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

Mental Health

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Perspectives

Despite some signs of post-pandemic recovery, the college mental health crisis remains alive and not-so-well.



Young people passionate about their own and their peers’ mental health continue to sound the alarm on college campuses, while institutions across the country devote their own staff, resources, and time towards interventions to the same end.&nbsp;



But are the two groups missing something or, more specifically, each other in the process?&nbsp;



The&nbsp;<a href="https://c4sw.org/">Coalition for Student Wellbeing</a>, a new student-led mental health advocacy group, is founded on the premise that the most authentic and effective solutions to student mental health issues will come from ensuring those making the decisions hear from those affected by them.&nbsp;



Unlike other student groups that focus on issues within their institutions, the Coalition unites members across colleges nationwide to address a broad range of mental health concerns. The goal is to ensure that the student voice is part of the policymaking process, whether on campus or in Washington.



“The college student experience is so unique and dependent on the person,” said Carson Domey, the founder and executive director of the Coalition. “We need to tailor systems of care but also systems of education so that students are involved in these policymaking conversations at all levels.”



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“We need to tailor systems of care but also systems of education so that students are involved in these policymaking conversations at all levels.”
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Domey has never been one to sit on the sidelines. A rising senior at the University of Texas at Austin, he started the Coalition in August 2024, having been active in youth mental health advocacy for years.



He entered the world of policymaking and politics well before he could vote. By 11, he had been carted back and forth to hundreds of doctor’s appointments for a rare form of Crohn’s disease and began <a href="https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2016/07/09/this-11-year-old-is-working-to-expand-telemedicine-coverage-in-massachusetts/">pushing for legislation</a>&nbsp;in Massachusetts to expand access to telemedicine.



When a close friend died from suicide three years later, the scope of Domey’s advocacy grew. Since high school, he has pursued state-level mental health changes, like adding the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline to student IDs and expanding the definition of physical education to include mental health.&nbsp;



At U.T. Austin, Domey makes time to be not only a full-time student and director of the Coalition but the chair of the Texas State Policy Council at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. His combined advocacy efforts regularly shift him between the Massachusetts and Texas legislatures.



Domey called the Coalition’s mission “purposefully ambiguous.” The broad purpose is “to bridge the gap between students and decision-makers,” though he didn’t set parameters around the type of “decision makers” members should target, nor the specific actions they should take to reach them.&nbsp;



He likened the group to a sort-of universal puzzle piece, ready to fit in wherever needed.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Raising awareness around student perspectives on mental health is one key focus. Members utilize a variety of platforms, like Substack, to publish their ideas on concerns, from suicide prevention and basic needs support to combatting loneliness.



A new webinar series the group launched similarly promotes young voices, and also puts them in conversation with experts. In June,&nbsp;<a href="https://c4sw.org/event/building-the-foundation-why-k-12-mental-health-education-matters-for-college-wellbeing/">the first webinar</a>&nbsp;centered on the importance of K-12 mental health education to set up students for success in college and beyond. The second, airing in August, will be a “town hall” for students to share their thoughts on “the state of higher education going into the fall semester,” Domey said.&nbsp;



But being a piece of a larger “puzzle” also means finding ways to compliment the efforts of other existing organizations and individuals, hungry for a student-informed edge.&nbsp;



One example of this kind of collaborative advocacy is the group’s fall 2024 visit to the White House to contribute to a roundtable discussion on suicide prevention.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter is-resized is-style-default"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/IMG_4662-1-1024x576.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-2774" width="1024" height="576"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Members of the Coalition for Student Wellbeing traveled to the White House in fall 2024 to participate in a roundtable discussion about suicide prevention.</figcaption></figure>



Then, this spring, the Coalition teamed up with Active Minds to produce a&nbsp;<a href="https://activeminds.org/resource/student-id-cards-a-lifeline-for-college-students/">toolkit</a>&nbsp;of resources to help students advocate for printing the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline on student ID cards — an extension of Domey’s work in Massachusetts.&nbsp;



The response from those the Coalition hopes to influence has been promising, as many leaders embrace the importance of including students in mental health policymaking on campus.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The group’s&nbsp;<a href="https://c4sw.org/our-team/">advisory board</a>&nbsp;comprising top administrators and advocates, including President Domenico Grasso of the University of Michigan and President Mark Gearan of Hobart and William Smith College, offers insights and expertise to help the students refine their advocacy efforts.



Gearan said he believes the student-inspired nature of the Coalition makes it both unique in the higher education space and valuable for administrators like himself.&nbsp;



“It’s not that everyone can always agree with students, but the North Star is what is best for the student experience,” he said, adding that the diversity of the Coalition’s national membership is an added advantage.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Domey has lost track, he said, of “the amount of times that I’ve just sat down with either a president, a provost, a dean of students, and really tried to get to know their role and their perspective more to make us a better organization.”



“We’re so much better for being able to have those resources,” he added.&nbsp;



Domey expressed similar enthusiasm about the quality and connectedness of his&nbsp;<a href="https://c4sw.org/our-team/">student council</a>. “There’s honestly a very small amount of students that I would say work on youth mental health nationally,” he said. “The pro is we’ve all gotten to really know each other, and it’s a really cool community of people spread throughout the country.”



While members may come from a range of backgrounds, they share a passion for mental health and, in many cases, impressive advocacy records.



Domey met Ela Gardiner, soon-to-be sophomore at Hobart, when they were both in high school in Massachusetts and already education advocates on the state stage. Gardiner had been elected one of her high school’s delegates to the Student Advisory Council of the Board of Education.&nbsp;



She also struggled with anxiety and depression, an experience that spurred her mental health advocacy in the transition from high school.



When Gardiner discovered she could no longer see her Massachusetts-licensed therapist at college in New York, she dove into trying to adjust licensure policies and ensure students don’t lose crucial support at a vulnerable time. Along the way, she joined the Coalition.&nbsp;



Shira Garg, a rising junior at the University of Georgia, connected with Domey and the Coalition through an internship involving research on college student mental health screening tools. Now, her pre-med focus not only grounds an interest in wellbeing but helps spearhead the Coalition’s assessment of gaps in the mental health space.



For the Coalition’s members, the collective dedication to mental health is a major motivator.



“All the students that are involved are so passionate about the topic, and I think that in itself kind of propels each one of us to want to do more and more and more,” Garg said. “When you surround yourself with peers that really want to make change, you also follow in their footsteps.”



The objective moving forwards is recruiting more members from new backgrounds and strengthening the foundation further, Domey said.&nbsp;



“It all goes back to reflecting the stories of others and really trying to be that voice for as many people as you can.”



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

Student-Centered Solutions   

Lindsay Baker tended to be uncomfortable with conflict, a trait that extended to her professional life as an instructor at the University of Rochester. So when she heard about the new Mindful Professor Training Program available to the school’s faculty members, she saw an opportunity to address her aversion to engaging in difficult conversations.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



“After Covid, I wanted to stay involved with learning and professional development, and this program offered the chance to focus on things related to mindfulness that I haven’t looked at in awhile,” said Baker, an instructor of opera and arts leadership. “So I started asking myself, ‘How can I be more present in a conversation that might be challenging? What's my own stuff I can take care of and shed before tense situations, so I can be open to better conversations with students and colleagues?’”



Launched in 2023, the Mindful Professor Training Program is a semester-long initiative that guides faculty through the principles of mindful leadership, helping them not only tend to their own wellbeing but also shape healthier, more supportive classroom environments.&nbsp;According to a&nbsp;<a href="https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-Role-of-Faculty-in-Student-Mental-Health.pdf">2021 study</a>&nbsp;from the Healthy Minds Network (HMS), 21 percent of faculty surveyed said supporting students in mental distress had taken a toll on their own mental health — and 61 percent believed it should be mandatory for faculty to receive basic training in how to respond to students in distress.&nbsp;The Mindful Professor Training Program comes out of more than just post-pandemic urgency: a deeper recognition that the mental state of those who teach affects those who learn, and vice versa.&nbsp;



“If we want to support students, we have to support the faculty and staff with these tools,” said Rebecca Block, director of the program and the university’s health promotion specialist. “We’ve known that students benefit from mindfulness. But what about the faculty? They’re the ones setting the tone.”



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“We’ve known that students benefit from mindfulness. But what about the faculty? They’re the ones setting the tone.”
</blockquote>



The inspiration for the Mindful Professor program took root in the years surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty across higher education found themselves suddenly navigating Zoom classrooms and working with students in emotional crisis without training beyond empathy and instinct.



Research bore out what many were feeling intuitively. The 2021 HMS study showed that while 80 percent of faculty had spoken with students about mental health, only half felt equipped to identify emotional distress. “That was an eye-opener,” Block said. “We realized we needed a new kind of training as national data keeps on getting worse. We have to think differently because what we're doing is not working.”



Block teamed up with consultant Lisa Critchley, whose background in mindful leadership in business settings brought a complementary expertise. Together, they created a curriculum that bridged personal mindfulness with leadership skills.



The result was a first-of-its-kind program in higher education: eight weekly workshops that combine meditation, discussion, applied classroom practices, and leadership skill-building. Critchley begins each session with a grounding meditation — breathwork, posture awareness, gratitude practices — before guiding faculty through exercises in mindful communication, self-regulation, and mentorly insight.



Lindsay Baker enrolled in the program in spring 2024 after spotting it in a faculty newsletter and joined a cohort of participants from a wide range of academic disciplines.&nbsp;



“I used to have a really solid meditation practice, but it had fallen off,” she said. “I was curious whether this would help jumpstart it again and whether I could bring some of it into the classroom.”



She found that she could. From the earliest sessions, Baker was struck by the value of pausing — “arrival practices,” as she calls them. “I started incorporating little rituals into my acting classes: a breath before entering the studio, a moment of grounding before auditions. It’s simple, but it changes the space.”



Baker also found herself applying the lessons offstage. As she juggled multiple productions during a particularly intense semester, the program’s emphasis on resisting urgency helped her avoid spiraling into panic. Perhaps even more powerful was the community that the program fostered. Faculty came together across disciplines — from vocal coaches to mathematicians, from nursing faculty to researchers — that didn’t ordinarily have an opportunity to share substantive conversations.



“There was just this sense of acceptance that there is no one single way and we’re there to support each other,” Baker said. “Some people were hardcore meditators. Others said, ‘Hey, I remembered to breathe today — that’s a win.’”



Mindful Leadership, Not Just Mindfulness



What sets the Mindful Professor Training Program apart from traditional wellness offerings is its focus on leadership. While mindfulness courses for educators have existed for years, the University of Rochester’s program explicitly teaches participants how to show up for others — a skillset that can have tremendous impact on the tenor of a conversation and its outcome.



Mindful leadership equips faculty with emotional regulation skills that ripple outward. “How a teacher shows up in the classroom — whether calm or frazzled — actually influences students neurologically,” Block said, referencing the role of mirror neurons, which cause our brains to “match” the emotional state of those around us.



A teacher who brings a calm presence into a tense classroom doesn’t just feel better, Block said. They set a tone. They create an environment in which students feel more grounded, focused, and able to learn.



“Faculty who've gone through the program are better able to regulate their own emotions to be thoughtful when they speak, and they say it can impact the way the conversation goes,” Block said. “If you show up for a stressful conversation with a student in a calm way versus a stressful way, it’ll really affect the way the conversation goes and the way the student feels supported.”



Early results suggest the program is having an impact. Post-program surveys found 100 percent of participants incorporated mindfulness into their daily lives and teaching practices. The majority reported they’d experienced greater confidence in supporting student wellbeing and managing their own stress.&nbsp;And 85 percent said they were either “extremely” or “moderately” confident in their ability to use mindfulness strategies to support student wellbeing.



The program’s success has caught the attention of researchers and peers nationwide. Block and Critchley have presented their work at over a dozen national conferences and, last month, published a study in the peer-reviewed “Journal of American College Health” on the program’s measurable benefits.



To meet growing demand — and logistical challenges — the university is expanding its reach to make it easier for faculty to participate from different physical corners of the campus. This fall, a full cohort will be hosted at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Next spring, the team hopes to bring the program to the Eastman School of Music. A fully asynchronous version is also in development, aimed at increasing access for faculty with demanding schedules or at satellite campuses.



“Our goal is to meet people where they are. Sometimes the biggest barrier to participating in wellness work is just making it to the building,” Block said. “So we’re adapting.”



A Wider Movement Toward Educator Wellness



While the Mindful Professor Training Program is unique in its scope and integration of leadership training, it is part of a broader shift in higher education toward acknowledging the mental health needs of faculty.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The University of Rochester’s broader “Well-being for Life and Learning” initiative offers an array of workshops focused on student wellness, and many faculty who complete the Mindful Professor program continue with follow-up coffee hours, self-care seminars, and classroom innovation labs.



With six cohorts completed and more than 60 graduates to date, the Mindful Professor program is gaining wider interest. Block receives regular inquiries from institutions looking to replicate the model, and when she speaks about it at conferences, she said she’s encouraged by the growing interest.



“We’re still growing,” she said. “But if our faculty feel more grounded, more connected, and more equipped to support students, that’s a win. They can really support not only student wellbeing, but their own teaching efficacy.”&nbsp;



Inside the classroom, Baker is able to recognize that efficacy in the moment. “I’ve been able to identify and experience what we were talking about in the program in terms of that self-regulation and the ability to let some things go,” she said. “In those heightened moments of urgency or stress response, now I recognize what it feels like, and what I can do.”



You can reach LearningWell editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

The Mindful Professor 

Mary Beatty was stressed about the upcoming presidential election. It was fall 2024, and Beatty, then a senior at the University of Richmond, was spending her final year of college classes mindlessly doom scrolling on her laptop.&nbsp;



Her mom suggested she try knitting. One day, Beatty, a leadership studies major, brought a beginner’s crochet kit to her classes, which ranged from five to 25 people. The repetitive, small movements required to crochet a blue narwhal—an item the kit provided instructions on how to create—forced her off her laptop and drew her into the class.&nbsp;



&nbsp;“I’m able to absorb the information better if my hands are doing something tactile,” she said.&nbsp;



Beatty is among a new crop of students who are turning to an old craft to help them focus and relieve stress. Knitting has emerged in classrooms across the country, at liberal arts colleges and state universities alike. Student knitters and educators tout knitting’s unique ability, backed by research, to reduce stress and enhance focus.



Annabel Xu knits throughout all five of her first-year courses at Harvard Law School and has the wardrobe to show for it. This spring semester, she knit a blue sweater, a purple top, and a pink cardigan, which she made for her mom for her birthday.



During class, Xu will occasionally place her needles and yarn aside to jot down notes on paper or answer a cold call—a term for the fear-inducing Socratic method in which a professor peppers a student with probing questions.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Xu said she received permission from her professors to knit in their classes after explaining that knitting helps her concentrate. “I’m not slacking off,” she assured them.&nbsp;



Xu, who learned to knit on YouTube during the coronavirus pandemic, uses the continental stitch, a repetitive, rhythmic movement that she said keeps her hands occupied without requiring much brain power.&nbsp;



There is a misperception, she said, that students who knit in class are not paying attention.



“People will say things to me like, ‘It’s funny that you were knitting, but then when you got called on, you knew the answer.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, because I was paying attention.’”



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“People will say things to me like, ‘It’s funny that you were knitting, but then when you got called on, you knew the answer.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, because I was paying attention.’”
</blockquote>



<a href="https://www.craftyarncouncil.com/health-resources">Research supports</a> anecdotal evidence that knitting promotes mindfulness and focus, according to Teresa May-Benson, a life-long knitter and occupational therapist who practices outside of Philadelphia.&nbsp;



“Sensory and motor activities help regulate the brain,” Benson said. “Doing things with your hands, especially if it is something productive, is very organizing. It is common that students, especially those with ADHD and other attention issues, find it helpful.”&nbsp;



Not everyone in the classroom benefits from knitting. Harvard Law School student Nikhil Chaudhry said peers knitting in his classes has interfered with his ability to concentrate on the professor.



In one of Chaudhry’s classes, a student knits directly behind him, which he said sends the noise of metal needles clinking into his ears. In another class, a different student knits directly in his line of sight to the professor.&nbsp;



“Knitting looks so different from everything else that it’s really a visual distraction,” said Chaudhry, who is surprised that professors tolerate students knitting in their classes.&nbsp;



“It is disrespectful,” he said. “You have an eminent legal scholar, who you’ve paid $80,000 a year to learn from—and you’re knitting.”



A Harvard Law School spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the school’s policy regarding classroom knitting.&nbsp;



Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet said that while she would allow students to knit in her classes, other professors may find it “off putting,” especially if they expect students to take notes.&nbsp;



“Anecdotally, students have knitted in classes for a long time. I’ve spoken to a number of lawyers who either did it or remember a classmate who did it,” she wrote in an email. “I would allow a student to knit because I know from personal experience that it can aid focus on the class, as long as the knitting is simple enough.”



Students and teachers have not always supported students knitting in class or engaging in other sensory activities.



Beatty, the University of Richmond student, said her public high school in Connecticut banned all types of fidget instruments, such as friendship bracelets and fidget spinners.&nbsp;



“There was a belief that you couldn’t get away with that in the real world,” she said. “The mentality was, ‘This would not fly in college.’”&nbsp;



Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, suggested knitting may be more prevalent at schools that promote a progressive approach to education, compared to schools that “may expect more traditional behavior.”&nbsp;



“I believe in a progressive education and progressive teaching,” he said. “The result of which is I want to be as accommodating and open to whatever learning styles suit my students in the best possible way.”



Abrams said, in total, he has had more than a dozen students—of different genders—knit in his classes.&nbsp;



He said he allows students to knit because it is an evidence-based intervention to promote focus that has few drawbacks relative to other accommodations he has granted. Abrams said a student once brought a support animal to class that went loose and caused students to scream. (He declined to name the kind of animal to protect the student’s anonymity.)&nbsp;



“As with most things, it’s about having the right tone and recognizing that we want to try to maximize everyone’s needs and set the right conditions in our classrooms to make it work for people,” Abrams said.



