expert on your tomorrow, but you’re the expert on your today,” she often said.&nbsp;&nbsp;



With that, we were thrown into the deep end, and like the child that learns to swim this way, we kicked our legs hard enough to keep our heads up.&nbsp;Rather than assigning us simple administrative tasks, Dr. Daugherty handed us complex challenges, like bolstering an atmosphere of “belonging and mattering” among Georgetown students. We weren’t told to be cogs in a machine; we were empowered to build new ones. We were asked to lead the way in designing new initiatives and solutions to address issues that we dealt with firsthand as students, like finding community within the university or balancing working hard with caring for ourselves while being away from home for the first time.&nbsp;&nbsp;



There would be constant pressure, not necessarily to succeed, but to maintain unwavering ambition and creativity. We were required to bring our respective passions and skillsets into conversation with the spirit of innovation, all in the name of creating a world we thought we could only imagine.



What we learned is that the deep end is not a place to drown; it is a place to learn.&nbsp;It is a place where Fellows are trusted to take on unsolved institutional challenges, to move beyond our comfort zones, and to think beyond our own years of experience. It is where we are asked to address student impostor syndrome while managing our own, tasked with changing a culture we were not sure we had the authority to critique.&nbsp;&nbsp;



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What we learned is that the deep end is not a place to drown; it is a place to learn.
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We were given access to the full resources of the Division of Student Affairs and encouraged to collaborate with university leaders. We relied on each other and drew from our own experiences as alumni, as well as from the students who are still attending. Most importantly, we were not afraid to make mistakes because we were guided by leadership who encouraged us to take risks. For Fellows, there was no consequence for failure besides learning a lesson and trying again. It’s inevitable that we’d falter along the way, and we agreed that the only thing that fearing failure does for us is hinder and delay our eventual triumphs. Failing didn’t mean the journey ended; it just provided us another memory, lesson, and motivator to propel us towards results.



Since the beginning of the Hoya Fellowship in October 2023, the Fellows have helped student affairs launch a number of initiatives and projects, which have proven almost overwhelmingly successful. Each Fellow was encouraged to pursue projects aligned with our own strengths and to collaborate and learn from each other in the process.&nbsp;&nbsp;



One of our biggest accomplishments came directly from our own experiences.&nbsp;A major goal of student affairs has been to focus on “belonging and mattering” on a campus, which is welcoming but also often too perfect for its own good.&nbsp;On a campus like Georgetown, many students find it difficult to be anything other than perfect. This cycle of pretending to be perfect causes some of the brightest adolescent minds to wonder if they really belong in a place where everyone is as smart or smarter than they are.&nbsp;From this came the development of a class called “Blowing Up Perfection,” meant to teach students some of the skills they might not learn in other classes: how to build authentic friendships, how to face conflict, how to be resilient in the face of difficulties, how to embrace vulnerability.&nbsp;These skills help students understand that belonging comes not from perfection but from connection and self-acceptance.&nbsp;It is something we had to learn ourselves.&nbsp;



Another related initiative is Hello Hoyas, a summer program where university leadership travels around the country to visit incoming first-years in their own hometowns.&nbsp;Particularly impactful for first-generation and low-income students, Hello Hoyas offers a powerful message that students and families belong here and that we will be here for them when they arrive. Hello Hoyas expanded from five cities in 2024 to 10 cities in 2025 and has welcomed hundreds of students before they even reach campus across both years.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Expanding our impact beyond Georgetown, Fellows even helped advance scholarship and research on adolescence, most notably by leading a national research symposium that reimagined how we approach adolescent development within the context of today’s challenges and opportunities. The gathering, called “The Promise, Possibility and Power of Adolescence,” convened K-12 and higher-education administrators, educators, non-profit leaders, and renowned researchers, who were brought into conversation with adolescents themselves — the very people who would be impacted by the work. Like the Hoya Fellowship, the hallmark of the symposium was that the youth led the way.&nbsp;There, young people spanning 14 to 22 years old worked alongside adult participants to co-create innovative solutions aimed at promoting universal adolescent thriving, regardless of one’s location or access to resources.&nbsp;



