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Like most colleges and universities, the University of Michigan came out of the pandemic reeling, awash with a host of new and heightened community mental health concerns. True to Michigan’s culture, its response was to go big.&nbsp;



In 2021, Michigan made wellbeing across campus an institutional priority by becoming one of the first eight U.S. universities to adopt the Okanagan Charter, a framework and commitment to infuse health promotion into policies and systems at every level. To serve and steer these goals, the administration founded the Well-being Collective, a hub for wellness efforts with university-wide infrastructure and influence.



Today, the work of the Well-being Collective continues, as leadership finds fresh and innovative ways to deepen the impact. One of the latest developments is the Mattering at Michigan Initiative, a push to expand three existing wellness interventions that have the promise of being particularly effective at “mattering” — a concept that is frequently misunderstood but increasingly recognized as critical to emotional and behavioral health.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Mattering may sound familiar, thanks in large part to the work of journalist Jennifer Wallace. Earlier this year, around the same time that Mattering at Michigan launched, Wallace released her second best-seller, “Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose.” In it, she contends that feeling like we matter is one of our most fundamental human needs. But it’s not just about belonging or being part of a group; to matter means knowing we’re valued and that we&nbsp;add&nbsp;value.&nbsp;



The timing of Wallace and Michgan’s work wasn’t just coincidental. The original idea to package and amplify mattering at Michigan came from the author, who has been studying and promoting mattering work at colleges and universities as an extension of her research. She’s currently collaborating with Harvard and realized, rather serendipitously, that Michigan might offer another model for evidence-based best practices in this area that could be implemented at scale.&nbsp;&nbsp;



While attending a Michigan Wolverines football game, Wallace had looked out across the packed stadium and discovered the cheering sections were color-coded. Students had followed emailed instructions, she learned, to wear either maize or blue depending on their seat assignment and now formed vibrant stripes around the arena. To Wallace, this was mattering at work — intentional community building that invited everyone to play a role.



&nbsp;“All different types of kids felt a deep sense of belonging there, whether they were former jocks or members of the marching band or really cerebral academics. It felt like everyone had a place to belong at Michigan,” Wallace said. She started talking to parents and faculty about why they thought Michigan was different. “What is this secret sauce?” she would ask them.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/MCOMMONS-NewStudentConvocation6199-Nolan.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-3823"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Michigan students wear their university's signature maize. Photo courtesy of the Regents of the University of Michigan, via Nolan Bona</figcaption></figure>



Wallace’s hunch that Michigan was ripe for mattering was met with enthusiasm from campus leaders in mental health. Lindsey Mortenson, Michigan’s inaugural chief mental health officer, said the university’s size and sprawling organization are often barriers to implementing services or fostering a wider culture around wellbeing. Mattering excited her as a framework and ethos that could unite and guide wellbeing on a broad scale. 



Mortenson also recognized mattering as a promising antidote to the achievement culture rampant on Michigan’s campus. Students often get caught up in the rat race of academic and other success, she said, so gaining perspective on what really matters — namely, connecting with and supporting others — might help right the ship. “Mattering felt like a way to be responsive to a focus on values, but in a secular way,” she said.



With funding from an anonymous donor, the Mattering at Michigan Initiative involves a build-out of three individual programs: wellness check-ins for large classes, a for-credit course on navigating wellbeing in college, and a new “social prescribing” effort to promote engagement in nature, the arts, and the wider community.&nbsp;The three interventions are not only among the most popular; they are specifically designed to give students a sense that “they matter.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Big Classes



An important question for students at Michigan is how to experience mattering when they are one of so many. The large course wellness check-ins are meant to help there. With an easy-to-implement protocol, the effort is a way of touching base with students enrolled in some of the university’s largest lecture classes. It’s part of a&nbsp;<a href="https://learningwellmag.org/article/five-for-flourishing">growing trend</a>&nbsp;in higher education focused on personalizing the educational experience in settings that typically make students feel anonymous.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Like the larger Well-being Collaborative, the check-ins emerged following observations about student mental health during and after the pandemic. Faculty concerned about their students, but busy fulfilling the traditional duties of teaching, wondered how they could best support these hundreds of adrift young people.