Knitting may be out of the ordinary and visually conspicuous. But it is far from the only behavior taking place in the classroom that could be viewed as distracting.



Mary Esposito, a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said she has seen students use their computers during class to play video games, shop for clothes, and even watch porn.



“Students are going to do what they’re going to do,” the business major said.&nbsp;



Esposito <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C6UH-4cumXt/?hl=en">went viral on Instagram for a video</a> following the TikTok trend “there’s always that one kid in class” and&nbsp;depicting her crocheting a pink scarf toward the back of a lecture hall.



The video garnered roughly five million likes and 15,000 comments. Esposito, who said she is diagnosed with autism, uploaded a series of follow-up posts responding to the comments and dispelling beliefs that she knits in class to bring attention to herself or because she is not serious about academics.



“As someone who is on the spectrum, this is really helpful for me to do in class because my hands need to be doing something,” she said. “It’s more of a tool for engagement—not distraction. That was the bigger dialogue that this video started aside from being just a silly, funny trend.”



After posting the video, Esposito said, people came forward telling her they also knit during class. “All the sudden, going viral, it proved there were actually other people like me.”&nbsp;



Esposito said her grade point average is a testament to knitting’s educational benefits (she has made the dean’s list the last two semesters). She recommended anyone struggling to focus in class travel to their nearest arts and crafts store to purchase needles and yarn.

Knitting in Class

To&nbsp;Angelina Rojas and her classmates at TechBoston Academy, gun violence isn’t an abstract policy issue. It’s a lived reality.&nbsp;



Rojas and many other kids at the Dorchester middle and high school have friends and family members who have been injured or killed by guns. Three years ago, a teacher and a student were shot outside the school as they boarded a bus bound for the state basketball game. 



So when Rojas took the stage with seven of her peers last month to offer a solution to the gun violence epidemic, she spoke with passion and a sense of urgency.



“We’ve learned that people are uncomfortable, scared to have this conversation about gun violence,” she told a panel of judges. They would decide whether her group would get to present its solution on a much bigger stage: The Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual gathering of global leaders, funders and entrepreneurs. “It became our job — our job! — to become voices for victims, for survivors. 



“My cousin was shot. He is paralyzed,” Rojas said, her voice rising to a shout. “I’m here because of him!”



The presentation was part of the annual Aspen Challenge, a 10-week long program that invites teams of high schoolers to develop durable solutions to complex societal problems. Started in 2013 in Los Angeles, the challenge has spread to 11 other cities, spending two years in each location. It landed in Boston this year. 



For students like Rojas, the challenge is an opportunity to make concrete change in their own communities. For their schools, it’s a way to cultivate the human skills employers are demanding — skills like communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.



A 2022 evaluation of the program found that participants showed an increase in skills such as collaboration, resilience, leadership efficacy, and social perspective-taking.



The challenge may also be part of the answer to rising rates of disengagement in school, said Rebecca Winthrop, co-author of The Disengaged Teen. By enlisting teens in solving problems that affect them directly, the activity provides both relevance and agency — two key antidotes to disengagement, according to Winthrop.



“A lot of kids don’t see the point of school,” she said. “They don’t see how what they’re doing is connected to the real world.” 



In Boston, the work began in January, when teams from 17 of the city’s high schools gathered to hear local and national leaders present on five issues chosen by the students: affordable housing, community violence, access to green spaces, post-secondary pathways, and the role of social media in glamorizing substance abuse. Among the speakers was Manuel Oliver, whose son Joaquin was killed in a high school shooting in Parkland, Fl. in 2018. 



Oliver, whose organization, Change the Ref, seeks to empower young people to fight for stricter gun control laws, showed students videos and pictures of provocative protests and disturbing ad campaigns that his group has produced to get lawmakers’ attention.



He told the teens about the time he got arrested for scaling a construction crane near the White House to hang a banner about gun violence and urged the students to take risks — within limits.



“I don’t want you to get arrested,” he told them. “I just tell you that sometimes you want the attention, and you use the guerilla style to get it.”



Oliver’s challenge to the students — to produce a media campaign that would raise awareness around the gun violence epidemic and empower youth nationwide to take action in creating safer schools and communities — appealed to students at TechBoston Academy immediately.



“It’s heartbreaking to see article after article about gun violence,” said Brian Hodge, the TechBoston team captain, partway through the kickoff. 



But there were still three more issues to hear about before the group would pick one.&nbsp;



The event drew representatives from Boston’s school board and district leadership, including assistant superintendent for strategic initiatives Anne Rogers Clark, who said the challenge aligns with the district’s goal of developing future leaders for Boston.



Clark said conversations with decision makers in other cities that have joined the challenge convinced those in Boston that “it changes the orientation of how students view themselves,” helping them “develop a sense of themselves as agents of change in the larger world.”



The district encouraged its high schools to identify “emerging leaders,” for the challenge, rather than established ones like the student body president. They wanted students with potential, students “who haven’t had the opportunity to show what they can do,” Clark said.   



Many of the students who participate in the challenge, in Boston and other cities, come from low-income communities of color that are often overlooked or underestimated by policymakers, said Katie Fitzgerald, director of the Aspen Challenge.



“The biggest untapped resource in our communities is young minds,” she said. “They have the answers. They just need us to get out of their way.”



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“The biggest untapped resource in our communities is young minds.”
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Studies show that student engagement drops precipitously between elementary and high school. In one recent <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-disengagement-gap/">survey</a> by Winthrop and her colleagues, three quarters of third graders said they loved school, but only a quarter of tenth graders said the same.



While this problem isn’t exactly new, the consequences of disengagement are higher than they once were, according to Winthrop, who is director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. 



“Students can’t just coast along and develop the high-level skills they need to succeed in the workforce,” she said.



Jeri Robinson, the chair of the Boston School Committee, laid some of the blame for disengagement on what she sees as outdated methods of educating children. 



“Our way of doing schooling for the last 100 years has not taken advantage of the things students experience day-to-day,” Robinson said at the kickoff. “Kids are bored with school because we make it boring.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“Our way of doing schooling for the last 100 years has not taken advantage of the things students experience day-to-day."
</blockquote>



The Aspen Challenge is one of numerous efforts being undertaken by districts, schools, and nonprofits to make learning more relevant and engaging for students. But such work remains at the margins of the education system, Winthrop said.



Following the kickoff, the teams had 10 days to choose an issue to tackle. Then they had to design a solution, develop a work plan, and craft a budget. Each team was given $500 in seed money by the Aspen Challenge, which is funded by the Bezos Family Foundation. 



At TechBoston Academy, students chose to focus on gun violence because they felt that the official response to the shooting at their school had been inadequate. They wanted their district and the city to do more to prevent gun violence and to help students recover from its trauma, according to Bruce Pontbriand, the civics and government teacher who served as the group’s leader. The project’s tentative theme was “broken promises, broken hope,” he said.



“Adults have been promising things and falling flat on those promises,” Pontbriand said. 



Still, the students wanted the documentary that they envisioned to end on a positive note, to uplift the school community and help it heal, he said.



Healing, Pontbriand said, is something that the teachers and staff at BostonTech need as much as the students. He still thinks about the fact that he could have been on the bus that was shot at if he hadn’t had a headache and decided to drive to the game. 



“To help them, we need to get over our own stuff,” he said. 



Halfway through the challenge, in late March, each of the teams received a visit from a member of the Aspen Challenge staff. At TechBoston, Arisaid Gonzalez Porras, operations coordinator, showed up with Japanese cheesecake and enormous blueberry muffins.  



The students, all of whom are 11th graders in Pontbriand’s AP Government class, told Gonzalez Porras how TechBoston has been scarred by the shooting and how it has negatively influenced others’ perceptions of their school.



“It paints us in a bad light,” said Aaron Curry. “I hear people talking about our school, and that’s not us.” 



The students said their documentary would be both educational and transformative. It would teach kids to make better choices, while also instilling hope and a sense of unity.



“We are all going to rise together with this video,” Rojas said. 



Five weeks into the 10-week challenge, the students had already reached out to district leaders, public officials, city councilmembers, and grassroots organizations and conducted several focus groups and one-on-one filmed interviews. 



Gonzalez Porras praised their progress and asked pointed questions about how the students would promote their video and measure its impact. She wanted to know what their call to action would be and encouraged them to consider how they might continue their work after the competition ends. 



“The judges like it when you’re thinking about scaling,” she said. 



Hodge, the team captain, was quick to respond.



“When we win the Aspen Challenge, we plan to use the money to start a nonprofit,” he said. 



Gonzalez Porras indulged his optimism. “When you’re in Aspen, make sure you call out to people in the audience” who might provide funding, she suggested.



Over the next few weeks, the students edited the video for their documentary and got 11 city council members to sign a pledge to provide more support for prevention and healing. 



Finally, in late April, it was time to pitch their solution.



Teams in the Aspen Challenge are evaluated based on a one-page written report, a six-minute on-stage presentation, and an exhibit. The judges want evidence that students worked well together and engaged in meaningful collaboration with members of their communities. They’re looking for big ideas that take a creative approach to a stubborn problem. And they want proof that a team’s solution has made a sustainable impact.



At the end of the day, three teams would be awarded the grand prize: an all-expenses paid trip to the Aspen Ideas Festival. Three others would take home prizes for originality, collaboration, and resiliency, and one would be chosen by their peers for a “People’s Choice” award.



The TechBoston team introduced members, their team name, Team Unity, and an updated, more inspirational, theme: “Keep Hope Alive!” They showed a two-minute snippet of their documentary that included news coverage of the shooting at their school and testimony from team members whose families have been affected by gun violence. They answered questions about the obstacles they’d encountered during their project and the themes that emerged from their focus groups. 



When, at the end of the day, they were bypassed for an award, it came as a big disappointment, Pontbriand said.



“We had to relive a lot of that [trauma] before we got to the solution piece,” he wrote in an e-mail. “After the announcement, the kids were a bit retraumatized.”



In a group interview a couple weeks later, Curry said students were “still working through the emotions” around the loss and “taking a hiatus to focus on school.”



But Team Unity hasn’t given up on its mission to change the way the district and city prevent and respond to gun violence. The students are working with Pontbriand to design a course that will allow them to continue their work next year. Pontbriand said that Snoop Dogg’s son, film producer Cordell Broadas, has offered to help the team finish its documentary and “take it to the next level.” 



The students are also collaborating with three city counselors to create more afterschool activities for high schoolers, after a survey showed that less than half of students at their school feel like they belong. They want their peers to find positive communities, so they don’t wind up in negative ones.



“The Aspen Challenge is over, but the work is not,” Pontbriand said in the interview.



Robinson, the school board chair, hopes that the challenge’s goal of engaging students in real-world problem solving won’t end here, either.



“It can’t be two months and done,” she said at the kickoff. “What will the district and the city learn from this?”



“I’m hoping it will create as much change in our adults as in our kids,” she said.

The Change-Makers

In high school, guidance rarely reached me. The encouragement was well-meaning but abstract. I was full of potential, but no one translated that into actionable steps. No roadmap was provided.



I would have to chart my own course through systems structured by geography, class, and institutional habit and designed for students born into different expectations. 



My journey through higher education followed no predictable path. It began with my basketball coach, who introduced me to St. Joseph’s College in Maine. Several players like me from Charlotte Amalie, US Virgin Islands, had enrolled there before, creating a tenuous bridge I could follow.



<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/GarnettPhoto-2-1024x768.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-2718" width="453" height="340"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Dr. Rhoan Garnett</figcaption></figure>



I arrived on campus filled with idealism, only to discover that my teammates and I comprised virtually the entire Black student population. For the first time, I had a white roommate, and I befriended people for whom I was the first Black person they had ever met. The cultural terrain matched no map I’d been given.



Then came financial reality. Unable to afford my expected family contribution, I stopped out with my transcript frozen due to unpaid balances. This began a fragmented, eight-year journey across multiple institutions. At the University of Southern Maine, I couldn’t qualify for aid without parental support — federal rules at the time required students to be 23. After a personal loan proved unsustainable, I enlisted in the Air Force. When medical issues intervened, I worked, re-enrolled at 23, and kept working until graduation.



What reads on a résumé as a non-linear path was, in truth, a masterclass in adaptation through systems offering little direction and even fewer second chances.



Seeing the System from Both Sides



My understanding transformed when, with my hard-won undergraduate degree in hand, I joined Bowdoin College's admissions office. My recruitment trips revealed how significantly zip codes determine college access. At Chicago’s Hyde Park Academy, I found talented students with just one overwhelmed counselor for 1,800 predominantly Black students. Miles away at suburban New Trier, seven counselors served fewer students from far wealthier families. My role shifted from promoting Bowdoin to providing basic application instructions that affluent students took for granted.



The contrast was stark: brilliant minds with untapped potential, shaped by schools whose structures, not intellect, had narrowed their imagined futures.



Even as our team diversified Bowdoin’s student body, I recognized that admission alone wasn’t enough. Students who defied odds to enroll found themselves grappling with belonging and cultural translation, the very territories I had navigated years before.



This firsthand understanding later informed my dissertation research on “undermatch,” illuminating how talented students from historically marginalized backgrounds often enroll below their academic potential, not from lack of ability, but from systemic barriers to information, guidance, and belonging.



Not Grit, But Grace



The prevailing narrative celebrates individual grit while ignoring the systems we navigate. What distinguished my journey wasn’t exceptional perseverance but moments of grace when relationships created bridges across institutional gaps.



At Saint Joseph’s College, classroom discussions about poverty were framed through a white lens. As a low-income Black student among peers who shared my economic background but not my racial experience, I carried the invisible labor of translation, navigating coursework while bridging unacknowledged differences.



What made the difference wasn’t superhuman resilience but relational infrastructure. I pieced mine together slowly, while students in programs like Posse arrived already equipped with mentoring, cohort support, and cultural translation, structures mirroring what intergenerational college-goers receive naturally. When someone explained unwritten rules or affirmed the right to belong, seemingly insurmountable barriers became navigable challenges.



This reveals a deeper truth: educational environments often leave students unprepared for meaningful dialogue across difference. We raise students in segregated spaces, then expect authentic engagement without preparation. When institutions create environments where diverse students build networks and process belonging uncertainty together, they transform individual struggles into collective strength, benefiting everyone, regardless of background.



Designing Belonging



After years navigating systems not built for students like me, I began asking: What would higher education look like if belonging were deliberately designed, not left to chance?



Too often, access becomes the endpoint, and success stories become misleading proof that the system works — classic survivorship bias. Real equity requires shifting from celebrating those who overcome broken systems to designing ecosystems that recognize all students’ needs. This means partnerships between colleges, high schools, and communities, ensuring readiness extends beyond academics to navigational knowledge.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
Real equity requires shifting from celebrating those who overcome broken systems to designing ecosystems that recognize all students’ needs. 
</blockquote>



One promising approach scales the relational infrastructure found in effective mentoring programs. My research shows information travels best through trust. Students act on guidance from people who understand their context. Systems embedding personalized support within human connection democratize opportunity.



These solutions aren’t just technical. They’re deeply personal. I’ve lived in systems that confuse potential with preparedness and mistake access for belonging.



As students, especially from low- and middle-income backgrounds, rightly question whether college is worth its rising cost, I offer no simplistic promise of prosperity. The debt crisis is a matter of justice.



Yet even as the system must change, I hold fast to what Baldwin called the “liberation of consciousness”: education that sharpens critical thinking, deepens empathy, and gives us language to name systems as they are and imagine how they could be.



In a world of rising disinformation and artificial shortcuts, real education helps us discern signal from noise — a clarity I once sought amid the quiet pressure to trade opportunity for survival. It is not only a path to making a living but also to making a life. As Mandela reminded us, it remains one of the most powerful tools for changing the world, not just for ourselves, but for each other.



Inside the System I Once Observed



Even in doctoral education, belonging isn’t automatic. My research on underrepresented students navigating mismatched systems became autobiography. Despite strong initial mentorship, structural supports faded. My focus on equity didn’t align with traditional research models, and I often lacked a peer cohort or institutional roadmap. I was simultaneously in the system and not of it.



Even at the highest levels, I drew my own map in the dark. Reimagining belonging must extend to doctoral spaces, where too many still arrive unsupported, underfunded, and alone. This requires not only mentorship and peer networks but institutional recognition of the financial and emotional labor required to navigate systems never designed for us.



For Those Still Searching



My journey has come full circle, from navigating unfamiliar terrain to charting pathways for others. In my work with postsecondary transitions, I see what statistics miss: for every student who makes it through broken systems, countless others with equal potential never find their way. When I listen to students at their own crossroads, I hear familiar echoes: brilliance without direction, presence without recognition.



What ultimately matters isn’t celebrating exceptional navigation of broken systems but transforming those systems themselves. My story isn’t a model — it’s evidence for why we must design education where belonging is a foundation, not an accident, and where no student must draw their own map in the dark.







Dr. Rhoan Garnett's work bridges the personal and systemic, informed by his journey as a first-generation immigrant student who navigated educational systems without clear guidance. Through his research-practice consultancy WeBe Collab, he leads transformative initiatives, including postsecondary mindset and transition research for the Gates Foundation and AI-enhanced learning systems at College Unbound. His dissertation on undermatch, mismatch, and reverse transfer — recognized with the Gordon C. Lee Award — continues to inform equity-centered approaches to educational design.