Our experience as Fellows made us realize that the distance between students and administrators didn’t come from disagreement, but from mutual misunderstanding. While institutional leadership can offer frameworks of what young people&nbsp;should&nbsp;be, only young people themselves can speak authentically about their own current reality.&nbsp;The Fellows program has helped expand the opportunities for students and administration to communicate directly with one another. Our office initiatives include a student advisory, which invites all students to join university leaders for dinner and discussion.&nbsp;There are Hoya Family Forums, which invite curious parents to meet different student, professor, or staff panelists and keep families informed about what happens on campus. The Fellows have helped build bridges between Georgetown leadership, families, students, alumni, researchers, and everyone who is invested in making universities everywhere a better place for adolescent wellbeing.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Through these initiatives and projects, the Fellows have helped reframe how the university approaches its students.&nbsp;There are many more opportunities for students to connect directly with leadership, even before their time on campus. And in turn, leadership can better understand the state of adolescents today. The Fellows have helped blow up the culture of perfectionism and exclusivity which permeated the otherwise very welcoming Georgetown community, and we hope to continue doing so in the future.&nbsp;&nbsp;



We never thought we’d be working for the university, let alone teaching classes or organizing national conferences. We’re driven by our pride in being members of the Georgetown community, and we’re honored that we get to serve as a connector between students and administrators, all of whom want the best for our university. The issues we tackle — adolescent development, student wellness, belonging and mattering, to name a few — reach far beyond Georgetown’s gates. Through the Hoya Fellowship, we aim to show how empowering young people to lead not only develops them but also ignites impact at scale.&nbsp;



One last note: When you throw people like us into the deep end, we’ll never want to leave the pool.



Since October 2023, Hoya Fellows have worked in key university offices across Student Affairs to develop strategic initiatives focused on student life and well-being.&nbsp;These positions enable the university to benefit from the experience and insight of alumni who understand the lived experience of our students, while also empowering these new graduates to help build Georgetown into the institution they hope to leave for future generations of Hoyas.&nbsp;

Thanks for Asking 

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LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede talks with Beth McMurtrie of The Chronicle of Higher Education about new research on A.I. and student cognition.



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A.I.'s Impact on the Student Brain with Beth McMurtrie

John Volin, Ph.D. is the new President of Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts school&nbsp;nestled in the scenic Minnesota River valley town of St. Peter, Minn.&nbsp;In his convocation address, Volin told his fellow “Gusties” that being there reminded him of his upbringing in South Dakota — of the rural roots that shaped him and his desire to pursue higher education in the first place.



“We are not just beginning a new school year, we are beginning a year of discovery, growth, and possibility,” he said, revealing his signature optimism. Before leading Gustavus, Volin, an environmental scientist, was provost at the University of Maine and, prior to that,&nbsp;vice provost of academic affairs at the University of Connecticut.&nbsp;&nbsp;



As a long-time college administrator and frequent first line of defense against external threats to higher ed, Volin might be less zealous about assuming a role many others are exiting. Instead, he says he has taken to heart Gustavus’ new slogan — “Go Beyond” — which for him means focusing on what’s possible, even as you manage what’s facing you. Volin has long hoped to lead an institution that would align with and benefit from his robust body of work in student-centered, transformational education. In Gustavus Adolphus, which is guided by the Lutheran mission to educate students with purpose, he has found it.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In this candid interview with LearningWell, President Volin talks of first impressions, early priorities, and how college can be a pathway to life-long wellbeing.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;You are a first-time college president at a very challenging time for higher education. What keeps you so engaged and optimistic?&nbsp;



JV:&nbsp;I was reminded just the other day of why all of this is so important. A couple weeks ago, we had our first-year students arrive with their parents. There are all the hugs, the occasional tears. And you see this new cohort of students that have this energy, this curiosity. They're nervous, maybe even scared, but they have all these aspirations as well. And it really reminded me of the awesome responsibility that we have — this privilege to help shape the conditions that are going to allow those students to thrive, not just during their undergraduate years, but well into the future. And that is something that gets me excited and keeps me engaged.&nbsp;&nbsp;It was the reason I got into higher ed in the first place.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;What drew you to Gustavus? And how does the culture here resonate with your own philosophy on learning?&nbsp;



JV:&nbsp;I grew up in the upper Midwest, so I knew of Gustavus and remember being intrigued by its residential liberal arts setting. As family tradition, we all went to South Dakota State University, and I've always been in public comprehensive research universities. So when Gustavus first reached out to me to throw my hat in for president, I was like, ‘Oh, this is exciting.’



But the mission to educate students to lead purposeful lives is what resonated deeply for me. The Lutheran tradition, similar to the Jesuits, is to educate the whole student — mind, body, spirit — and that is really alive here. It's more than a slogan. It really is part of the core, and you can never take that for granted. I think there is a real motivation for faculty and staff to mentor our students beyond the classroom — to help them develop a sense of belonging, a sense of community, to give them agency and character development to lead lives that contribute to society. That’s what really drew me here.