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Part of the mattering is in the intention. As subtle as the nudge might be, even the quickest check-in can help students feel that their personal and academic success is valued.
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Through a collaboration with the Wolverine Wellness, an implementating partner of the Well-being Collective, faculty can now work with a health promotion specialist, who will drop into classes mid-semester and present students with a digital form and the opportunity to seek help in three different ways. These include completing a brief survey on how they’re doing, signing up for a 20-minute check-in with a wellness coach, or requesting their professor to reach out to them. Wellness coaches will follow up with anyone who fills out the survey and indicates that their situation is “unmanageable.” They also share wellness resources with the class.



Part of the mattering is in the intention. As subtle as the nudge might be, even the quickest check-in can help students feel that their personal and academic success is valued. “We know that students who don't even opt in for the faculty check-in or the wellness check-in respond that they feel like their faculty respects them, cares for their wellbeing, is looking out for them,” said Janet Jansen, one of the specialists from Wolverine Wellness. “Just showing up and naming it,” she added, can make a difference.



Currently, the wellness check-ins cover around 11 large courses and reach around 2,000 students each semester. In a survey assessing whether the check-in helped students “feel supported in this class,” 83 percent of first-gen students and 72 percent of non-first-gen students agreed. 71 and 65 percent, respectively, also agreed the check-in helped them “learn about wellness resources on campus.”



A Small Class



The second program in the Mattering at Michigan Initiative impacts fewer students but in an in-depth, semester-long way. ALA 240: Living Well in College &amp; Beyond is a course designed to familiarize students with the major, wellbeing-related public health issues likely to impact the college experience and skills key to navigating them. The class is academic, and it’s personal.&nbsp;&nbsp;



When it launched, the course was a two-credit, elective opportunity capped at 15 students. It met once a week for two hours with a lead instructor and two peer facilitators. But alongside the Mattering Initiative, the class is growing. Soon it will be worth three credits, in addition to now fulfilling a social science distribution requirement. Enrollment has been raised to 54, looking toward 72, with participants gathering first for a lecture and then in small, peer-facilitated discussion sections.



The topics covered in ALA 240 span top concerns from belonging and failure to substance use and sexual health. Through weekly readings, journaling, and conversation, students delve into these concepts both generally and in the context of their university. Discussions are especially important, encouraging the rich and varied perspectives of participants and peer facilitators from all four classes. Together students open up and break down shared challenges.



Timberlee Whiteus, a health promotion specialist, has been an instructor and involved in ALA 240 since 2023. She’s also a two-time Michigan graduate. To her, the class is really about general “campus culture” at Michigan, she said. Lately, she’s found the greatest or most pressing interest among students to revolve around social connectedness, or a lack thereof.



“It really is a shock sometimes to be in a room full of such bright people at such a great institution… to hear students saying that they really feel anxious to show up,” Whiteus said. “They feel like they're the only one experiencing these problems or having these challenges, or they're afraid that the person next to them is going to judge them.”



With students struggling in real time, the practical component of ALA 240 is as important as the theoretical. Major assignments are indeed experiential exercises in combatting the class’s central issues. The “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, for example, requires students practice four different skills, in whatever way they see fit: asking for help, being a buddy, perspective taking, and uncomfortable conversations. The final project asks them to go out into the community to bring the class content to at least 10 new people.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Here, mattering is playing out on multiple fronts. The course’s existence, for one, signals to students that their school cares about them and their wellbeing. Participants also study mattering as a concept, contemplating how it functions at Michigan, and how to improve the culture around it. All along, they’re connecting with one another, working actively on their wellbeing, and helping others with theirs.&nbsp;



Whiteus said students often tell her, “I don’t get this anywhere else. You all are really seeing me.”&nbsp;



Beyond the Classroom



The newest of the Mattering at Michigan initiatives centers a fresh but increasingly popular practice in the wellbeing space: social prescribing. The basic idea is to connect people with opportunities to engage with others in the community. It’s a non-clinal approach to boosting mental and emotional health but with a clinical vibe that says this is serious.&nbsp;



At Michigan, the effort is known as Experience Rx and involves wellness coaches or mental health counselors who refer students to a range of activities as if they were more traditional medical treatments. With the formal “prescription” of an authority and structure of an assignment, the thinking goes, young people may be more likely to actually get out there and seek the connection they need.