Without a Map

Maaz Shaikh spent the summer before 11th&nbsp;grade at football camps, among college scouts, chasing hopes of a Division I career. Just a few weeks later, the wide receiver’s first ACL tear pushed his personal endzone, dreams of recruitment, down the field. When his senior season came and he underperformed, then tore his other ACL, he knew the clock had run out.&nbsp;



Shaikh’s plans for college needed to change, or so he thought. Growing up in Cambridge, Mass., he had his eye on nearby Boston College (BC) but would have relied on an athletic scholarship to open those doors. “I really wanted to go, but we weren't financially stable enough to afford a college with that high of a tuition,” Shaikh said.



Then his guidance counselor told him about Messina College, the two-year associate degree program at BC that would be welcoming its inaugural class in July 2024, shortly after Shaikh graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. Messina is BC’s ninth and newest college, created specifically for students like Shaikh from first-generation and low-income backgrounds. It offered him the financial aid he needed, along with the opportunity to transfer to a four-year bachelor’s program at BC afterward—no reapplying necessary—if he maintained a 3.4 GPA or higher.



As one of its first 100 students, Shaikh joins Messina in uncharted territory. While BC isn’t the first four-year university to offer an associate degree program, it is one of the most selective colleges to do so. Messina is also fully residential. With the will and the wealth, BC is able to invest in high-need students and their success in a way other low-cost, two-year undergraduate programs can’t afford. By the same token, its leaders are navigating challenges they can’t always predict with little by way of example.&nbsp;



The groundwork for Messina began in 2020, when BC merged with Pine Manor, a private four-year college in Brookline, Mass. that served mostly local first-gen and low-income students. Four years later, and located on the Brookline campus, Messina is following in the tradition of Pine Manor, as well as BC, whose Jesuit founders helped educate Boston’s immigrants, most of whom were Irish Catholic.&nbsp;



Fr. Erick Berrelleza, the founding Dean of Messina, said “human formation” is the mission that unites his college and BC as a whole. In the admissions process, BC recruits promising students perhaps short of qualifying for especially elite universities and standing to benefit most from Messina’s aid. All who finish the two years receive an associate degree from BC. Some will move onto a bachelor’s program. Others have the chance to get a feel for the undergraduate experience but may choose to move straight into their careers.



To fund tuition, Messina relies on federal and state aid but primarily BC’s contribution, including around $40,000 per student. (BC also put $35 million towards capital expenses to launch Messina.) This support distinguishes Messina from other associate programs, like traditional community colleges. Dr. Larry Galizio, President of the Community Colleges League of California, said there are constant funding issues within the system. Despite having the most low-income students, Galizio said, community colleges in California receive the least funding per student of any education sector in the state. “So it's just like the United States, where the people who have the most get the most.”



Messina tries to flip that theory. Through a mix of grants, loans, and work-study opportunities, the financial aid office meets 100 percent of demonstrated need. The same goes for BC’s four-year programs, although tuition there is nearly $70,000 per year, compared to Messina’s $30,000 (not including room and board). Those at Messina with the greatest need take out a maximum $2,000 loan. Everyone receives a free laptop and coverage for textbooks. If students end up transferring into a four-year program at BC, it will continue to meet their full need.&nbsp;



One condition to attend Messina is participation in summer courses. While building the residential community early on, this session gets students ahead on the 20 courses they need to take to graduate. Fewer classes during subsequent semesters help limit academic stress and offer more time for other activities amid the transition to college life.



Providing housing for all Messina students reflects BC’s core mission to teach to the whole student. “I think [formative education] happens in a residential environment,” Berrelleza said. Living on campus, students can get to know each other and staff and faculty in a way designed to identify anyone who may be struggling.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“It’s a big family,” said Maaz Shaikh, whose high school class was five times the size of his college one. “If I need help, I can reach out to whoever, and they would obviously help me.” He mentioned relationships with not only students but the student life administrators, dining staff, and janitors. Because the class size is capped at 100 students, there is little room to fall through the cracks.&nbsp;&nbsp;



If anything, Shaikh has had a “challenge with getting too much support,” he said, only half joking. Every time he passes the tutoring center, the director of student success checks in about how things are going for him. When Shaikh decided to change his major at the end of the first semester, he was able to set up a meeting and shift his entire schedule just days before the spring term.&nbsp;



He’s also been attending a weekly mentoring group and a similar forum called “Soul Circle,” run by his resident minister. In both settings, students share their issues, whether they are school-related or not. “I would say coming into college, I didn't really believe in that—that talking about my problems will make them ease off. But I would say I was completely wrong about it,” Shaikh said.



“In some ways, the least important part is the academic stuff,” Berrelleza said. “Even though they're doing that, and there's a tutoring center here… the most important work is just making sure we're responding to them and their needs as people.”&nbsp;



Yet the shared identity that bonds students at Messina’s Brookline campus can also be the barrier to feeling connected to BC’s main campus, a few miles away in Chestnut Hill, Mass. “It's a really good thing that all of us are first-gen because we all share the same goal of—I think of it as creating a legacy—of trying something new and helping out our families,” Shaikh said. “I would say that is the number one thing that motivates us all and brings us all together. Whereas if I go to Boston College and I just see a bunch of white people around me, it’s different. It's not the same.”



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“It's a really good thing that all of us are first-gen because we all share the same goal of—I think of it as creating a legacy—of trying something new and helping out our families.” 
</blockquote>



Students interested in transferring into a four-year bachelor’s at BC take a course on the Chestnut Hill campus during their second year. On the pre-med track, Shaikh is already attending class there. “It is very different when I go there. But I would say I don't get treated differently,” Shaikh said, adding that he’s “not a very picky person.” He also participates in a number of clubs in Chestnut Hill, including as Messina representative for the Undergraduate Government of Boston College and first-year representative for the Muslim Student Association.&nbsp;



All Messina students can engage in the spaces and extracurriculars in Chestnut Hill, except Division I sports, but some are more hesitant than Shaikh to do so. “For me, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, we're the same.’ But I know some people on our campus usually either go home or stay at Messina [as opposed to visiting Chestnut Hill].” Because of his position in student government, Shaikh finds his fellow students approach him with their concerns about, in his words, “being this standalone campus that's mostly students of color.”&nbsp;



Other issues at Messina have been more logistical and easier to address. Early on, when Shaikh and his Muslim peers found they needed more room for prayer, Messina allocated a space. For next year, there are plans to address the lack of air conditioning during summer classes and add another shuttle to Chestnut Hill to accommodate the second and incoming class.&nbsp;



At this point, Berrelleza is focused on improving the existing Messina program, not growing it. Meanwhile, he’s taking calls from universities interested in implementing their own Messina-like work. Berrelleza encourages the effort but stresses the importance of replicating the residential element. “It's an investment. It's added resources to house and feed the students here, but I think it makes a world of difference for the type of education you can provide them.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“It's an investment. It's added resources to house and feed the students here, but I think it makes a world of difference for the type of education you can provide them.”
</blockquote>



As for Shaikh, who’s already started building a foundation in Chestnut Hill, his potential transfer to BC still presents questions. He wonders how his community at Messina, and the even smaller subset of students within it who want to pursue a bachelor’s at BC, will change, merge, or perhaps dissolve into a much larger campus. “Will I still be friends with the people that I'm not too close to over here? Or will I become closer friends with them because I know them more than everyone else?” he asked aloud.&nbsp;



“We'll see.”

BC’s Messina College

If you asked people to describe the Healing Meals Community Project, you might get different answers. For families experiencing a health crisis, it is a lifeline of nutritious, medically tailored meals delivered with a personal note of support. For the high school students who prepare the food, and write the notes, it is a unique opportunity to serve others, while discovering the good in themselves. Perhaps the best way to describe Healing Meals is as an organization that leverages the powerful relationship between food, health, and community.&nbsp;



“We want everyone who comes through our doors to feel better when they leave and bring that energy to the next person they come in contact with,” Sarah Leathers, the C.E.O. of Healing Meals, said at its annual fundraiser in June. &nbsp;



According to the Healing Meals team, that positivity is baked into every meal they make; and, they say, their clients can taste it. As a healing protocol for patients dealing with a serious illness, the organization prepares and delivers meals to families in Connecticut’s Hartford, Middlesex, and Litchfield Counties. Eighty percent of those who receive the food are eligible to do so for free. All of it is organic, locally sourced, and nutritious, aimed at nourishing patients with medical conditions and/or limited diets.



Healing Meals is among a growing national community dedicated to “food as medicine,” meaning they advocate for food-based interventions in health care. Research shows that tailoring meals to meet a client’s specific medical diagnosis leads to <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2797397">positive outcomes</a> in health and satisfaction for people with severe, complex, and/or chronic illnesses. But anyone who has been in the Healing Meals kitchen, or worked in the gardens, or delivered meals to families, knows that this work is not just about food.&nbsp;



As part of its model, Healing Meals enlists teenage volunteers who show up daily, put their phones aside, and help grow, cook and prepare the food under the supervision of a chef and other adult mentors. Part experiential learning, part youth empowerment, the program lets students learn about the relationship between food and health, become an integral part of a kitchen crew, and, often, gain meaning, agency and belonging. &nbsp;



“From the moment I walked in, I felt instantly welcomed,” said Ben, a rising high school senior who is interning at Healing Meals this summer. “All of the other volunteers were just incredibly helpful to me. It was nothing I had really felt before.”



Since its founding in 2016, Healing Meals has engaged 700 youth volunteers, the majority of whom stay beyond their first experience. Leathers said while the organization’s dual mission – supporting clients and students alike -- can be challenging for donors to categorize, the success of the youth development program has taught her that one purpose often serves another. At a time when 40 percent of high schoolers <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a9.htm">report</a> persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, Healing Meals is becoming a model for a different kind of youth volunteerism, where the kids that are helping others may be getting far more in return. &nbsp;



Organic Roots



The Healing Meals story began in California, where Leathers’ sister, Cathryn Couch, was running a similar organization called Ceres Community Project. Now serving more than 2,500 clients throughout Northern California, Ceres also has a youth development component, though Couch said its inclusion was somewhat serendipitous. &nbsp;



As a well-known caterer in the Bay Area, Couch was asked by a friend to give her daughter a volunteer job for the summer. At the time, she was helping a woman undergoing cancer treatment with medically tailored meals for herself and her family. Realizing the growing need for this kind of support within her community — and witnessing the empathy and confidence her young intern was gaining — Couch put it all together, gave up her successful catering business, and launched Ceres.&nbsp;



“It addressed so many needs in the community and so many things I care deeply about,” she wrote in her origin story on the organization’s web site. “Young people would learn to cook. People who needed healing food would have it. We would help teach people about the link between what we eat and our health. And we’d help restore the idea of caring for our neighbors, something that has been lost between my parent’s generation and my own.”



Leathers had long hoped to launch something similar in Connecticut, where the sisters were raised. Having experienced a personal health crisis in 2011, she began studying the link between nutrition and health and the relationship between the mind, body and spirit. But she had also been a tutor to students with disabilities and a job coach to young people, including boys who hadn’t finished high school and were preparing to enter the construction field. Leathers, who is an engineer by training, built the Healing Meals model with these experiences as scaffolding.



“No matter where you come from or what your story is, every young person deserves to feel seen, valued, and supported,” she said. “We all need someone who genuinely cares and who helps us grow with accountability and love.”



The opportunity to mentor youth volunteers as part of the food-as-medicine model was particularly appealing to Leathers’ co-founder, Ellen Palmer. A certified holistic health and life coach, Palmer had worked with teenagers and young adults with stress and anxiety. Yes, the students would provide a valuable service, but they would also have an opportunity to contribute to something meaningful, away from the pressure of college prep and social media.



“Young people need a place to go where they can feel worthy and learn about themselves,” said Palmer, who was with the organization until 2023.



In November 2015, Leathers and Palmer went to California with their other two co-founders Ellen Deutsch and Emily Safino to complete the Ceres affiliate training course. They launched the Healing Meals Community Project from a dining room table and used a borrowed kitchen for the first year. From an event posted on Facebook, they got a handful of adult volunteers, their first four clients and $50,000 in initial funding. That funding has grown to over $1.4 million per year from people and organizations who have touched, or are touched by, the Healing Meals mission.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
"The objective at Healing Meals is to have youth lean into the positive belief that we have about them: 'You are amazing. You are capable. You can’t mess this up. We love you.'"
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Cook. Breathe. Grow.



Nine years and more than 218,000 meals later, Healing Meals now has an industrial kitchen inside what was a former golf club, sitting at the bottom of a low mountain range in Simsbury, Conn. There are organic gardens and free-range chickens out on the grounds. The students come in just after school and grab their aprons. But before they get to work preparing whatever meal the chef has planned for the day, they enter a circle, hear from a recent client, and giggle through the icebreaker.



Questions in circle range from “What animal would you want to be?” to “What does Healing Meals mean to you?” Most of the kids start out as strangers, some frightened to socialize beyond screens and across differences. But Palmer said the immediacy of the task before them accelerates a special connection.



“There’s a level setting that goes on in the Healing Meals kitchen,” she said. &nbsp;“We’re all in it together. Someone is chopping vegetables. Someone is mopping the floor. Someone is working on a recipe. Somebody else is taking out the garbage.”&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Healing-meals-inside-photo-1024x768.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-2875"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Executive Chef Joe Bucholz with student volunteers. Via Healing Meals.</figcaption></figure>



Joe Bucholz is Healing Meals’ executive chef.&nbsp; He said there are major differences between his current workplace and the upscale restaurant kitchen he used to run, particularly around command and control. “I do a lot of supervising, a lot of coaching, a lot of connecting,” he said. “But I’m not actually cooking the food.” &nbsp;He said he is always surprised when he hears parents say, “In our house, you are famous.”



At Healing Meals, the students are involved in food and nutrition in a number of ways. Their shifts often begin with a lesson about what they are preparing, where it is sourced, why it is being used. They are invited to eat what they cook and provide suggestions on how it can be improved or scaled. The adults in the room are there to coax the learning, whether by teaching the volunteers how to gather herbs or asking them to improvise when they’ve run out of cilantro. While there are many important protocols to follow, and safety guardrails strongly enforced, the message the youth receive is “We trust you.”



“The objective at Healing Meals is to have youth lean into the positive belief that we have about them,” said Palmer. “'You are amazing. You are capable. You can’t mess this up. We love you.'”



After preparing and packaging meals, students sit down and write individual notes to each person the organization serves. The kids are encouraged to share positive thoughts and whatever is on their minds. Instead of “Get well soon,” the notes might say “It was such a beautiful day in the garden” or “I really enjoyed making these enchiladas for you.”



“It’s great to see how much they love this part,” said Leathers. “A lot of times, the clients write back, and that makes them feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, they cared about my card.’” Just outside the Healing Meals kitchen is a wall with hundreds of notes the students have received.&nbsp;



While much of the volunteer experience unfolds organically, leadership and confidence are intentionally nurtured at Healing Meals. Students earn a Blue Apron after 50 hours of service and a Chef’s Coat after 100 hours. This final designation comes with an invitation to join the youth development committee, for which students meet regularly and contribute ideas and feedback that have led to enhancements in the program.



Addie, who will be leaving for college in the fall, has been volunteering at Healing Meals for three years. She was recently invited to join the board as a junior member. She said that, since starting at Healing Meals, her perspective on the work has flipped from “something that would be good on my resume that I should probably do”&nbsp; to “an unbelievable experience that would also be good on my resume.”&nbsp;



“I feel like people are motivated by what looks good or what their parents tell them to do. But for me, getting my Chef’s Coat, joining the development committee and then the board, these were things I worked for, I wanted for myself, that I’m proud of.”&nbsp;



Leathers said the difference between students like Addie and those who have been “voluntold,” as she calls it, can be seen in the number of them who stay on. Eighty-five to 90 percent of the students that volunteer at Healing Meals continue with the program, whether they complete 20 hours or achieve 300. Leathers believes that what keeps the students coming back is the direct impact they have on the lives of the people they serve.&nbsp;



“There aren’t a lot of volunteer opportunities for kids that can provide that,” she said.



“I still remember my favorite story that was shared in circle,” Addie said. “It was about a client who had come to the Healing Meals facility to visit, and she had noticed our wall of hearts, titled ‘Client Wall.’ She had asked if her name would be up there, and she was told to go see for herself. When she had found her name written in a heart, she had broken down in tears. She had felt so loved. In that moment, I really felt my impact. I had played a part in making this woman feel loved, something I never want to stop doing.”



Healing Minds



In addition to regular check-ins, Healing Meals surveys its students about the impact of their experiences. Increasingly, they have reported improvements to their emotional and mental health. In an email to Leathers, one parent wrote of her son, “He has reduced anxiety, reduced stress, increased confidence, increased social interactions and increased trust in others. He has since joined a sport and a club at school with his new-found bravery.”



Leathers sees this qualitative data as too powerful to ignore at a time when the adolescent and <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/healthy-youth/mental-health/mental-health-numbers.html">young adult mental health crisis</a> continues to confound parents and educators. Indeed, there is ample <a href="https://time.com/6283458/volunteering-good-for-kids-health/">evidence</a> in the literature as to the benefits of service work on the mental health of young people, particularly through programs like Healing Meals which involve reflection on purpose and <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/teens-mental-health-may-improve-when-they-help-others/">meaning</a>.



Additionally, Leathers believes the palpable feeling of inter-generational connection at Healing Meals can be an anecdote to the unprecedented rates of loneliness youth are reporting and Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy deemed “an epidemic.”&nbsp;



Leathers is confident that as the organization expands to meet the increasing demand for medically tailored meals, the youth development program will grow, too. She has plans to open a new youth program in Hartford, Conn. in 2026 and looks forward to expanding in other parts of the state.