For me, this opportunity has been a long time coming. Early in my career, I started to see this huge responsibility we have to focus on the formation of our students as human beings. And data is starting to really show the benefit of that in terms of life-long wellbeing. It really does make a difference when students know that they're cared for — that they belong — even as we challenge them in the classroom. And then we need to open up opportunities for students to be able to take what they've learned in the classroom and get a really authentic experiential learning engagement. Whether it's through an internship or research experience or service learning, we know that those high-impact practices lead to overall wellbeing during the undergraduate years and well beyond. These students tend to have a higher chance of flourishing later on in life, have greater career satisfaction. And so that for me, is a real driver.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Can you describe an example of this type of approach?&nbsp;



JV:&nbsp;Let’s take curriculum development. I have been a part of two very large university curriculum redesign initiatives. And yes, it’s exciting to make change, but often it’s been incremental change — over a six- or seven-year period. And it's always compromise after compromise, and no one really feels completely great about the product. But here, the faculty and staff came together and, in an eight-month period, redesigned their curriculum into a really innovative model: A third of the students’ credits are in their major; a third are in general education; and a third are in electives. So it allows for that depth that the students need and but also the breathing room to try new things. And the results have been really exciting.&nbsp;



My wife Valaria and I live on campus, and every night, we walk our dog — our 15-month-old golden retriever named Sofia. Invariably, our half-hour walks turn into 45 minutes to an hour because we end up talking with students, and I noticed that I would get very different answers to the typical question: “What are you majoring in?” Students will say “business and music” or “biology and theater,” and I love it because that’s what a true liberal arts education can offer. They are using their whole brain.



LW:&nbsp;What are some of the big things you’re working on?



JV:&nbsp;There's amazing momentum here, but we can't just be the best kept secret. We need to better define and communicate what we do. There’s been a lot of work done in marketing and communications, and our new brand, which I was introduced to this summer, is “Go beyond.” I love it because it’s an action phrase that can mean so many things: “Gusties go beyond.” “Go beyond the Hill,”&nbsp;which is what campus is often called.&nbsp;



That’s part of a new strategic visioning and planning process I just announced at convocation. By the way, they tell you as a new president, you should never do a strategic plan your first year, and yet here we are. Actually, this was a mandate coming in, so it’s perfect timing. We’re looking at this as a significant opportunity to shape the institution’s future with purpose and collective ownership. It’s about who we are and where we want to go, and it involves all members on campus. We will ask ourselves: What do we do well? Where must we do better? What can we imagine that doesn’t yet exist?



LW:&nbsp;Do you think your message about the student-centered work you are doing here will resonate with the public at a time when there is so much skepticism on the value of a college degree?&nbsp;&nbsp;



JV:&nbsp;I hope it will. I think, historically, higher education has isolated itself too often from the public. But when you're on a college campus, at least in my experience, it doesn’t always feel that way. I think we can all agree that we need to be clearer and much more transparent about the outcomes of a college education. That includes career readiness, but it also includes critical thinking, adaptability, and,&nbsp;&nbsp;importantly, civic engagement. We need to demonstrate that higher ed is not a luxury; it is a public good that benefits communities as well as individuals and helps advance humanity. At the same time, we need to hold ourselves accountable on affordability and access and making sure our students succeed. We are fortunate that we have a great track record here on four-year graduation rates, but we can never stop working on that. I think trust will come when we show through action and not words that we're preparing our graduates to thrive, to contribute in meaningful ways, and to find high satisfaction in their careers. But that'll take time.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Gustavus is a Lutheran school. Your experience has been in public, secular universities. Now that you’re here, do you see a place for faith and religion on campus?&nbsp;&nbsp;



JV:&nbsp;Yes. We have five core values here: Excellence, Community, Justice, Service, and Faith, and that's everywhere. We don't shy away from these core values. At the same time, there’s no pressure on students. This is a place, where, in the Lutheran tradition of acceptance, you can come with faith, no faith — wherever you're at — and we will accept you.&nbsp;&nbsp;