The origins of Experience Rx stem from Nature Rx, a student-led initiative launched at Michigan in 2019 to promote time in the outdoors for mental health relief. Nature Rx is still active, but now possible “prescriptions” also span experiences with the arts, service, exercise, and food. Some activities may be completed in a group; others could be done alone.



One of the critical elements of Experience Rx, and ideally social prescribing in general, is that the coaches and counselors do not assign experiences at random. The goal is to formulate a detailed profile of their students and then think intentionally about the type of engagement that would most benefit them.&nbsp;



Lindsey Mortenson, who has been closely involved in the development of this project, explained the importance of getting this part right. She imagined the frustration a student could feel upon receiving a misaligned prescription: "You don't know me at all,” they might think. “I've just told you I hate being outside with insects and bugs, and you just told me to get out into nature and go walk in the arboretum.” 



Mortenson added that the prescription-transaction model is another way to boost mattering. She reflected back to when doctors handed over a physical prescription to a patient, explaining that kind of verbal and physical exchange is, in itself health-promoting. Although the Experience Rx organizers hope to eventually increase accessibility by creating a way for the students to “self-refer” online, the activities themselves are only one part of the larger initiative’s endeavor towards mattering.



“I think one of the connections to mattering and [Jennifer Wallace’s] work in general is this desire that we all have to be seen and understood,” Mortenson said. “That's where a really well-informed prescription or referral, that is really based on some attunement with the person in front of you, really matters.”



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

Mattering at Michigan

Going to college is a fate-determining decision that is often driven by external factors such as family expectations or securing a good paying job. Indeed, given the cost of tuition, knowing that your degree will lead to employment is one reason the value of higher education is increasingly being measured in metrics, namely first-year earnings. But does that mean that intrinsic gains like intellectual growth and finding your purpose in life are no longer part of the equation?&nbsp;



A new survey asking students why they went to college and what experiences they value indicates otherwise. The survey, “<a href="https://learningwell.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/What-Students-Value-in-College.pdf">What Students Value in College</a>,”&nbsp;co-sponsored&nbsp;by the LearningWell Coalition* and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&amp;U), shows that students go to college to get a good job and to grow as a person — in equal measure. The survey of 872 undergraduate students, conducted by Morning Consult,&nbsp;found that while more than a third of students cited career outcomes as the main reason they chose to go to college, a similar share (38 percent) cited factors related to intellectual and personal growth, identity formation, and giving back to their community as their number one reason.&nbsp;



“Students continue to recognize higher education as one of the most important pathways to economic opportunity, but this survey reminds us that their aspirations extend well beyond career preparation alone,” said AAC&amp;U President Lynn Pasquerella. “They are seeking a sense of purpose, opportunities for self-discovery, and experiences that help them understand who they are and how they can contribute to their communities and the broader world.”



When asked to name their primary reason for attending college, 38.5 percent reported it was “to get a good job.” 38 percent named other personal growth-oriented factors (17 percent for learning and gaining knowledge; 10 percent “to grow as a person;” and 2 percent “to give back to the community”) as their primary motivation. An additional 15 percent reported their number one priority was to support their family.&nbsp;



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“Students continue to recognize higher education as one of the most important pathways to economic opportunity, but this survey reminds us that their aspirations extend well beyond career preparation alone.”
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The survey also shows that lower-income and first-generation students were less likely to prioritize career motivations than their higher income peers (32 percent of students from households earning under $50,000, versus 48 percent of students from households earning over $100,00.) This finding challenges an assumption that the less-resourced students are more inclined toward specialized certifications as opposed to a broader learning experience, a narrative that has driven higher education policy in the last several years.&nbsp;



“What I see in the survey is that students want holistic experiences, and they want to be prepared for a career, and this extends to low-income and first-generation students, as well,” said Peter Felten, the executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University and an author of “<a href="https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/books/relationship-rich-education/">Relationship-Rich Education</a>.” “But there is a narrative out there that holistic education is for privileged kids, and we need to remind ourselves that this is not true, particularly when we start designing programs or putting forth certain expectations about what students need.”