This summer, Healing Meals has launched its first-ever paid internship program for youth leaders who have earned their Blue Aprons. It is informed by the developmental relationship framework of the Search Institute, a youth-serving organization that conducts and applies research to promote positive youth development. As part of the program, Palmer is leading a session on life design that asks students to consider what they value and to reflect on how they want to feel. &nbsp;Leathers sees the internship program as a pilot where staff and youth leaders are co-creating what they hope will be a more formal version of the iterative model that has helped so many young people grow.&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 Recipe for Growth and Love

What if colleges and universities assessed student flourishing on par with traditional metrics like graduation rates and grade point averages? If they did, would they work to improve the conditions under which students report finding meaning, purpose, and wisdom? Would students and families consider these measures in their choice of college?



A new research initiative from the <a href="https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/">Human Flourishing Project</a> at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science is providing both the means and the encouragement for these scenarios. The <a href="https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/academicflourishing">Academic Flourishing Initiative</a> launches this month with an invitation to schools across the country to join a research learning community focused on examining how well their institutions promote conditions that lead to flourishing in college and in life.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;



Project leaders argue that, as part of the assessment efforts institutions use to benchmark and improve, colleges and universities should understand how university life is helping students grow in wisdom and judgement and whether they are prepared for leadership, citizenship, and problem-solving in an increasingly complex world.



“Our conventional college assessments are all critical and should not be neglected, but we should also broaden our focus,” said Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Project and the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We should consider flourishing both academically and in life more generally. What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, and what we aim for.” &nbsp;



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"What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, and what we aim for."
</blockquote>



VanderWeele and his team at Harvard <a href="https://www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/index.php/ijow/article/view/5003">define</a> “academic flourishing” as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of an academic community’s life are good,” including the degree to which institutions help students grow as human beings. It is a focus within the Human Flourishing Program’s longstanding assessment work involving six dimensions of flourishing: happiness, health, meaning, relationships, character, and financial security. It also includes a community flourishing component, which considers, “What does it mean for an academic community to flourish as a community?” This takes into account conditions such as good relationships in the community, proficient leadership, healthy structures and practices, and a shared mission.&nbsp;



The aim of the Academic Flourishing Initiative is to form a network of schools that participate in assessment and data collection campus-wide, reflect on the data, and learn what institutions can do to more intentionally infuse flourishing into their practices. The heart of the Academic Flourishing Initiative is focused on the individual flourishing of students along with students’ assessment of whether or not their college is contributing to their own formation and flourishing.



Among the assessments available to the institutions is a 24-question student formation survey divided into four themes: knowledge and critical thinking, character formation, citizenship and leadership, and meaning and growth.&nbsp; VanderWeele said the real innovation within this work is the students’ perception of the contribution of student life not only to their development, growth, knowledge, and critical thinking, but also to their moral foundation, character development, and their capacities for leadership and citizenship.



In acknowledging that assessing institutions’ capacities in these areas holds them accountable for outcomes that many might view as outside their purview, VanderWeele pointed to the mission statements of countless colleges that profess otherwise. A commitment to human-centered education is not only foundational in many institutions but, one might argue, necessary to accomplish more traditional academic outcomes.&nbsp;



“Even institutions that don’t embrace character formation as part of their mission would arguably find it a necessary part of achieving their cognitive and epistemic goals,” said VanderWeele. “You need a certain level of perseverance to work through difficulties and to push one’s mind. You need a certain level of courage to work through controversial or challenging questions. And you need honesty in test-taking and research practices.”&nbsp;



As an indication of the widening appeal of this work, four of the questions within the survey were embedded in the Wall Street Journal’s annual college rankings. These four were growth in wisdom, justice, contributing to society, and positively changing the world. While the information won’t be released until the fall, <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/human-flourishing/202410/assessing-academic-flourishing">early results</a> show meaningful differences among schools on individual questions within the survey.



VanderWeele was pleased the Wall Street Journal included student formation among the many, more heavily weighted factors in its analysis but said the Academic Flourishing Initiative is more interested in shared learning than competitive benchmarking. Still, the inclusion of formation and flourishing within a widely publicized measure on the comparative value of college says something about what student and families may be yearning for.



To learn more about the Academic Flourishing Initiative, see the <a href="https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum8886/files/2025-07/HF.academic%20flourishing.pdf">Initiative brochure</a>, join a <a href="https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-gXPiXCIS-aLkBhRzmYeWg#/registration">webinar</a> on August 20, or contact Associate Director for Research Brendan Case at <a href="mailto:brendan_case@fas.harvard.edu">brendan_case@fas.harvard.edu</a> or Associate Director for Impact Reece Brown at <a href="mailto:reece_brown@fas.harvard.edu">reece_brown@fas.harvard.edu</a>.&nbsp;



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

Measuring Mission and Meaning

When Alyssa Acompora began her career as a nurse in the intensive care unit, she threw her whole self into the job. As a former Division I swimmer at Fairfield University, that’s what she knew how to do: go all in. But unlike athletics, nursing didn’t offer external validation for her efforts, and before long, Acompora was burned out and considering leaving.



Acompora’s experience as a former collegiate athlete struggling to adjust to life after athletics isn’t unique. Many young adults who wrapped their entire lives and identities around their sport suffer as they attempt to transition to the real world. For that reason, Acompora created “<a href="https://www.beyondtheathlete.net/about">Beyond the Athlete</a>,” a counseling service aimed at helping former athletes discover their new purpose.&nbsp;



“I thought I could just copy and paste how I operated as an athlete,” Acompora said. “But I was burning out because they don’t give gold medals in life.”



Beyond the Athlete is one of a growing number of similar businesses, especially as athletes of all levels have started speaking up about mental health, helping move the needle in the right direction. With unique challenges, the transition period between end-of-college athletic career and real career warrants a unique solution.



“These athletes face an identity crisis, especially if their careers come to an end by force, which they usually do,” said Derrick Furlow, Jr., chief athletic officer at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.onrise.care/">Onrise Mental Health Care for Athletes</a>.&nbsp;“They’ve been a part of their sport for so long and usually haven’t given thought to what’s next.”



In a world where only&nbsp;<a href="https://assets.nfhs.org/umbraco/media/886012/recruiting-fact-sheet-web.pdf">two percent</a>&nbsp;of the 460,000 N.C.A.A. athletes move on to the professional level, a sobering number of young athletes are left struggling.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“I thought I could just copy and paste how I operated as an athlete. But I was burning out because they don’t give gold medals in life.”
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While some colleges are putting mental health support in place to help student-athletes adjust, many simply don’t have the resources, especially for those leaving the system. A&nbsp;<a href="https://resources.mantrahealth.com/mantra-health-naia-survey-2022">2022 survey</a>&nbsp;from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) reveals that 90 percent of collegiate athletic directors do not feel their institutions provide adequate psychiatric support services for coaches and student-athletes.



Thankfully, former collegiate athletes are emerging to help those following in their footsteps. Their services take on different forms, but all have the same goal: to fill in the gaps that leave former student-athletes struggling as they adjust to a new world.&nbsp;



Transition issues



When Acompora first began her nursing career, she did everything she could to be the best version out there. No matter how hard she worked, there were no gold medals to validate that effort.&nbsp;



Like Acompora, understanding that life doesn’t offer external validation like athletics is something Tony Muskett has struggled with, as well. The 22-year-old recently graduated from the University of Virginia after finishing his football career there. “It used to be that when I had a big game, my social media would blow up all weekend,” he said. “Now, if I have a good day at the office, there’s no real acknowledgement. If you can’t find the internal motivation, you’ll struggle.”&nbsp;



Acompora turned to therapy for help but found her therapists couldn’t relate. “They don’t think in an athlete mindset,” she explained.&nbsp;



She kept trying, however, and eventually took some of the responsibility on herself, becoming a certified nurse coach, confidence coach, and athlete transformation coach. After eight years, Acompora began to pull out of her spin. “I began to identify patterns and habits of how I was trying to define myself,” she said. “I had to learn to internally validate myself.”



That meant identifying her core values, setting smaller goals and checkpoints, and celebrating herself along the way. This also carried over to her personal life, where Acompora learned to slow down, too. She took up yoga, surfing, and walking, defining consistency differently than she did as an athlete. “I realized I didn’t need to operate at full speed at 31 years old,” she said. “Many athletes feel like everything is a competition and that if they’re not going all out, they’re unproductive or lazy.”&nbsp;



Muskett, who works in commercial real estate, admitted he was ill-prepared for the real world. He had his sights set on the N.F.L. draft, but injuries his senior year forced him to start thinking differently for the first time in his life. “For 20 years, I was programmed for football,” he said. “When you think about the possibility of life after football, it’s scary.”&nbsp;



One reason for that, Muskett said, is that as a full-time athlete, you don’t have the time for internships and networking like other college students. Derrick Furlow said that’s a valid concern. “I was a football safety, so I was an anomaly who recognized I probably didn’t have a future at the pro-level,” he said. “I realized I needed to figure things out, so I started looking at the people around me to see who could expose me to other opportunities.”&nbsp;



Not everyone thinks ahead like that, however, and many get stuck in the grieving process. “For most athletes, the game comes to an end, and its often not by choice,” Furlow said. “They will grieve the game, wish they had done more, and often experience anger about it.”



Jaimel Johnson, an all-American soccer player for the University of Tennessee who went onto a professional career, now works as an athlete mental health specialist at Onrise. “There are a lot of variables when you transition from school to after,” she said. “You’re trying to separate your identity from the field and figure out your value to the world.”



The helpers



In 1991, Brian Satola graduated from the University of Virginia, where he played football. He’s also the father to two student-athletes and has borne witness to how much things have changed. “There’s so much pressure on these student-athletes today,” he said. “Back when I was in school, the final whistle blew, we dropped off resumes, and found a job. Today, athletes are occupied with their sport full time and then must compete for jobs against kids who have done multiple internships and have stacked resumes.”&nbsp;



During their time at school, these athletes have access to mental health resources. But when they graduate, they lose that structure. “A wall goes up and they’re left to dangle and figure it all out,” Satola said. “Colleges have limited resources to help and can’t provide the breadth of programming needed.”



For this reason, Satola recently helped found LAVA: Life After Virginia, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting U.Va. student-athletes as they navigate this transition. Working in partnership with the school and its athletic director, LAVA focuses on four key pillars: mentorship, mental wellness, alumni engagement, and career transition. “Many of these athletes don’t even know what they want to do after school, so we help pair them with alumni to get micro-internships,” he said. “We also let them hear alumni stories, so that they can understand how to launch a career.”



Satola started with a focus on the football players for now, with hopes that the model will expand to other sports at U.Va. He’s found an advocate in the coach and athletic director, who allow LAVA access to the student-athletes. “Without their support, the program doesn’t succeed,” he said. “The coach is a realist and understands the importance of mentorship and guidance for the players, and we begin offering that support from the start of the recruiting process.”&nbsp;



Johnson would like to see these conversations begin even before high school. “I think we should get to a point where we start talking about the reality of what happens after sport at the youth level,” she said.&nbsp;



The LAVA program models itself similarly to&nbsp;<a href="https://fightingirish.com/student-athlete-services-launches-4-for-forever-program/">“4 For Forever”</a>&nbsp;at the University of Notre Dame, whose intended goal is to support the student-athlete in a holistic manner, including preparing them for life after graduation. A former student-athlete created the Notre Dame program, and like U.Va., works with an external partner, called Life After Notre Dame.&nbsp;



It was at a LAVA event that Muskett connected with Satola and to his first real job. “I’ve learned that I can apply some of the same principles I learned as an athlete to my career,” he said.



Identifying those assets, as well as what careers might be of interest, is key. “Athletes need to identify what transferable skills they have and what jobs might be good fits for that,” Furlow explained. “What are you good at? What do you do for free time that you enjoy?”&nbsp;



Over their careers, these athletes have developed many transferrable skills, including time management, leadership, communication, and a hefty dose of confidence. But until someone points this out, they may not recognize how well they can apply those attributes in the real world. “We already possess the necessary skills,” said Alexis Hornbuckle, who played basketball at University of Tennessee and then won a W.N.B.A. championship with the Detroit Shock. “You’ve earned your athletic arrogance, and that comes across as confidence in a job interview. That can win in any space.”&nbsp;



Conversely, that confidence can sometimes prove tricky. For athletes who are used to existing at the pinnacle of sport, understanding that they won’t be starting out as C.E.O. is a necessary reality check. Beyond the Athlete, Acompora’s organization, offers former athletes one-on-one mentorships to help them strategize a path forward and soon will add a community-focused membership, too. “Our goal is to help students keep the training wheels on for a while as they transition,” she said.&nbsp;&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/IMG_1053-1024x768.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-2852"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Members of the Onrise team, including Kim Quigley, Derrick Furlow, and Alexis Hornbuckle, cheer on their shared alma mater, the University of Tennessee. Via Derrick Furlow.</figcaption></figure>



Beyond the Athlete is relatively new, but in a nod to the fact that higher education is beginning to recognize the issues graduating athletes face, the organization is now an official partner of the NAIA. In this capacity, the organization provides mindset coaching, routine optimization, and identity creation. “There’s a growing recognition of the need for these services,” said Acompora. “Schools are learning that they need to care about athletes not just physically and mentally but to help them be well-rounded and prepared.”



Likewise, Onrise provides athletes with mental health specialists like Johnson, albeit in a business-to-business format. “We partner with organizations, and then the athletes can reach out to us without their coaches or anyone else knowing about it,” Furlow said.&nbsp;



Onrise designed this format so that athletes have no hesitation asking for help. All its athlete mentors receive training in a “transition formula” that they can use with the student-athletes. Hornbuckle is one of those mentors. “In my era, we didn’t talk about mental health,” she said. “You didn’t want to be labeled as crazy. That’s changing, but we still want student-athletes to feel safe navigating this space.”



Hornbuckle added that, as a former athlete, she understands the issues students face, and how hard the end of a playing career can be. “It took me four years to truly retire,” she said. “When I quit, I felt like I was letting people down, and that sent me into a bad spiral.”&nbsp;



The transition to the real world for student-athlete is highly individual, and all the newer organizations designed to help recognize that. The former student-athletes at the helm are uniquely equipped to understand the challenges the adjustment period presents.



Ultimately, no matter what supports are available to them, the student-athletes must seek out the help and put in the work for results, said Acompora. “They have to be the butterfly to my cocoon,” she said. “I can show them everything you need to transition, but they have to want it, too.”&nbsp;

The Toughest Game of Their Lives

At the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., the question isn’t just what students will do after graduation — it’s who they’ll become, quite consciously. In an age when higher education is often measured by employment rates, St. Thomas is leaning into a different measure of success: whether students leave not just with a degree, but with a sense of purpose.&nbsp;



Through The Purpose Project, launching this fall, the university is reframing college as a formative journey, one in which reflection, storytelling, and ethical exploration are as essential as more traditional career prep. As the new thinking goes, if all a student takes away from college is an entrée to their first job, they — and the college — have missed the point of higher education.



“I think we fail our students if, when they graduate, all they think college was good for was getting them their first job out of college,” said Christopher Michaelson, professor of business ethics. “But,” he conceded, “we also fail them if we don’t help them get that first job.”



The heart of the new initiative sits in the juncture of that tension between the practical and the profound, at a time when the practical is increasingly under the crosshairs for “return on investment.” Part cultural philosophy, part pedagogical blueprint, The Purpose Project asks a different question than the ones colleges often lead with. The focus is not so much “What career do you want?” but instead “What kind of life are you trying to build?” And then it offers the tools for that blueprint.



From the earliest conception, the project was never meant to be a philosophical silo but a shift in the university’s core culture: a way of weaving reflection and purpose through the fabric of a student’s entire experience. Amy McDonough, chief of staff in the Office of the President, watched this idea take root in the university’s leadership and spread throughout the campus.



“We wanted this to be something that students encounter throughout their time here — not just a one-off retreat or capstone,” she said. “It’s not about putting pressure on students to ‘find their purpose’ in college. That’s too much. Instead, it’s about equipping them to begin the lifelong process of searching.”



The Purpose Project took shape with support from a Lilly Endowment grant and was further strengthened by campus-wide strategic planning, culminating in its inclusion as a priority. University President Rob Vischer allocated institutional support to the initiative, advocating that a St. Thomas education must be more than transactional.



In the process of planning, McDonough and her colleagues began an audit of what was already happening across the university. They discovered that many faculty had been doing work rooted in vocation and reflection. The task then became one of elevation: recognizing that existing work, giving it a common language, and creating a framework that could unify and strengthen it.



Around the same time, a grant through the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University was also awarded to the Office of the Provost to support faculty development around the teaching of virtue and character formation. The initiative focuses on helping faculty explore how virtues such as integrity, empathy, and courage can be integrated into their teaching across disciplines. And it complements other elements of The Purpose Project by reinforcing the university’s mission to cultivate ethical leaders and graduates committed to the common good. 



The touchpoints of The Purpose Project now include a reimagined First-Year Experience course that introduces students to vocational thinking from day one. Sophomore-year retreats, piloted with students from the Dougherty Family College at St. Thomas, are designed to meet students at a mid-college moment when questions of major, direction, and identity converge. For seniors, faculty are working to infuse capstones with deeper reflection on purpose.



Even techniques like storytelling, which might seem tangential to vocation, have been folded into The Purpose Project’s scope. Faculty have partnered with organizations like Narrative 4, co-founded by author Colum McCann and supported by figures like Bono and Sting, to help students tell their own stories. In telling where they’ve come from, students reflect on who they are, who they want to become, and how they want to contribute to the bigger picture. 



“Students come to realize, ‘I can tell my story, and I reflect a little bit about myself.’ And then if you can carry that through, you combine that with what you're learning and how you want to show up in the world,” McDonough said.&nbsp;



Still, she was quick to note that the project, with its exercises and skillsets, is meant to feel organic, not imposed. “It’s about recognizing and elevating the work that’s already happening. When you talk to alums, it’s been a distinctive piece of their education,” she said. “This isn’t about adding more to people’s plates. We’re not talking about taking on another minor. This is work that helps you reflect on the rest of your life.”&nbsp;



A new elective class, designed by Michaelson, the business ethics professor, is one of the most tangible expressions of The Purpose Project. Called “Work and the Good Life,” the course is launching this fall in two pilot sections. The idea had been percolating for years, grounded in Michaelson’s research and personal convictions, as well as research for his book “Is Your Work Worth It?”&nbsp;which explores the intersection of personal fulfillment, ethical responsibility, and professional ambition. The Purpose Project brought together a team of faculty to build the course from the ground up.