There's a 20-minute service on Tuesday, a 20-minute service on Thursday midday, and one on Sunday afternoons that are all run by students. We have three chaplains on campus. No matter where anyone is on their own journey, they have the chance to plug in if they choose to. A lot of this is about being present and finding spirituality, whatever that may be. Christ Chapel, which is right in the center of campus, is gorgeous. And it's open 24 hours a day. When we first moved here, I found myself going in there one evening. I pulled the door open, and there's this little fountain running, which gives the sound of trickling water. The sun was setting, and I thought, “Wow, you can’t help but feel well here.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;So you see a connection here to wellbeing?&nbsp;&nbsp;



JV:&nbsp;I think the faith-based dynamic gives us an extra advantage. I’ve never been at a university where we can actually talk about it, and I do think it helps, particularly if you put this in the context of community. It’s really all about relationships and connection. We’re hosting Bob Waldinger on campus next spring, and I’ve asked students, faculty, and staff to read his book “The Good Life.” Bob is the director of the longest continuously running study on what makes people happy, and at the end of the day, it's relationships. In a very intentional way, I want to bring this message to campus to reinforce that element here.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Do you think about how technology, particularly AI assistance and online learning options, will affect relationships between students and faculty or students with each other?&nbsp;&nbsp;



JV:&nbsp;I definitely think about that. And I also think it's an opportunity for us to get ahead of it. We certainly can't put our head in the sand, but we need to be very thoughtful about how we use technology. For the liberal arts, we need to fulfill the promise we make to families that we are institutions with high touch, smaller class sizes — all those opportunities. We have to be present. That’s our strength.&nbsp;



After the pandemic, there was discussion here about whether we should continue with some online courses, and my understanding is the students overwhelmingly voted no. They wanted in-person classes. What that signals to me is the students who come here want to get to know their professors, and they want to be able to be in the classroom and have those relationships.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;As president in a challenging time for higher education, how do you “lead” through it?&nbsp;



JV:&nbsp;It is tricky, for sure, because you are in some ways the main translator for your college. You are one that sets the tone and delivers the message, and there’s a real balance to uphold. You have to help bolster morale in very difficult times, but you don't want to come off as Pollyannaish. You need to be authentic and truthful. This is a hard time for higher ed. There’s a real assault on academic freedom and a misunderstanding of what academic freedom really is. It's our mandate as leaders to be supportive of and consistent with the values of academic freedom and open inquiry, but it’s very challenging. We just have to keep moving forward.&nbsp;&nbsp;



You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at <a href="mailto:mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org">mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org</a> with comments, ideas, or tips.

A New President Strives to “Go Beyond” 

David Kelley is the Donald W. Whittier Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, but most know him as the creator of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or simply the d.school. Kelley, who celebrates 50 years at Stanford this year (as both student and professor), presents more like an eloquent historian than an engineering genius. But it should be no surprise that the founder of an institute that invented “outside the box” thinking would be such fun to talk with.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The founder of design firm IDEO and recipient of numerous honors and awards, Kelley describes his work as“helping people gain confidence in their creative abilities.” He and his brother are the authors of “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.” In it, they argue that labeling people, particularly children, as creative or non-creative is as limiting as it is incorrect. In this interview with LearningWell, Kelley talks about the connection between creativity and discovery, how human-centered design is changing the world, and how the d.school got its name.   



LW:&nbsp;I'm very curious about one of the main focuses of your book, which is creative confidence — unleashing the creative potential within us all. What do you think the implications of that idea are in the context of higher education?



DK:&nbsp;Most of my work could be categorized as helping people gain confidence in their creative ability. That would be what I care about the most. And I think we start out by people thinking of themselves as&nbsp;not&nbsp;creative, and I've tried to convince people — and prove — that everybody's wildly creative. They just have blocks in the way of it. So you need to change the mindset from teaching people to be creative to giving them credit that they're already a creative organism and remove the blocks keeping them from doing that. The psychologists call it self-efficacy — that you believe that you can accomplish what you set out to do. I mean, that's just it. Wouldn't you like to give every one of your students the notion that they can accomplish what they set out to do and have that confidence? I really think that's the goal here.



So how do you go about that? The way you go about it, especially with students, is to help them have some success. You set it up so that it's a problem that's easily solved, and you hold people's hands, and you lead them through it, and they're successful at some small thing. Then you do another one, and then you do another one. Pretty soon, people are saying, “Oh my god, I am creative.” So I guess I'll summarize: The main thing about creative confidence is how you help people remove those blocks. And the main reason that they have that block is that they are worried about the judgment of others.



LW:&nbsp;And that has something to do, I imagine, with what they've been told they are, right?



DK:&nbsp;Yes. You do something that's not conventionally creative, or just doesn't seem like it has a direction that's creative, and then pretty soon you're “not creative.” And people hear that when they're nine years old. They hear, “You're not creative,” and then they never address it again. It's like, you try to play the piano, and you're not good when you sit down for the first three seconds. You are not good at playing the piano, so you don't continue. It's hard. Doing things that matter is hard.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
"The main thing about creative confidence is how you help people remove those blocks. And the main reason that they have that block is that they are worried about the judgment of others."
</blockquote>



LW:&nbsp;So you're encouraging people to have a wider view of creativity and what that can mean?



DK:&nbsp;Yes, for sure. Sometimes, early on — I'm talking about child development — creativity is defined as drawing, believe it or not. If you can't draw well without any practice and you just don't naturally draw well, you're identified as not being creative. Well, maybe this person's musically wildly creative, or maybe they're creative in a different way. So the problem is that, whatever the conventional way of doing something, if you are off that, you're not creative. You're also not conventional. It's a funny dichotomy. But the main thing, yes, is that people are branded as not creative for a bunch of reasons, and we need to see that as wrong.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;It sounds like there's an urgency around this. Because if people are limited in thinking about themselves as being creative, then we have arguably less creative people. Why is it important to have more creative people?



DK:&nbsp;It's only if you care about the future that you think creativity is important. That's how you cure disease and how you make advancements in technology — is people being confident in their career ability and doing new things that change the world for the better. Our phrase that we like to use is:&nbsp;It's your job to paint a picture of the future with your ideas in it.&nbsp;The funny thing is once you can use your creativity and paint a different picture of the future, then everybody else can have an opinion. They can help you. They build on the ideas of other people when they can visualize it — when they can see it. So that ability to visualize the future is inherently a creative task.



LW:&nbsp;Let me ask you a little bit about the founding of the design school.&nbsp;&nbsp;Can you just give me a quick overview of that?



DK:&nbsp;Back to the notion of creativity —&nbsp;when you have a diverse group of people, you come up with better ideas. You can define diversity in any way you want: age diversity, racial diversity, or geographic diversity. But having those people — the mashup of those different people that come from different viewpoints — greatly increases the probability of you coming up with something new to the world. So that's something I wanted to codify at the university.&nbsp;



And so basically the notion of the d.school was to have a place that everybody wants to come to. A lot of the classes students take in college are required classes, and so the teacher doesn't really want to teach them, and the students really don't want to be there. I wanted a place where everybody wanted to be there all the time — that they opted into this place because it was so enjoyable, so fulfilling, rewarding, informative. So the d.school is really based on that notion of making a crossroads, where professors and students from all over the university would come together. And I'm so gratified. It turned out so great. And the reason — they all say the same thing, particularly the professors: “When I cross the threshold, I know I'm allowed to act differently here.” And that's just like music to my heart. 



LW:&nbsp;Was it a difficult concept to communicate within the school?



DK:&nbsp;It started out with a bunch of us in a room talking. It wasn't going anywhere particularly, but it got started. And then, fortunately, as we went further along, we had a perfect storm of administration. So we had a department chair and a dean and a provost and a president that all resonated with the idea. It took giving us the donation. I don't know that I ever would've gotten it started if it hadn't been for the generous donation from Hasso Plattner. But the president,&nbsp;&nbsp;John Hennessy, came to me and said, “What would it take for all Stanford students to be more creative — to be more confident in their creative ability?”



It really helped to have that. I mean, faculty are very siloed and more concerned about their little empire than somebody else's. So getting everybody's attention was difficult. It took a long time to get the place up and running to the point that people were drawn there naturally. But it did snowball. It accelerated beyond my wildest dreams because it turned out to be true — that it was super interesting for these geniuses from different departments to get together and duke it out on different topics. They really liked being there. They liked teaching together. And the way we used to do it before was I'd go in and lecture in somebody else's class, or they'd come in my class and give a lecture. But that's not a collaboration. Once people started to team-teach classes  — somebody from political science teaching with somebody from the ed school or the business school or the law school — when they were actually standing in front of the class together for the whole class, then we knew we had it. That's what we were after.



On a side note, one of the most interesting things that happened was how much the students loved watching the faculty fight. Somehow it was really cathartic for the students. They were used to the sage-on-stage, saying their point of view unchecked by anybody else in the room. So as soon as you get a couple of strong-willed experts in the room talking about a subject and they disagree, it's really interesting. I think, for the students, the faculty became more human to them, and maybe there's not a direct, correct answer to every question.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;I hear there is an interesting story about the naming of the school?