Michaelson had long been observing a tension in his students. Many were driven, focused, pragmatic — laser-aimed at securing that first job. But what many lacked, he felt, was space to ask the bigger questions: What is work for? How does it fit into a good life? What responsibilities come with privilege and education?



The course invites students into those questions. Developed with input from faculty across disciplines — chemistry, social work, English, entrepreneurship, and political science — the course is interdisciplinary and intentionally open to students from all majors. One section is dedicated to honors students; the other is open enrollment. But both sections will converge at times for plenary speakers and shared conversation.



Each week, students experience three modes of engagement: a lecture-style session, a small-group discussion, and an asynchronous reflection. Assignments are deliberately experiential and reflective. In one assignment, students interview someone whose job does not require a college degree, seeking to understand motivations and obstacles. In another, they interview a retiree to explore how perspectives on work evolve over time. Throughout, they pursue methods of creating a life path using tools from the world of design thinking, while also building an appreciation of the idea that paths rarely unfold as planned.



The culminating assignment is a letter to a “wise elder”— a parent, mentor, or imagined confidant. In it, students reflect on three fictional job offers, each with its own balance of compensation, passion, and public service. Their task is to justify, in writing, the path they feel drawn to and why. It’s a final exercise in what Michaelson called “asking better questions.”



“I’m not telling students what kind of work they should do,” he said. “I’m helping them ask better questions. That’s the real goal.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“I’m not telling students what kind of work they should do. I’m helping them ask better questions. That’s the real goal.”
</blockquote>



In many ways, the crux of the forward-thinking course lies in a deceptively old-school tool: a physical workbook. Unlike most contemporary digital course materials, this one is tactile. Students write by hand. They fold it open on dorm desks and coffee shop tables. Forming answers this way takes time.



“Research suggests that we learn differently when we actually write by hand,” Michaelson said. “It slows you down. It encourages reflection.”&nbsp;



The workbook includes single-day exercises and multi-part projects, but perhaps its most endearing quality is its intentional tone. Michaelson likened it to the Dr. Seuss book “My Book About Me,” a fill-in-the-blank childhood journal filled with drawings and declarative statements. (“My favorite food is macaroni and cheese! When I grow up I want to be an astronaut!”)



Michaelson’s own children had copies, and years later, enjoyed the glimpses of their past selves. That’s the spirit he hopes this workbook captures: not to infantilize students, but to offer a keepsake of where they were at this moment in life.



“I hope years from now,” he said, “they look back and say, ‘That’s what I thought I wanted… and here’s what I’ve learned since.’”



It’s all part of the focus on intentional work — with an eye to giving back. While some programs and institutions stress an element of being the best X you can be, St. Thomas, as a school founded in a faith tradition, believes in going a step further and linking your goals towards larger obligation.&nbsp;



“We don’t say, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’ If you want to be a really good bank robber, well, that might be O.K. in other places, but we’re more judgy than that,” McDonough laughed. “We say, ‘You can be anything you want to be — for the common good.’ It’s also about what you’re bringing to the world. That’s a distinction here.”

Rethinking Work, Meaning, and Education 

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

At Roanoke College, purpose is part of the brand. With the motto, “Our purpose is to help you find yours,” the school prides itself on guiding young people towards full and rich lives focused on doing good in the world.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The champion of this bold expression of formative education is Roanoke’s President Frank Shushok. With degrees in education and 30 years of experience in the field, Shushok is passionate about the role higher education can play in young people’s personal and professional growth and has compelling reasons for why they should be intertwined. In this interview with LearningWell, Shushok talks about creating counter-cultures on campus in which students are frequently asked meaningful questions without binary answers.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;How has your background influenced your role as a college president?&nbsp;&nbsp;



FS:&nbsp;First of all, I am a person of faith, and what I mean by that is my whole life has been shaped by a sense that life is for a purpose. Believing that my own life can push forward goodness in the world is something that both centers me and compels me. I’ve also been focused on interfaith curiosity and collaboration, and along the way, that has drawn me into many conversations about how people find meaning and purpose in their lives.&nbsp;



Almost all people yearn to understand why they’re here, and I find very few people who, at the end of that question, don’t believe their life should be for something good. Whether I’m sitting at a table with Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, Christians, or atheists, I have found that when we begin a conversation about how we find meaning and purpose in life, designing a life toward virtue is a really powerful connector.&nbsp;



That framing says a lot about how I view higher education. I absolutely believe every student should be able to graduate and find work that can support them economically and support their families. But I also want them to find purpose in that work and to find an alignment between their gifts and talents and a need that the world has. When that happens, energy and hope abound, and who doesn’t want more of that?



I’m such a fan of the good work that’s being done on the science of hope and the idea that hope has three actionable components: goals, pathways, and agency. In short, to have hope, you need a goal you’re shooting for and practical ways to go after it. You also need pathways and a consistent belief that you can get there — agency. What I love about the agency part is some people have plenty of agency and some people are growing in their agency, and that’s the golden time when they need someone to walk alongside them until they have the confidence to make progress toward their goals. That’s our job. Fundamentally, I believe that higher education is there to inspire in students a sense of purpose, shaped by character, and that makes life so much richer for them and for everyone in their orbit — their families, communities, workplaces, etc.&nbsp;&nbsp;



But for whatever reason, I find a lot of college students haven’t thought about how their education can be about connecting to much more than a job-slash-career. Often, it’s not a question or a conversation they’ve been having at home. And it’s not a conversation that they’ve been having in the educational environment they were in prior to college. Sometimes, they make it all the way through college and never have this dialogue with anyone, even within themselves. In fact, they mostly have had one conversation, which is about the return on investment question: “If I go to college, what should I study so I can get a certain job, so I can have a particular level of economic security?”&nbsp;



Those are also good questions, but they’re much more powerful if they’re coupled with other questions like the imperatives we have in our strategic plan, which champions the exploration of purpose, the pursuit of character, and the graduation of leaders. This is a distinction of the Roanoke experience. We’ve created this entity called PLACE (Purpose, Life And Career Exploration) drawn from our old career center model, and what we’re saying here is this process is about so much more than getting a job.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Do you think these imperatives are particularly important at this moment in time?&nbsp;&nbsp;



FS:&nbsp;Absolutely. I found a&nbsp;<a href="https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/on-edge">report</a>&nbsp;released by the Harvard Graduate School of Education sobering. Thirty-six percent of young adults aged 18 to 25 are struggling with anxiety, and 29 percent are dealing with depression. The study reveals some likely suspects, including worrying about finances, feeling pressure to achieve, being concerned with the world unraveling, and feeling like they don't matter to others. But the number one driver of poor mental health for young adults was a lack of meaning, purpose, and direction in their lives, with 58 percent reporting. We can’t ignore that deep yearning to understand what makes life matter.



LW:&nbsp;How do you go about “meaning making” with students?&nbsp;&nbsp;



FS:&nbsp;There are many practices to engage, but we need practices that shape culture so that culture shapes practices. What I mean by that is we first ask good questions, which will help us get good at being thoughtful and spur us to think more deeply about better questions worthy of our time. In a way, it’s countercultural. The power of a question is a crucial thing to acknowledge. Occasionally, I experiment to see how long it takes for someone to ask me a meaningful question — a question that asks me to reveal something about who I am, what I believe, where I’m going, what’s motivating me, and why I care.



If you pay attention, you can go a whole day without anyone asking you that kind of question. I think what we can do in a place like Roanoke College or any institution of higher education is to create a culture where we teach ourselves to be countercultural and to ask questions of meaning and purpose, questions that engage all of our not-so-disparate parts: our intellectual selves, our emotional selves, our moral selves. But we have to acknowledge we live in a world where people are moving at warp speed. Technology overwhelms people, and no one’s asking them meaningful questions. In turn, they’re not developing the habit of asking other people meaningful questions. Without meaningful questions, there is little need for astute listeners. And when we don’t develop astute listeners, we’re often not encouraging thoughtful learners.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“Without meaningful questions, there is little need for astute listeners. And when we don’t develop astute listeners, we’re often not encouraging thoughtful learners.”
</blockquote>



I have two questions that I keep at the forefront of my mind every day as I approach my work: First, what am I trying to increase the probability of occurring through my daily activities, conversations, and experiences? And second, what am I doing when I’m doing what I’m doing? See, every one of us is engaged in seemingly unidimensional transactions, but underneath them is a greater purpose. Whether you’re serving food in the dining center or you’re advising or you’re standing in front of a classroom, the kinds of questions you ask and the kinds of listening you do and the way that you view your purpose — what you’re doing when you’re doing what you’re doing — it shapes everything. So many people on a college campus don’t understand the incredibly transformational and powerful role they play as educators when they enact the important and powerful pedagogical practice of asking meaningful questions, followed by deep and curious listening.



LW:&nbsp;How do you get a whole campus to embrace this approach?&nbsp;&nbsp;



FS:&nbsp;It’s slow and iterative, like all transformations. In many ways, the headwinds pull you away from doing these things, so you must drive into the wind. You must be committed and undeterred when the car’s shaky. Sometimes, you have to slow down a little, meaning it will take a little extra time, but it will be worth it. But if you believe that the whole world can shift by doing this, you can stay the course.



There’s a book that I’m particularly fond of by Peter Block called “Community: The Structure of Belonging,” where he talks about the small group as being the unit of transformation. You think of these movements as top-down, and they are to some degree because one of the first things you must do is declare a shift. In our case, we determined and stated that we would make the exploration of purpose, the pursuit of character, and the graduation of leaders a distinction of Roanoke College.&nbsp;



But a stated plan becomes a cultural transformation at the small group level. It’s the small conversations. What new conversations do we want to have, where will we conduct them, and who at every level will start? These things happen at the micro level, and then they become exponentially more likely to occur naturally on a campus. Over time, you’ll be surprised that everything has been transformed.



My assumption about how we build people of character and shape virtue and moral fiber is that none of it happens outside the context of community, and you can’t desire community until you’ve experienced it. One of the immediate structural challenges when people enter a new environment is to help them experience community. There are a lot of young people who come to a college campus who haven’t experienced it, and they don’t know that they need it. They’re not going to look for it. We have many, many lonely young people. It’s up to us to play a structural role in creating an environment that increases the likelihood that community happens.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Would you connect this work to what employers say we need more of: people who understand people?&nbsp;



FS:&nbsp;Yes. When you think about the technical skills that are required to build a 21st century aircraft, it requires incredible knowledge of physics, engineering, aerodynamics. But we also need people that can convene other people from different vantage points and communicate in adaptive ways that allow for understanding based on different acculturation. And look what happens from a character or virtue standpoint. If there is pressure to produce something in a particular timeframe that may not be safe, that’s not a technical question. That’s a moral question.



You really need expertise and character. You need a competent “what” and a firm “why.” You need to know what you’re doing when you’re doing what you’re doing. Are you taking care of humanity? Are you loving people? Are you looking for opportunities to lift others up? Are you viewing yourself as part of a greater community? Those are the kinds of questions, the kinds of values, that when coupled with the job that you have, make such a powerful combination.



LW:&nbsp;Does higher education have a role to play in addressing the polarization we are experiencing on so many levels?&nbsp;



FS:&nbsp;Yes. I think this is why I’m attracted to this conversation of character. Most of the skills that are important in character formation are learning to listen and asking good questions, which may be as simple as forming a meaningful question, versus a question with a binary answer. You get better at these things when you’re equipped, and then you get to practice in an environment where there are people with diverse viewpoints and different backgrounds. And I think a legitimate critique of higher education is that we have preferred echo chambers and haven’t been interested in listening to and learning from some voices, and there are some good reasons why that’s been the case. But if we view leadership as growing the skill and capacity to bring people together to achieve a common goal that is good for all, then yes, we can widen the circle. And I think those who can do that most effectively must be well-informed people of character. Because that is what will keep you in a place of productivity when times are tough and conversations are hard.&nbsp;&nbsp;



You can reach LearningWell editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

When Questions Are the Answer 

Here at LearningWell, we are always interested in new approaches university leaders take to foster community on campus—with students, among students, and within the faculty and administration. So our ears pricked up when, at a recent gathering of educators, we heard Connie Book, the president of Elon University, speak about her practice of ambushing parents with good news phone calls. 



We asked her to expand on this and other things she does to help cultivate connection. Her experience and insights tap into her years as the first female provost and dean at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C., and far earlier to her own upbringing in a large family as the sixth of nine children.



LW:&nbsp;I heard you speak recently about your Friday phone calls to parents of students who’d done something noteworthy. I love this idea of catching students in the act of doing something good. Can you tell us more about it?&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;Sometimes it's when they've done something like won an academic award, but other times it's when they've taken on some role on campus, like they're on a committee or helping us with something new that we're trying to accomplish. Or sometimes it's just students that I think, Oh, he's really interesting. He just makes the student body more present. It's such an easy thing to do. The parents are always grateful, and the kids are, too.



I do it on Friday afternoons because at the end of a long week, Fridays can be a day that some unpleasant things get dumped before the weekend. When I worked at The Citadel, the military guys would never take appointments on Friday afternoons because they said that’s when the second lieutenants came in and wanted to dump the problems on them, and they didn't want to let this ruin their weekend. So it's my realization that my Fridays could, depending on what was going on campus, really stage either a terrible weekend or a relaxing weekend. So I started being a lot more intentional about Friday afternoons.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;As a mother of college kids myself, I imagine it could be really moving for a parent to get that call. Can you give us an example?



CB:&nbsp;The first call I made was in my second year here at Elon when one of our first-generation college students won a Goldwater Award. If you're in higher ed, you understand what that means. But I thought, I think her parents don't even realize what a significant achievement that was. So I just decided on Friday afternoon, I had the staff pull her record, and I called her father. They see the out-of-state area code for the university come up on their phone, so the first thing I say is, “Your child is healthy and fine and not in trouble.” Just to get all that off the table. I did have such a powerful conversation with him that day. It felt so good to share with him what a remarkable daughter he had and that she was doing such good things, and then explain what the Goldwater was and how much our community here enjoyed having her. And then he shared about all the hard work she had done to get to college from the time she was very young. It was a conversation about the hard work that young people do to make sure they have a good opportunity, the process, and the appreciation when scholarships come through and they can afford college. Just leaving home from Arizona to come to Elon was a risk. After I hung up, I thought, Wow, I should do this more often because it was driving my sense of mission and purpose about the work. You can get so wrapped up in politics or budgeting or some other challenge that it can be a barrier to really feeling the mission, and on those calls, I feel the mission and the impact it's having.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;What are some other ways you make yourself more present for the student body? Do I recall hearing you mention something about Ping-Pong?



CB:&nbsp;Yes. Friday is my day to connect with students. So I play table tennis at one o'clock for an hour. They sign up on a whiteboard. There's always a line there to play. Students will say, “This was on my bucket list, to come play with you before I graduated.” I have parents show up, because they've heard I do it, and they're good at it. So they're like, “Oh, the next time I'm on campus, I want to play the president.”



LW:&nbsp;And how did this activity occur to you?&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;When my son was in middle school, he really started answering every question with one word answers. “Yes. No.” I could not get him to talk about anything. So I told him that winter, let's bring the Ping-Pong table inside. We had played occasionally, but we started playing every day. And then I noticed that because you talk when you play, he would start talking more after a couple of sets.&nbsp;



That’s true with the students here, too. I'll always say, “Well, what's your major? Where are you from?” And we get talking. My son now is an Olympic-rated table tennis player, so I know how to play, and I like to win. If they have a good hit and beat me, I'm always like, “Aaand … What's your name again?”



LW:&nbsp;So this game isn’t just a walk in the park! But that is true about communication with teens, having that shared activity to get you talking.&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;I actually&nbsp;do&nbsp;walks with students, too, a couple of times a semester. I'll invite student groups, post where I’m going, and anybody can show up and join us. What's really funny about that is that students, when they see where I'm going to be, sometimes they do come to lobby me for different things. I had some theater students ask for a budget increase. It's almost like I had a little tracker on me. “Yeah, we know where she is.”



LW:&nbsp;Ha! Future politicians. What about community building with faculty, staff, administration? Do you have strategies for outreach with them as well?



CB:&nbsp;I would say our culture is pretty open already. Like last week, I had two faculty conversations that I announced literally on Monday and had them on Friday. And I always have audience microphones. I have three suggestion boxes on campus and an online one where anybody can tell me anything.



LW:&nbsp;Are they used?&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;Yes. And they do tell me anything. Some are like, “The doorknobs are broken here.” But they are usually about things that make the workplace or the learning environment better. “Have you considered doing this?”&nbsp;



I am a believer in letting people know you are open, saying to them essentially, “Hey, if you see something, let me know because I can't see what you can see.” It may not create the solution they have in mind. Bring me the problem, but don't get too wedded to the solution. They have to be open to us&nbsp;problem-solving together.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Do you have an example of some kind of problem brought to you that way?



CB:&nbsp;We have an ombuds program here for the faculty. It's very official. You have to do the training. We pay a stipend. But one of the staff people that serves as the ombuds also happens to be an employee in Human Resources. And people said, “I'm not comfortable going to HR to talk to the ombuds person because it's supposed to be a confidential unit.” I had never thought of that because we have been doing this through HR for a long time, and it never occurred to me that people saw that as a disciplinary unit so that there was hesitancy. We did add another ombuds person to the mix. And we worked together on the job description to give people more choice.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;What kinds of things did you learn from the requests coming into the ombuds person?&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;What was really powerful about that is that I was always thinking it was workplace disagreements, but I learned a lot that people need somebody to talk to about personal challenges. They were coming to her for things like food insecurity, car repairs. And I was like, Wow, it's almost like pastoral care. We have on-site counseling services for students but not employees. So it was a good learning moment for me as well.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Is that going to spark any kind of a change in the way you offer counseling services or pastoral services for employees?&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;It could. We have a chaplain here, and the chaplain has an emergency fund. Part of it was letting the ombuds person know they have a resource in the chaplain, who can help. But for some people, religion might be a barrier, too.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Is there anything else you’d like to add about community building? We’re at a very difficult moment nationally—both socially and politically, as well as educationally. Is there anything you do at Elon to break down barriers?&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;Well, we have 7,000 students on campus at Elon, and there’s a longstanding community dead-period—a time where you don't have any classes—on Tuesday and Thursday mornings around 10 o'clock. On Tuesdays, we have College Coffee—free coffee and donuts outside when the weather is good—and there's always several hundred people that come. And then on Thursdays, we have a spiritual program with singing. We’re not religiously affiliated. We’re independent. But there's certainly a really vibrant feeling with multiple faiths represented.&nbsp;



Also, we have a street that runs down the middle of campus, and during really difficult times, we will put a chalkboard out there. The day after the election, for example, we put up boards inviting the hopes that students had about the future. Politically, we don't overly lean one way or the other, so the responses were really down the middle. Like, “There's happiness for all to find joy in every day.” Or, “Strength and unity. God is good. We can all love and accept each other, no questions asked.” And then we kept them up in the student union for several weeks. I decided to take some pictures of them because every now and then I like to remember that part of what we're doing on college campuses is the critical work of a future that we won't be alive to witness, but we are planting all these seeds for a really strong future for all of us all around the world. To me, that is purpose-driven work. And I like to pull it out and be reminded.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
"I like to remember that part of what we're doing on college campuses is the critical work of a future that we won't be alive to witness."
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LW:&nbsp;You have a very insightful and empathic way of talking about students and the experience of leading a university, something people might not expect to evolve from working in a military environment. How did you come by this mindset?&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;That's a really good question. Growing up in my own family, I'm number six of nine kids, and both of my parents were educators. I think about all the great lessons of sharing and compromise and negotiation that you learn in a family. I think one of the things as a president that I think a lot about is that I see and witness things. And then my job is often to tell the story of that to people who influence the resources and regulatory policy that shape the world we live in on campus.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Thank you for that plug for the benefits of a large family. I have five children, but it doesn’t always feel like the world sees that as a positive.&nbsp;



CB:&nbsp;Oh yeah, the good lessons of humility, of being an equal and doing your part. My job was to do the laundry growing up, three loads a day.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;The chore chart. And the role of fairness and truth-telling. And squabbling and learning to work it out. Those are powerful things.



CB:&nbsp;I have been really aware of the power of this witnessing piece. And so now I think I'm intentionally looking all the time, talking to parents, and wanting to be effective in sharing the power of the work that's going on on college campuses. Especially at a time when the negative rhetoric is suggesting that it's not needed and it's not worth it. Yet we all know 99 percent of what we're experiencing on a college campus is good and powerful.&nbsp;

Not by the Book

If you studied or worked at a health-promoting university, would you know it? Would you recognize the institution’s commitment to wellbeing in your daily activities, your relationships, your environment? For the colleges and universities that are part of the&nbsp;<a href="http://ushpcn.org/">U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network</a>&nbsp;(USHPCN),&nbsp;the answer to these questions is yes, or at least, that is the aspiration.&nbsp;



The&nbsp;USHPCN is a&nbsp;coalition of colleges and universities dedicated to infusing health into their everyday operations, business practices, and academic mandates. It was launched in 2015 to promote the “Okanagan Charter: An International Charter for Health Promoting Universities and Colleges,” which offers&nbsp;a blueprint for making wellbeing an institution’s foundational principle.



As it celebrates its 10-year anniversary, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.healthpromotingcampuses.org/okanagan-charter">Okanagan Charter</a>&nbsp;(OC) is now an institutional priority at 39 schools in the United States. Around 300 others are not official “adopters” of the charter but participate as “members” of its broader network. For these colleges and universities, the O.C. serves many purposes. It is a pledge, a road map, and in some cases, a license to experiment with new approaches outside the traditional lanes of higher education. More than anything perhaps, the Okanagan Charter is a major shift in thinking about what constitutes wellbeing on campus, as well as who is responsible.&nbsp;&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
The Okanagan Charter is a major shift in thinking about what constitutes wellbeing on campus, as well as who is responsible.
</blockquote>



“With the Okanagan Charter, institutions around the country are reimagining higher education as a catalyst for human and planetary flourishing on every campus, everywhere,” said Sislena Grocer Ledbetter, chair of USHPCN and associate vice president of counseling health and wellbeing at Western Washington University.&nbsp;



International, Indigenous Origins&nbsp;



The Okanagan Charter reflects an international recognition of the influence of higher education on “people, place, and planet”—the three domains frequently cited within the common language the OC provides.&nbsp;“Higher education,” the charter goes, “plays a central role in all aspects of the development of individuals, communities, societies and cultures—locally and globally.” Indeed, colleges and universities serve as not only large institutions but major employers, creative centers of learning and research, and educators of future generations.&nbsp;



The OC grew out of the work of the World Health Organization’s Health Promoting Universities movement of the 1990s.&nbsp;&nbsp;The document was formally launched at a&nbsp;2015 International Conference on the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus in Kelowna, Canada. The first draft of the charter was based on input from 225 people with the support of a writing team and an additional 380 delegates who critiqued and refined the document. Its introduction includes an acknowledgement that the OC was developed on the territory of the Okanagan Nation.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In addition to recognizing the influence of universities on people, place and planet, the charter’s creation and early appeal was in response to the growing international crisis in mental health. According to the&nbsp;<a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6408297/">Healthy Minds Study</a>,&nbsp;the rate of (mental health) treatment (for college students) increased from 19% in 2007 to 34% by 2017, while the percentage of students with lifetime diagnoses increased from 22% to 36%.&nbsp;By 2015, it was becoming apparent that campuses in the United States were indeed not well.&nbsp;



One recent&nbsp;<a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2024.1443937/full">paper</a>, “The Okanagan Charter to improve wellbeing in higher education: shifting the paradigm,” suggests a public health approach is the way to solve this problem which led to overwhelmed counseling resources and concerns over inconsistent help-seeking. One of the authors is Rebecca&nbsp;Kennedy,&nbsp;assistant vice president for student health and wellbeing&nbsp;at the&nbsp;University of Alabama at Birmingham, the first school in the United States to sign the Charter.&nbsp;



“For many years now, universities have been trying to help students on their campuses thrive and flourish, increasing the availability of services on campus,” Kennedy and her co-authors explain. “Many of these services, including mental health treatment, are directed towards individuals, which is important for that individual, but does nothing to create conditions that prevent the need for these services at the population level.”&nbsp;



In their research, the authors found a paucity of population-based strategies and little examination on system-wide approaches. “There was little evidence of policy, systems, or settings wellbeing strategies in the higher education literature. There was a lack of scientific investigation and evaluation examining the impact of changes to public policies, regulations and laws that impact the health of college students.”



The Okanagan Charter is an effort to fill that void first by creating a framework for improved wellbeing at the population-level on campus and then capturing data that will show its effect over time. According to the charter, “Health promotion requires a positive, proactive approach, moving ‘beyond a focus on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions’&nbsp;that create and enhance health in settings, organizations and systems, and address health determinants.”&nbsp;



For colleges and universities, this means applying a “settings and systems” approach to scenarios one might think of as singular or isolated. One example the authors offer is the diet of college students. While adding more nutritional food to the dining hall menu may be one (downstream) solution to improving students’ notoriously unhealthy eating habits, keeping dining halls open and accessible after hours or during breaks so students avoid resorting to vending machines would be the upstream approach. A Campus Determinants Model, within the Okanagan Charter and mapped to person, place and planet, further demonstrates these distinctions.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Understanding What Institutional Wellbeing Looks Like



The document, which is 11 pages, provides institutions with a common vision, language, and principles on how to become health and wellbeing-promoting campuses. It includes two calls to action: “Embed health into all aspects of campus culture, across the administration, operations, and academic mandates; and lead health promotion action and collaboration locally and globally.”



What that looks like for campuses within a sector as diverse and tenuously connected as higher education is the big question and the primary work of&nbsp;&nbsp;the&nbsp;USHPCN. Associated with the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.healthpromotingcampuses.org/networks/">International Health Promoting Universities &amp; Colleges Network</a>, the USHPCN supports campuses in interpreting and operationalizing the Okanagan Charter framework, acknowledging the unique factors that influence the OC’s adoption on each campus. Designees from the institutional members, as well as from the schools who have formally adopted the charter, work as a network, meeting regularly and sharing best practices and metrics.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Julie Edwards is the assistant vice president of student health and wellbeing at Cornell University and the chair-elect of the steering committee of the USHPCN. She is well known among the OC community, as she chairs the potential adopter cohort and is frequently called upon to consult with schools just starting their journey. She urged Cornell to adopt the Charter in 2022 and has made it a pillar of her work and that of the entire university with the full engagement of partners, from faculty members and facility managers to the president’s office.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“First and foremost, the Okanagan Charter gives us shared language and a shared vision,” Edwards said of the OC’s implementation at Cornell. “An unintended but powerful outcome is that people have become genuinely excited to understand this health-promoting concept and their role within it. Wellbeing is no longer looked at as just an initiative from Cornell Health.”



Edwards said Cornell had an existing foundation of wellbeing support for students, staff, and faculty, as well as for the planet through sustainability initiatives. The Okanagan Charter was the Venn diagram that put it all together. After the adoption of the Charter, the school created multiple guidelines that align with the guiding principles. For example, if you’re thinking of revising or creating a new policy at Cornell, you are asked to consider the question, “Is this health promoting?”&nbsp;&nbsp;



These criteria are used in decision-making throughout campus. To diffuse some of the academic stress among Cornell’s high performing students, changes have been made to transcript policies, including to avoid discriminating against students who have had to take an incomplete. Many colleges have also implemented credit caps to reduce stress of taking over 20 credits in a semester. Another recent policy change is that employees at Cornell are now allowed two additional floating holidays to use as they please.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Through the Okanagan Charter, Cornell developed a Community of Practice—a structure that Edwards describes as “bringing together diverse folks who have shared goals to work together to solve complex problems.” With the participation of about 150 people on campus, the Community of Practice is also working on assessing the impact of the policies that have been adopted.&nbsp;



“My hope is that when students, staff and faculty come to Cornell, they can feel a sense of care and compassion and support for their wellbeing. They can feel that they have equitable access to the services that are provided, and they are able to connect with others in meaningful ways to flourish.”&nbsp;



At a very different campus, the team from University of Massachusetts, Amherst is equally as enthusiastic, though less far along in the OC process.   “We’ve been forming relationships, listening to speakers, really cementing the excitement for this concept as we move into implementation,” said Elizabeth Cracco, the assistant vice chancellor of campus life and wellbeing. 



Cracco said the Okanagan Charter, which is now part of the university’s strategic plan, came into view after the pandemic when every stakeholder on campus focused on a common goal. “During the pandemic, there was such a great demonstration of serving the greater good of the campus, and that made us want to keep going, to keep thinking collectively around wellbeing.”



Connecting the OC’s population-based approach to student mental health is a welcome strategy for Cracco, who is a trained clinical psychologist with student counseling within her purview. She said the Okanagan Charter allowed her to add a layer to this work, expanding their existing focus on providing individual mental health support.



“The systems we have built to deal with students who are in distress have not gone away,” she said. “But using this collective impact framework, we are able to consider larger issues, such as, ‘How are we going to undo some of the intended or unintended consequences of everyone’s attention going to a screen instead of each other or themselves?’ That’s a whole campus problem. That’s faculty, staff and students.”&nbsp;



Cracco said what excites her the most about the work is the unexpected partnerships it is forging with other stakeholders on campus. As was the case during the pandemic, she is working alongside numerous teams on campus that are experimenting with new ideas, including creating a greater sense of belonging in the classroom and even making changes to the built environment. “We have a faculty member in the school of architecture who is working with her senior students on the redesign of our residence hall lounges,” Cracco said.&nbsp;



Cross-sector partnerships are a commonly reported benefit for schools who have adopted the Okanagan Charter. For some, like Furman University in South Carolina, the OC framework was a natural extension of what was already happening on campus. Since 2018, the school has offered the trademarked initiative “The Furman Advantage,” a student-centered pathway that requires a first- and second-year program combining academic advising and student wellbeing.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Furman’s involvement in the Okanagan Charter, first as an institutional member and then as a full adopter, was initiated by the Wellbeing Strategy Committee, co-chaired by Dean of Students Jason Cassidy and Meghan Slining, a faculty member in health sciences who is a well-known public health expert on campus.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Cassidy said he had a good feeling about the Okanagan Charter right away and appreciated being part of a learning community that the USHPCN provides.&nbsp;



&nbsp;“People from campuses all over the country are really open to sharing what they’ve done, how they’ve done it, and meeting with you one-on-one,” said Cassidy. “But there’s no playbook. They give us a unified skeleton, and then it’s up to us to put the meat on the bones that makes the most sense for our campus community. I think that’s the only way you could get something like this accomplished.”&nbsp;



While the adoption of the OC may have been an easy lift at Furman, it still represents a significant change in thinking on campus. Slining said she is frequently asked to explain the OC to people who, in another world, would never be expected to understand it. Their response continues to pleasantly surprise her.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“This is not business as usual where the only people who care about health and wellbeing are from the health sciences,” she said. “Centers and groups all over campus are writing the language into their mission statements and figuring out how to incorporate it into their work. They’re fired up.”&nbsp;

A Framework for Flourishing 

As our plane rolled into the terminal, my seat neighbor asked if it was my first time in Egypt. I told him it was — my first in the country and second in the Middle East, although I hadn’t been back since before I started college and studying Arabic. He told me he was born and raised in Cairo and coming home after a few months coaching squash in Dallas.&nbsp;



We turned out to have more in common than being about the same age on the same plane. When he heard I went to Harvard, his face lit up in recognition. He quickly listed off the names of squash players, friends of his, who had been students. Some were Egyptian, others French and Canadian. Several of them I knew. We had lived together in the same dorm for years.



Within seconds of landing somewhere new, I met someone familiar. At the time, we laughed about the world being small. Now I wonder if it isn’t just that Harvard is big, its international network as wide as its roots in Cambridge are deep.&nbsp;



I thought about my chance encounter in Cairo after news broke of the Trump Administration’s order for Harvard to stop enrolling international students. Around a quarter of my classmates came from other countries. The concept of their absence is difficult to grasp and harder to swallow. What rare moments of connection would be missed? How many global touchpoints lost?



After four years studying the Middle East, I felt tied to the place upon arrival not because of the books I read or language I learned but because of the relationships I formed. This international education was a personal one, and it had lasted long after my Arabic began to fade.&nbsp;



When I was a student, even academic interactions with international students were personal. There was the friend from Marseille who edited my emails in French when I needed to reach out to subjects in Paris for my senior thesis. There was another from Cairo who, sitting across from me in the dining hall, would look up from her own math homework to answer my questions about Arabic. There were countless who deepened my understanding of course material — a place, culture, or tradition — because they reflected on it in the context of their own upbringing.



My most important relationship with someone from outside the U.S. had nothing to do with the Middle East. She was my randomly assigned first-year roommate, now my best friend.&nbsp;



On paper (and in reality), we’re different. She arrived in the U.S. from the other side of the world for the first time a week before move-in, while I drove the 25 minutes up I-90 from the Boston suburbs the day of. She worried about economics lectures delivered in English, which she was still mastering. I cried over essays assigned in the only language I’d ever really known or been asked to know. She spoke her mother tongue softly on the phone to her mom in the mornings when the time difference was manageable. I sometimes saw mine for lunch on a weekday.



That my house became both our closest home bonded us. We’ve stayed close for a million other reasons: a similar outlook on the value of family and friends; a common sense of humor and appreciation for art; the love of tennis we each inherited from our parents.



More than anything, I think we like listening to each other, chit-chatting. A lot of the time, our views on an idea, a social issue, a personal problem, align. When they don’t, I consider why we’re divided and often, how where each of us comes from has informed the way we think and operate now. That tendency to want to understand difference, I hope, has made me not just a better friend but a better person, maybe even a better writer.



We’re not friends&nbsp;because&nbsp;she’s from another place. But I recognize and admire all the ways her home and upbringing are inseparable from herself&nbsp;&nbsp;— her braveness and boldness, intelligence, humor, and singular thoughtfulness towards me and the world.



Sometimes a friend from a different country teaches you about the world; other times they teach you about the person you want to be.&nbsp;



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Sometimes a friend from a different country teaches you about the world; other times they teach you about the person you want to be.&nbsp;
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I know other students have had similar experiences. In her Harvard commencement speech last month, master’s student Yurong “Luanna” Jiang opened with her own testament to the university’s global footprint: While completing a summer internship in Mongolia, she received a phone call from classmates in Tanzania who needed help translating the Chinese instructions for their washing machine. “There we were: an Indian and a Thai, calling me, a Chinese in Mongolia, to decipher a washer in Tanzania,” she said. “And we all studied together, here at Harvard.” The crowd erupted.



Those cheers, I’m convinced, signaled agreement as much as pride. I imagine every recent Harvard student and alum could point to an instance when the university shrunk the world down a size, made a strange place knowable. They wouldn’t have had to study the Middle East like me or international development like Jiang, either. These moments usually come down to something with more staying power than a shared class or major: friendship.