DK:&nbsp;Actually, it is not a school at all. It's completely separate from the academic hierarchy.&nbsp;&nbsp;I remember sitting around a room — a couple of my graduate students and friends — and we were figuring out how to make this happen. And it wasn't clear. We are a small organization and felt we weren't very well understood. So there was the business school — the “B-school” — that was a really big deal on campus, and to feed off their importance, we decided to call ourselves the d.school.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;That's fantastic! Can you define for our readers what you would call design thinking?



DK:&nbsp;Yeah. Design thinking is just a description of the methodology and process that we use to routinely innovate. The way I talk about it is mostly around human-centered design. So there's plenty of people who have methodologies that are business-based or technology-based, and those are all good, and we employ those. But we seemed to lack a human-centered approach. What's feasible and viable is nice, but what's desirable? How do you make it more useful or convenient for people? How does it fit better into people's lives? To me, that's what design thinking is. It's a human-centered approach. And all the discussion about design thinking is the steps — the methodology — that you use to do that, but it's all centered on: How do you make it better for people?



LW:&nbsp;What has been the reaction to this method at the d.school from the students?&nbsp;



DK:&nbsp;Well, at first, all of our classes were electives. So the students were choosing something that they were particularly interested in. And by having different faculty, there were two wildly different points of view in the same room. So the students were excited about that. I'm going to go back to the same thing about human-centered design: Everybody can buy into this because it's so human. I mean, we're all humans, and the driving force is: How is this going to be better for the students? Or how is this going to be better for the people we're trying to design something for? That humanness is just really enjoyable.



And today, one of the consequences is that I used to be able to tell the students to design a clock radio or something like that. I'd be shot if I said something like that now. They want to do something that has social value. They want all their projects to be something that's good for the world. And I think that's a consequence of the human-centered approach. What they want to do is improve the lives of people who live in a village somewhere and don't have the internet. As a steady diet, that's what they really want to do, which is encouraging for that whole generation if you ask me.



LW:&nbsp;You've been at this a long time. Any other observations about how your field has changed?



DK:&nbsp;Design was just not a big deal in the world as a discipline. I always say I felt like I was at the kids' table, and then through mine and a lot of other people's efforts, we're now at the adult table. And I think that has to do with our way of thinking — that finding the right problem to work on is as important as the problem we are solving. Before our language, everything was problem solving, problem solving, problem solving. And after design started to take off, it was all: What's a project worth working on? Need-finding, more than just problem solving. So that put it front and center: the messiness of trying to understand what people really want, what would make their lives better.



Part of everybody's process now is this human-centered approach where you go out and try to understand — we call it the need-finding —what's valuable to people. It's a messy phase. At most companies, people want to sit there and look at their laptops in a conference room. They don't want to go out into the field and experience what's really going on with people. And I don't understand why that is, but we're getting better and better in that more and more organizations start out by trying to understand what's a good problem to work on by understanding what people really want. And I think that's a consequence of design having more agency in the world.



And I can tell you a million stories. One of the ones that comes to mind with my students is this class called “Liberation Technologies.” They were asked to look at fire prevention in these villages in Africa, and I thought they would end up doing a low cost fire extinguisher. But when they got down there and used our process and talked to the people, they started to realize that, yes, they were afraid of fires, but they're really afraid of losing their documents in the fire — their immigration documents that prove they were allowed to be in this building. And so students changed the problem from fire prevention to document preservation.



Their solution was a pickup truck with a scanner in it. And they went from village to village and scanned everybody's documents and put them up in the cloud. When you have a mindset of understanding what's the real problem by talking to people, then you solve the problem in a completely different way or you even solve a different problem. But for your question, I think that's the contribution of design being in the world and our methodology having some impact.



LW:&nbsp;Do you worry about people making things that aren't good for the world?



DK:&nbsp;We used to teach an ethics class and now there's ethics in every class — to try to understand the consequences of what you're going to do. We have a culture of prototyping, where we take a first pass at what we're going to make, and then you take it out and actually get it into the situation where it's going to be used. So before you've committed to what it's going to be and get it out there, you've seen the consequences of it. Before you commit to doing something bad or something good, you want to know the non-obvious things that are going to happen when that invention enters the world.



You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at <a href="mailto:mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org">mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org</a> with comments, ideas, or tips.