Global Connections

When the save-the-date from my son’s fraternity landed in my inbox, I was confused. I had never heard of a “Mom’s Weekend.” His older siblings hadn’t participated in the Greek system in college. The email mentioned a few activities and reminded us to bring a contribution for the silent auction. Photos of past baskets were attached to guide our creativity: a customized Yeti cooler filled with beer; a margarita-themed bucket with cactus-shaped glasses, limes, and a handle of tequila; a poker-motif basket with cards, bourbon, whiskey, and cigars.



Mom’s (and Dad’s) Weekend, I learned, is a tradition in the Greek system. It’s an opportunity to have special time with your student and get to know their friends during a number of planned activities. This is no small thing for mothers adjusting to seeing far less of their children, feeling your role in their daily life fade, to some extent, into the background of a Facetime square. Our Mom’s Weekend schedule was pretty open, with just a handful of organized social events, among them a cocktail-reception-house-tour, followed by a pub night, mimosa brunch, and silent auction, with proceeds benefiting chapter activities.&nbsp;



I’m not a drinker, but all of it was a welcome window into my son’s freshman experience, more than a thousand miles from home. I decided to make it a road trip and visit family along the way. I gassed up the car and packed up my auction contribution — a barbecue-themed basket of grill utensils, spices, and sauces. (Sorry boys, not that kind of sauce.)



But I was coming into the weekend carrying more than my basket. My own experience at a small university was one where fraternities played an outsized role in campus culture and where, as editor of the newspaper, I was drawn by a campus controversy into the darker aspects of Greek loyalty. But that was then; this is now. I was hopeful I would come away from Mom’s Weekend with the sense that belonging to a fraternity today, in its more modern form, represented a positive opportunity for community among young men, including my son.



He is a private person, and I had only the vaguest idea of how his pledging process had gone earlier in the spring. Because he hadn’t participated in many of the fall rush activities — meaning, he hadn’t let it dominate his orientation to college social life — his options were limited, though he said the house he’d joined was “chill” with “good guys.” In his shorthand, that meant the parties weren’t the craziest, or the members too intense about their demands on his time. His grades were good, he had a steady girlfriend in his dorm, and nothing about the road to initiation had set off alarm bells at least from our parental perspective. We’d gotten a letter from the fraternity president assuring parents that they took their anti-hazing vows seriously.



***



During my own senior spring in college, I was working with the newspaper staff late one night to close an issue when the telephone rang on the office wall. An anonymous caller claimed to have recently broken into a secretive fraternity’s notorious windowless chapel and stolen decades of ledgers. In the pages, long-ago members had allegedly recorded their thoughts and activities, and over the years, generations of brothers had added notes the margins. The caller offered to bring me the ledgers.



At the time, I had only an English major’s best guess at the intricacies of journalistic freedoms and liabilities, something I would later study as part of a master’s degree in my chosen field. But I suspected I should not accept original stolen materials. So the caller made photocopies and left them in my car. There were references to some unsolved crimes on campus, chilling racial commentary, coded language about sexual encounters, and hazing episodes that had taken an alarming turn. More recent entries addressed changing rules and attitudes on campus and vowed that if the house were compelled to “build bridges,” they should only give enough lip service to remain the same. I began writing an article and called university administrators to let them know. They didn’t tell me I couldn’t run the piece. But they did advise against it and said they couldn’t insulate me from repercussions.&nbsp;



After the article appeared, the rallies and protests began. There were calls to suspend or ban the fraternity and some to eliminate the Greek system on campus, a move that had been raised for years. Fraternity and sorority members pointed to the benefits of bonding and the charitable deeds done. The fraternity’s alumni leaders flew in with lawyers and investigators, determined to find out who had been behind the theft. I laid low. It wasn’t my place to offer opinions or get involved in debates. But I’d taken the call and written the article, and my car tire was slashed, and the university house where I lived as an RA had a window broken. I heard the fraternity’s legal team wanted to speak with me, but there was never a subpoena. The state’s shield law protected journalists’ right not to reveal their sources, but whether that covered university students remained to be seen. My father asked me to keep a low profile because he’d rather not take out a second mortgage to explore that precedent in court.&nbsp;



Things quieted down a few weeks later when students left campus for the summer, but the fallout went on for years. The fraternity was suspended, moved to private property, and went underground. The faculty voted to abolish the Greek system, but the motion was symbolic and not supported by the administration. After I graduated, I received a manilla envelope in the mail with a printed list of companies that supposedly would never hire me. A year later, after I’d begun working at a magazine, I had a surprise visit. The receptionist said an industry publicist had arrived for an appointment and buzzed a man inside. He sat down in my cubicle, pulled a tape recorder out of his briefcase (there was once a thing called a briefcase), and started asking questions about the night I received the call at the newspaper office.&nbsp;



***



Then and now, the takeaway for me about the Greek system is this: What happens when impressionable young adults join societies like these? Membership fosters group loyalty through a secretive selection and initiation process, rituals, identity, and language. To what extent is that loyalty inclined to supersede the individual morality these young people are still developing? This is the place where you live and (literally, with fraternity cooks) the hand that feeds you. These are the people you spend your weekends with, gravitate towards in classes, and have likely committed to live with going forward. Brotherhood, and all the ways that is entwined in your life, is a lot of your world.&nbsp;



Loyalty is a funny thing when you live smack in the middle of it. It isn’t just a friendship where you go out for pizza and play video games, particularly if something doesn’t sit right in this new family-away-from-home. If we stick with the video game metaphor, you’ve been initiated by the people who created the world-building behind it. That shared game is your universe, and it feels like everyone in other Greek organizations have their own, too. The roles and personas and tones are set, whether it’s inside jokes or repeated stories, or old ledgers.&nbsp;



The experiences you have in college, positive and negative, go on to shape your character and identity, as well as your resilience in the face of adversity. The lessons learned during these years contribute to making you&nbsp;you&nbsp;— either because of the environment, or in spite of it. A college’s atmosphere set by the administration and faculty can make the difference between a student feeling like their school has their back, or doesn’t. Mine didn’t.&nbsp;



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The lessons learned during these years contribute to making you&nbsp;you&nbsp;— either because of the environment, or in spite of it.
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Mom’s Weekend was, to me, a smashing success, in part because most of what we did together existed beyond the footprint of the “weekend” itself. My son and I did a few of the organized activities, and I met some of his new fraternity brothers. But we skipped the bar crawls, and because it was too rainy to hike, went to the gym to work out. We had a delightful three-hour dinner at a local restaurant, and I got to know his lovely, down-to-earth girlfriend. She described for me her own pledging process, the pressure from sororities to present a cool image that’s your own impeccable brand, right down to a written statement about yourself and proof of a masterful social media presence. She is pursuing a demanding major and seemed to have kept pledging in perspective, though she saw it wreak havoc on others. A few weeks after Mom’s Weekend, I saw a story in the news that a fraternity at my son’s school had just been suspended for 40 years — though it was later revised to 15 — for repeatedly violating hazing rules while they were already on probation. They had been paddling pledges at the off-campus home of an alum.&nbsp;



My son has confided to his father that he’s had some mild pressure from upperclassmen who say he doesn’t spend enough time at the house. He’s already committed to living in the fraternity during his sophomore year and, just recently, also in his junior year at one of the fraternity’s off-campus annexes. He tells us that kind of advance signing is required so that the brotherhood can retain its hold on valuable rentals. I’ve long felt that my boy is his own dog and doesn’t roll over to social pressure when he has a solid home base. Still, it’s not lost on me that this housing commitment years into the future in effect makes the fraternity the primary scaffolding of his college experience. This, before he’s even declared his major. That’s a lot of clout for an organization to have over my kid, an organization I can’t say I know much of anything about. I guess I can say that the house was pretty clean during the tour.



And yet. Another part of my maternal brain knows that belonging is so important to young people’s sense of connection and community. My son’s age-cohort was the one that entered high school remotely as the pandemic did its damage, and part of that damage was their dislocation from their peers and their academic world, slouched in front of Zoom, hoodies up. The last thing I want for him is isolation. What I do want for him is the development of a discerning character — steady in his sense of himself and true to his values, whoever he’s with, whatever they are doing.&nbsp;



Leaving dinner that night, my son and I decided not to go to “around the clock” at the favorite local bar, where pitchers started off in the single digits in the afternoon, then go up by a dollar every hour. I dropped him and his girlfriend back at their dorm, then headed back toward my rental house. But first I had to stop back at the restaurant, where I’d forgotten my umbrella.&nbsp;



I parked as close as I could on a side street behind the main drag of town, home to many of the annexes like the one by son had just&nbsp;committed to for his junior year. Just&nbsp;in front of me, a group of laughing young men weaved on and off the sidewalk, shirtless in the 40-degree torrential rain. From the other side of the street, another group called out to them, chanting something about… I don’t know what, but it seemed to be positive, or maybe they were mad. They ran and crashed into each other in the middle of the street with perfectly executed chest bumps, delighted or angry, yelling things I couldn’t understand. I gave them a wide berth, more than&nbsp;happy to be an inconsequential NPC in the background&nbsp;of their game.&nbsp;



When I returned to the rental, my two housemate-moms were hanging out in the living room with their sons, watching basketball and eating popcorn. They’d gone to “around the clock,” then wanted to come back and chill at the farmhouse and watch TV. As the rain pounded the windows and wind threw the screen door back and forth, the four slouched, wrapped in blankets on a sectional in the dark room, ageless in comfortable silence.&nbsp;

Have Fraternities Changed? A Parent’s Perspective

Authors of the new book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn't Matter—and What Really Does, speak with LW Radio host Marjorie Malpiede about how students can leverage higher education to get a richer college experience and, in doing so, may change the system.



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Hacking College with Scott Carlson and Ned Scott Laff

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Zoe had always wanted to study abroad. When looking at colleges, she was drawn to Lehigh University because of something she saw called “Lehigh360.” As the name suggests, Lehigh360 is an institution-wide initiative that helps students see the world through a broader angle by engaging in high-impact practices, like traveling to different countries, conducting research, or working on real-world problems.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“That said to me, ‘This school cares about these experiences and the students who want to have them,’” said Zoe, now a rising junior at Lehigh who spent last summer in Africa. “Lehigh360 connected me with an amazing opportunity that literally changed my life.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



While it continues to accommodate students like Zoe who gravitate towards new experiences, Lehigh360 is also there to inspire the larger number of students who, for whatever reason, do not. Now in its third year, Lehigh360 aims to equip every student at Lehigh with the information, access, and encouragement to pursue projects or programs that can prepare them for life, as well as career. Part database, part marketing campaign, Lehigh360 seeks to fill the access gap around these opportunities by addressing a number of barriers, whether lack of awareness, affordability, or self-confidence.&nbsp;



“We want all students to have these kinds of transformative experiences, and we want a more democratic, egalitarian process, where any student that comes here should be able to participate in them,” said Michelle Spada, the director of Lehigh360.&nbsp;



Spada works within Lehigh’s Office of Creative Inquiry, where Lehigh360 was, fittingly, created. Formed out of a desire to have students work on complex problems through open-ended projects, the Office of Creative Inquiry is an academic and non-academic vehicle for digging into big global issues. Its core program is called&nbsp;<a href="https://go.lehigh.edu/impactfellowships">“Impact Fellowships,”</a>&nbsp;through which students work in small teams and with faculty mentors on a host of global and local issues over two semesters with two to three weeks of on-site fieldwork in the summer.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Within the Office of Creative Inquiry, Bill Whitney is assistant vice provost for experiential learning programs. Having seen the positive impact of the office’s work on students who engaged, Whitney and his colleague, Vice Provost for Creative Inquiry Khanjan Mehta, were curious about how many of the university’s students were taking advantage of similar experiences on campus. What little information they found proved disappointing. When they asked students and alumni about study abroad or leadership or mentorship opportunities, a lot of them said they hadn’t participated in them; many said they didn’t know about them at Lehigh.&nbsp;



“It was clear then that we needed a better way of getting all these ambitious, driven, capable students doing things that are outside of just their march to degree, as important as that is,” Whitney said. “That’s what led us to Lehigh360.”&nbsp;



Whitney said part of the urgency to improve access to high-impact programs and experiences stems from the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.aacu.org/trending-topics/high-impact">evidence</a>&nbsp;of their significant educational benefit. Their longer-term benefits, including helping to develop a sense of purpose and fulfillment in life and career, have broad appeal for many worried about the&nbsp;<a href="https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/on-edge">lack of purpose</a>&nbsp;so many young people are reporting.&nbsp;



As strong advocates of this work, Whitney and Mehta began to convene campus stakeholders and alert them to the gap that existed in connecting students with these evidence-based practices. It was not a tough sell, given the school’s strong history of learning through doing. Best known for engineering, Lehigh’s close affiliation with Bethlehem Steel, once the anchor industry in the region, offered a host of work/learning opportunities that still exist today.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“There is a historical connection to experiential learning that I think everyone is on board with here, and there are these incredible pockets of signature high-impact opportunities,” said Whitney. “The problem is they exist in totally different spaces, and there’s no connection between them. There’s no common place to find them or learn how to get involved.”



Whitney met with over a hundred campus offices across numerous departments to achieve a significant level of buy-in for a campus-wide effort to organize and promote the many opportunities. They created a director-level position for Lehigh360 and hired Michelle Spada. Spada had previously worked on one of Lehigh’s high-impact opportunities — the Iacocca International Internship, a fully funded program for students who have some level of need — and before that, for an Africa fellowship program at Princeton University.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Spada said her previous work opened her eyes to the equity and access issues that exist in these programs. “Too often with these high-impact practices, we are just passing students back and forth — those that are really good at writing applications and presenting, those who happen to be bumping into the right people. But what about the others? Do they even know these opportunities exist or how they may get funded for them?”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Spada said the accessibility issue becomes even more pronounced considering the advantage these experiences have in today’s job market. Employers looking for distinctions beyond G.P.A. are eager to see what kinds of activities or work/learning experiences candidates have had in college. Those who decry Gen Z’s lack of readiness are likely to see working on real-world problems as a protective factor.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“When you consider that employers are putting an emphasis on these experiences, often over G.P.A., it becomes our responsibility to be much more intentional about them,” Spada said.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Lehigh360 offers a number of on-ramps to these opportunities, starting with communicating and promoting the benefits of doing something in addition to that “march to degree.” The vision for Lehigh360 is to help students find their place in the world, which includes knowing what the world needs from them. “We ask students, ‘What excites you? What really lights you up?’” Whitney said. “But we also ask, ‘What problems in the world do you want to help solve?’”



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The vision for Lehigh360 is to help students find their place in the world, which includes knowing what the world needs from them.
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In its most basic form, Lehigh360 is an accessible database and a toolkit that students can use to explore what opportunities exist. Students can query a number of different domains, such as travel in a certain part of the world, work internships, research opportunities, and special programs like fellowships or scholarships.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Students are introduced to Lehigh360 in their first year and reminded of opportunities through different touch points, like academic advising, student-facing services, and classroom presentations. Student “opportunity guides” help their peers with applications and references. The school even offers a pre-orientation Lehigh360 course to get students thinking about these experiences before they matriculate and to widen their perspective of what is possible.  



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/preLUsion_Zoe73-1024x768.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-2807"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Lehigh360 pre-orientation program "preLUsion" offers incoming first-years a head start on connecting with students and staff through shared interest projects.</figcaption></figure>



Sometimes getting a student to participate in activities outside their comfort zone involves more than just providing good information. Roisin, a rising junior at Lehigh, is currently in Edinburgh, Scotland, working for a social enterprise that helps fund small businesses in developing countries. The two-month position follows her previous internship in Uganda, an experience she said she never would have had without Lehigh360.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“As soon as I got the internship in Uganda, I went straight to Michelle and told her how nervous I was, and she was so helpful,” Roisin said. “She told me about the good experiences other students had had with the same program and showed me the value of doing this in my first year. She told me, ‘You will learn so much, and then you can apply that in everything you do in the three years you’re back at school.’”&nbsp;



With Spada’s encouragement, Roisin went to Uganda, where she taught English to elementary students, taught the staff to play rugby, and met one of her best friends. “It was the best experience of my life — so far,” she said.&nbsp;



“My experience last summer really opened up my perspective on the world,” Roisin added. “As far as teamwork and working with people I didn’t know, I just feel like I am so much more of a well-rounded person. I think everyone should be taking advantage of opportunities like these because it has honestly changed me for the better as a person. It has affected my mental health, my happiness.”&nbsp;



Roisin said the equity focus of Lehigh360 is important to her. She was able to participate in part thanks to being a “Soaring Together Scholar,” which involves a full-tuition scholarship to the university and a $5,000 stipend towards an experiential learning opportunity.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Spada believes initiatives like “Soaring Together” are small first steps in addressing the financial barriers many students encounter in even considering these programs. She and Whitney are working on leveling the playing field in this regard by connecting students to funding sources and securing paid internships for students who cannot afford to give up outside employment.&nbsp;



An important part of the equity work involves getting a better understanding of who participates and why. Following up on Whitney’s informal inquiry regarding awareness, Spada has engaged a student research team called “Impact Trails” to do qualitative research to help answer questions, such as “How did you get involved?” and “If you are not involved, what were the biggest barriers?”&nbsp;&nbsp;



The research itself is a high-impact opportunity for students and another example of how to connect learning to doing in college. “When I hear people talk about their education, I hear a lot about wanting their classwork to translate into action and into what they may want to do for the rest of their lives,” said Taylor, a rising sophomore at Lehigh and a member of the Impact Trails team. “I wanted to conduct research, and when I learned about Lehigh360 from a presentation in my first-year engineering class, I immediately looked at those opportunities.”&nbsp;



As the research continues, anecdotal evidence suggests Lehigh360 is taking off. Students said most of their friends now look into opportunities on the Lehigh360 website. Alumni lament it did not exist when they were at the school. Whitney said the effort to provide a common platform for the many opportunities that exist for students has faculty and administrators eager to get their programs included.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Still, he worries Lehigh360, like many initiatives in higher education, may be viewed as the passion of one department, as opposed to the culture of the entire university. The one thing he said he does not worry about is buy-in from the students.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“The students that come here, or any university, are ready to thrive. They are ready to flourish. It’s our job to help them do that.”

Lehigh360 Offers Students a Wide-Angle View 

Five years after the onset of the pandemic, concerns about the lasting impact of quarantine on the way students engage with each other and in the classroom linger. For some universities eager to intervene, one promising approach to boosting student interaction is peer-assisted learning.



At Florida Atlantic University (FAU), the Learning Assistant (LA) Program hires and trains undergraduates previously enrolled in a course to support students in subsequent semesters. Opening these new channels of engagement is improving not only the student experience but learning outcomes, too.



“In today's day and age, students don't talk to other students in the classroom. They go in, and they're on their phone; they’re on their laptops,” said Jennifer Bebergal, FAU’s associate dean for academic support and student learning and leader of the LA Program. “This is an opportunity for them to build that connection.”



These connections form on multiple fronts: Beyond bringing in additional support staff, the LA program requires faculty members to redesign their course to prioritize student collaboration. In classes typically involving two-hour lectures, for example, the second half gets devoted to group work.&nbsp;



In 2001, the University of Colorado Boulder developed the LA “model” in an effort to prepare students to become high school physics teachers, which the state was lacking. From one department at one university, the program has expanded to more than 120 across the country and globe.



FAU’s approach is distinct because the institution designates an administrative office to oversee and expand implementation. It gives stipends to faculty to compensate them for their redesign efforts and enforce cross-campus standards. At most schools, Bebergal said, academic centers or department heads are responsible for their own initiatives, primarily in STEM fields.



Across all institutions, though, three features of the LA Program stay the same: pedagogy, preparation, and practice. Pedagogy refers to training the LAs receive to support other students; preparation happens at weekly meetings between LAs and the professor to improve and tailor instruction; practice is what comes alive in the classroom.



LAs are not meant to teach course material but rather support the learning process. They don’t provide solutions to problems but coach students along the way.



“That's something that we learn a lot about during our pedagogy sessions — to try to not just give them the answer but more lead them through the thinking and logically arriving at the answer,” said Sebastian Hernandez, a rising junior and repeat-LA.&nbsp;



Tito Sempértegui, senior instructor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, helps lead the LA Program with Bebergal. As a professor of courses with LAs, he said he appreciates the added support in the classroom but especially how LAs provide unique insight into students’ understanding of the material.



“There’s a barrier between the students and the faculty members that is overcome with the presence of the Learning Assistants,” Sempértegui said. “Students are more likely to talk to them, and they do.”



The relatability of LAs may also help students envision their own success. “They see students who look like them, whether it’s race, gender, ethnicity,” Bebergal said. Something as simple as sharing an interest or club with an LA could help students feel more comfortable and capable in class.



Deepened classroom engagement is often the by-product. When relationships become a defining feature of the classroom experience, peers notice each other’s absences. “It builds that sense that the students matter in their experience here, and we care that they're in class, and we care that they're learning the material,” Bebergal said.



Connecting with an LA in his first-year math class is what led Hernandez to want to become one himself. He had arrived at FAU hoping to pursue environmental engineering, but the prospect of taking calculus was daunting.



“I had a lot of self doubt that I was actually going to be able to do it because of the math,” he said. “Later I realized that it wasn't really that I was bad at it or there's something wrong with math specifically.”



The support of his LA was key. “She helped me a lot, and she made the concepts seem very easy, and she even made it look exciting to the point where I really got into calculus,” Hernandez said. “So I just wanted to do that for other people.”



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“She helped me a lot, and she made the concepts seem very easy, and she even made it look exciting to the point where I really got into calculus. I wanted to do that for other people.”
</blockquote>



While taking into account anecdotal affirmations, Bebergal and her team assess learning outcomes for students in classes with LAs. As of fall 2022, the DWF (drop, withdrawal, fail) rate in both Calculus I and II had dropped by about half since the introduction of LAs in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Meanwhile, the percentage of students earning As in the courses significantly increased.



Outside class time, LAs offer office hours for students who either can’t make it to the professor’s sessions or prefer the lower-stakes environment of meeting with a peer.



As a student in class with LAs, Hernandez said LA office hours could be even more useful than receiving in-class support. “At least me, I feel a little intimidated to go to my professor’s office hours. I think he's busy and stuff like that,” he said. Conferring with another student, he said, felt “a lot more welcoming.”



Professors take different approaches to incentivizing visiting LA office hours. In his first semester as an LA, Hernandez said, students could earn extra credit by completing a worksheet and explaining the concepts to their LA outside of class. In another course, attending LA office hours was a requirement baked into students’ final grade.



In addition to the students in the classes, LAs themselves stand to gain from the program. First, it offers paid, on-campus employment for the FAU population, one-third of which is eligible for Federal Pell Grants for exceptional student financial need.



For LAs, teaching also presents its own confidence boost, Bebergal said. “Our new LAs come in really nervous. They have imposter syndrome: ‘Yeah, I got an A in this class, but I'm not going to be able to help others.’” Over the course of the semester and into their subsequent turns in the role, she said, “you just see them grow exponentially.”



LAs aren’t just benefitting from helping students, though. They have more time one-on-one with the professor and their LA peers, too.



Hernandez said he sees the payoff on at least two fronts: “It's very rewarding to be able to help someone,” he said. “But also, it really solidifies my own learning because I think the final step in mastering a concept is being able to teach it to someone.”



“It's like a win-win.”



Florida Atlantic University is a member of the LearningWell Coalition. To learn more about the program, please contact Dana Humphrey at <a href="mailto:dana@learningwell.org">dana@learningwell.org</a>.



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

Learning Together at Florida Atlantic University

This is the first in a series of stories on the Educating Character Initiative and the efforts of its member institutions.



Commencement season has come and gone and, with it, higher education’s annual homage to values such as good citizenship, service, and personal integrity. As in their mission statements and matriculation materials, colleges often summon these character virtues, but rarely do they teach students how to incorporate them into their lives.&nbsp;



As higher education continues its self-reflection amidst an onslaught of external criticism, there is a growing movement to revive the idea of teaching character to college students, though questions abound. What would that look like in the modern university? Does “character” mean ethics? Civic engagement? Holistic learning? And how would the idea take root within a diverse array of institutions?&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



The epicenter for this exploration is Wake Forest University’s&nbsp;<a href="https://leadershipandcharacter.wfu.edu/eci/">Educating Character Initiative</a>&nbsp;(ECI), a national network of colleges and universities committed to putting character at the center of higher education. The intra-institutional network is part of Wake Forest’s&nbsp;<a href="https://leadershipandcharacter.wfu.edu/">Program for Leadership and Character</a>&nbsp;(PLC), an undergraduate and graduate-level research, teaching, and learning initiative with a mission to “inspire, educate, and empower leaders of character to serve humanity.”&nbsp;



In 2023, the program received a $30.7 million grant from&nbsp;<a href="https://lillyendowment.org/">Lilly Endowment Inc.</a>&nbsp;to expand its work, $23 million of which allowed it to award grants to other institutions to create or strengthen character education on their campuses. In 2024, the ECI awarded nearly $18 million to colleges and universities in a number of categories, including teacher-scholar grants to individuals and capacity-building and institutional impact grants to institutions. This spring,&nbsp;another $2 million was awarded for teacher-scholar and capacity-building grants, and this summer, the ECI will award the 2025 institutional impact grants, which provide schools funding between $100,000 and $1 million.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Among those eligible for the funding are public and private research universities, minority-serving institutions, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, military schools, and faith-based institutions. This growing number of grantees has formed the basis of a national learning community, led by staff at Wake Forest, that is a laboratory of sorts for the ways in which character education is interpreted, taught, and internalized in diverse environments.&nbsp;



“The creation of the ECI has allowed us to catalyze a national movement around character,” said Michael Lamb, executive director of the PLC. “We are not just giving colleges and universities funding. We are giving them the tools and support to educate character in ways that work for them and their unique cultures.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Jennifer&nbsp;Rothschild is the director of the ECI and leads the high-touch process that keeps the network humming with what she calls “a parade of consultation.” Grantees, and would-be grantees, participate in webinars, conferences, site visits, and numerous phone calls with ECI staff. A philosopher by training, Rothschild relishes the process that goes into bringing character ideas to life, whether by helping to develop faculty training to incorporate character into courses or giving schools license to be creative and flexible about terms or scholarly definitions.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“Some of our schools are far along in this work,” Rothschild said. “Others have a need and an idea. Our job is to find the thing that clicks for them. We ask lots of questions: ‘What do your students need? What do you want your students to be able to do and feel? Where are the obstacles to this work on your campus? What are your strengths and expertise?’”&nbsp;



For Heather Keith, executive director of faculty development at Radford University, the ECI helped sharpen the focus of an existing program called Wicked Problems, where students consider ways to approach intractable issues like climate change and social injustice.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“Students were learning a lot of discreet skills like problem solving and critical thinking,” Keith said. “But we wanted them to think about these problems in character terms like hope and moral courage.” The grant from the ECI funded a faculty workshop called Active Hope to help students understand how to be part of the solution in ways that, Keith said, “made them feel empowered, not just in despair.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Keith said the ECI has provided a community for people doing this work and the chance to be part of something bigger. “I developed a network at ECI that I never had before,” she said. “It feels like there is a revitalization of character in higher education, and ECI is at the forefront of it.”&nbsp;



Character’s Comeback



To achieve the individualized character education Rothschild describes, the ECI uses what it calls a “contextually sensitive” approach. Avoiding being prescriptive about this work may be the key to reseeding it within higher education, which is both curious and cautious about the concept.&nbsp;



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Avoiding being prescriptive about this work may be the key to reseeding it within higher education, which is both curious and cautious about the concept.&nbsp;
</blockquote>



In an educational environment dominated by credentialling and return on investment, teaching college students to become good human beings may seem as dated as parietals. Character education has been in decline since the mid-century,&nbsp;&nbsp;as higher education focused more on research and less on teaching and personal development. Campuses became a reflection of a more pluralistic, secular society, which made talking about virtues awkward, if not fraught. And while helping students develop traits like honesty and responsibility may seem universally acceptable, character education has become one more term caught in the crosshairs of higher education’s culture wars.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“When I first said the words ‘character education’ at my previous public university, people immediately reacted poorly to it because they thought it was code for some kind of agenda,” said Aaron Cobb, the senior scholar of character at the ECI. He noted that the ECI welcomes grantees across the ideological spectrum. “I was like, ‘No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the formation of the student as a whole person.’”&nbsp;



Additionally, the notion of colleges stewarding personal growth may come off as coddling or indoctrination. Indeed, the lack of a common language around the concept feeds its vulnerability to misinterpretation and is something the ECI is working to address.



In the book “Cultivating Virtue in the University,” Michael Lamb, along with Jonathan Brant and Edward Brooks, helps clarify the meaning of character education: “The aim of character education is not to displace students’ reflective capacity to choose but to equip them to choose wisely and well. As such, character education in universities should not be taken to imply a didactic pedagogy or the undermining of student autonomy, but the opposite. Character education at the tertiary level should be critical and dialogical, with full recognition and encouragement of students’ own moral identity, judgement and responsibility and an emphasis on intellectual analysis and critical engagement.”&nbsp;



In his work at the PLC, Lamb frequently communicates both the need for character education and the value of it. The Request for Proposal (RFP) for the ECI, which he co-wrote, includes references to a survey administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, which found that 85 percent of 20,000 faculty across 143 four-year institutions said they “agree” or “strongly agree” that it is important for faculty to develop students’ “moral character” and “help students develop personal values.”&nbsp;



In its invitation to institutions, the ECI identifies several desired outcomes for institutions wanting to take this on: “Intentional efforts to educate character can support student wellbeing and flourishing, sustain academic excellence and integrity, promote equitable and inclusive communities, foster good leadership and citizenship, advance career preparation and vocational discernment, and encourage the responsible use of technology.”&nbsp;



For many colleges and universities throughout the country, these outcomes are even more desirable amidst the youth mental health crisis, disengagement among students, employers’ disappointment in the lack of “well-roundedness” in young workers, and the myriad of practical and ethical issues surrounding the proliferation of generative AI. For others still, the most compelling reason for reviving character in higher education is to stem the erosion of character witnessed by countless examples in everyday life.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In interviewing over 2,000 students for their book “The Real World of College,” Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner found that most students had a transactional view of college and a preoccupation with themselves. “In general, we found students to be preoccupied with themselves and their own problems, showing little concern for broader communities and societal challenges,”&nbsp;Fischman said.



Fischman believes character interventions can be effective ways of moving students from “I” to “we,” if the initiatives are well-understood and carefully assessed. “We are in need of these programs more than ever. By supporting and connecting them through a facilitated network like ECI, individuals and schools can learn from one another’s efforts, rather than reinvent the wheel. An essential piece of this work is assessment — to understand what’s working so that we can build on the effective approaches.”



Fischman and Gardner, who work for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thegoodproject.org/">The Good Project</a>&nbsp;at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, are part of a growing thought leadership community around character that includes, among others, the Jubilee Centre at the University of Birmingham, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, the Oxford Character Project, the Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame, and now the ECI. National funders concerned about the state of character and ethics fuel this work, including the&nbsp;Kern Family Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, both of which have given millions to Wake Forest and others.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In issuing its substantial investment in the ECI, Lilly Endowment CEO N. Clay Robbins said, “We are living in a moment of deep cultural and political polarization and increasing distrust of leaders and institutions.” He described the aim of the award as “educating a new generation of morally and ethically grounded leaders to rebuild trust and enhance civic engagements.”&nbsp;



Character in Action



Perhaps the strongest evidence of the current appetite for character education is the response to the ECI’s RFP. In 2024, its first grant year, the ECI received nearly 140 proposals from institutions across the country. Asked if she was surprised by the reaction,&nbsp;Rothschild said, “Yes, definitely. We hoped for 40 or so proposals, enough good ones to enable the awarding of the funds Lilly entrusted us for that year. What happened was we received an overwhelming number of proposals of exceptional quality.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



To meet the unexpected response, Lilly awarded an additional&nbsp;$12.4 million in funds, primarily to supplement the 2024 awards. The money went to 18 minority serving institutions, two military academies, one community college, 23 faith-affiliated institutions, 24 public institutions, and five multi-institutional projects.&nbsp;



The “point people” behind these numbers are a mix of faculty, administrators, teaching and learning professionals, and student affairs personnel. Aaron Cobb, who leads the programming the ECI schools participate in, said he is pleased that almost all of the initiatives are “all-campus” efforts. The eagerness of the grantees and prospective partners to understand and execute on the work translates into continuous contact with ECI staff. Since January, Cobb alone has held 159 total coaching/consultation/prospective partnership meetings, averaging about eight sessions a week. The work has proven fruitful for many, as some schools that received a capacity-building grant have returned with proposals for institutional impact grants this year.&nbsp;



Rothschild said what she finds exciting about the growing learning community is the energy and ideas people new to the conversation are bringing in. “These are&nbsp;not only traditional character people who are reaching back to Aristotle,&nbsp;though of course we have and love those, too,” she said. “What unites these efforts is an understanding that character is a matter of concern for both the individual&nbsp;and&nbsp;the common good.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



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“What unites these efforts is an understanding that character is a matter of concern for both the individual&nbsp;and&nbsp;the common good.”
</blockquote>



Cobb agreed, saying, “I’ve learned so much about character from people who may be doing it under a different name and are teaching me more about what it means.”



For faculty members Ted Hadzi-Antich and Arun John at Austin Community College, the prospect of an ECI grant meant pursuing their passion to bring liberal arts-like reflection to the community college experience through revisions to their general education program.&nbsp;



“For our students, completing general education is likely to be the only opportunity for the kind of interdisciplinary study they get to reflect upon what it means to be a human being and what kind of human being they want to be,” Hadzi-Antich said.



Character education is just as necessary for the community college population, Hadzi-Antich believes, yet much less available. He noted that when he and John turned to existing research to complete their application, they found plenty of references to four-year institutions but nothing about character in community colleges.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The capacity-building grant they received from the ECI has allowed them to bring faculty together across disciplines to create curriculum to identify, name, and cultivate character for students in all classes, including math and science. While there was some confusion at first about how to do the work, Hadzi-Antich said there were no concerns about it being well-received.&nbsp;



“In the community college setting, we see character in terms of intellectual virtues like curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility, and there’s nothing controversial about that,” he said.&nbsp;



Reflection is a big part of the program Austin Community College is running. “We encourage students to take a step back and ask questions like, ‘Why am I doing this? What am I trying to achieve here?’ We can now give these opportunities to community college students, who so deeply deserve it and are very, very open to it,” John said.



Anna Moreland, a humanities professor at Villanova University, had a very different motivation for joining the ECI. Already part of the character community, Villanova, which is an Augustinian Catholic institution, used the grant to form a year-long faculty and staff workshop to understand what was distinctive about educating Augustinian character. The effort was not without its challenges. 



“There were folks on our grant writing team that were worried that the Augustinian values were going to become a subset of the ECI values. And that’s where we had some very serious, very hard-hitting conversations,” Moreland said.&nbsp;



She said working through this dissonance actually produced the opposite result in the development of five distinctive Augustinian virtues. “This laid the groundwork for the possibility of people at Villanova to contribute in a distinctive way to the educating character conversation, nationally and internationally.”&nbsp;



The process of discovery may be as inspiring as the outcome.&nbsp;“The effort brought us together in a way that I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced at Villanova,” Moreland said. “It was a really profound experience.”



More about the ECI when our series continues.&nbsp;