Relationships, Experiences, and Wellbeing&nbsp;



The survey also explored student engagement in high-impact practices such as mentorships and internships and the effect of those experiences on their wellbeing. According to the survey, relationships with faculty and staff are among the most powerful elements of the undergraduate experience, with 76 percent of students saying having a mentor was “very” or “extremely” valuable.&nbsp;



Students reported that applying their learning to the real world, like through internships,&nbsp;was important, with 78 percent rating those experiences as “very” or “extremely” valuable. Of note, the most highly rated college experiences — at 79 percent — were those that exposed students to people with backgrounds, viewpoints, or cultures different from their own.&nbsp;



“If we’re thinking about what students perceive to be the value of college, a key driver of that is who they are connected to, so we know that relationships are really instrumental,” Felten said. “They help students stay motivated and connected, but they also give students a sense that all of this is purposeful; this is time and money well spent.” 



Felten called experiential learning opportunities “relationship accelerators.” “If you think about internships, service learning, student employment,” he said, “all of those things immerse students in relationships.” 



According to the survey, the effect of these experiences on improving student wellbeing is consistent with the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.709699/full">literature</a>. Using the PERMA framework for wellbeing, the survey shows that students with a faculty or staff mentor reported higher wellbeing (average score of 7.12) than those without one (6.62). Students who had participated in internships reported significantly higher wellbeing (7.22 vs. 6.65 for those without).&nbsp;



Similar patterns emerge across other forms of applied learning. Students engaged in service learning reported higher wellbeing compared to students who had not engaged in service learning (7.15 vs. 6.59). 74 percent of those who did engage said these experiences were valuable.&nbsp;



“These findings add to the evidence that relationships and experiences that promote connections are strongly connected to student wellbeing,” said Keith Buffinton, the executive director of the LearningWell Coalition. “At a time when students are struggling with mental health, loneliness and disengagement, higher education has the opportunity to tailor interventions inside and outside the classroom that can foster these experiences.”



But despite the evidence, the survey suggests a participation gap exists. The experiences students reported to find most valuable and have the strongest wellbeing outcomes are often the least accessible. This pattern applies to all students regardless of socioeconomic or first-generation status. Only 39 percent of students reported participating in an internship, and while 53 percent reported having a faculty or staff mentor, that leaves nearly half of all students not participating in one of the most influential experiences in college.&nbsp;



“The findings underscore the transformative power of high-impact practices such as mentorship, internships, undergraduate research, and community-engaged learning,” Pasquerella said. “Yet they also reveal a troubling gap between what students value most and what too many actually experience. Institutions committed to educating for work, citizenship, and flourishing lives must ensure that every student has access to the relationships and real-world learning opportunities that foster belonging, wellbeing, and long-term success.”



Felten said that fostering relationships among faculty and students is critical but challenging given the numbers and suggests we need to think differently about what “relationship” means in the classroom. “If we imagine that the only way we can build meaningful relationships with students is one on one, it feels impossible. But I think what most students want is a professor who they think cares about them enough to challenge and support them, and I think we can do that at scale. We can make ourselves human. We can make ourselves approachable.”  



Felten said that even in online teaching and large lecture classes, professors can be relatable, as opposed to robotic. “That matters a lot to students.” 



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"I think what most students want is a professor who they think cares about them enough to challenge and support them, and I think we can do that at scale." 
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Motivation and Engagement in High-Impact Practices&nbsp;



The case for expanding high-impact practices is made stronger with a separate brief culled from the survey that shows&nbsp;why&nbsp;students go to college influences&nbsp;how&nbsp;they go through it —&nbsp;and what that means for their wellbeing. “<a href="https://learningwell.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Report-2.pdf">Motivation, Engagement, and Student Wellbeing in College</a>” found that students who enter college with community and growth-oriented motivations are more likely to participate in high-impact practices. These experiences, in turn, are associated with higher wellbeing.&nbsp;



The report groups students into three motivation categories.&nbsp;“Community-oriented” students are those who reported attending college to give back to their community. “Growth-oriented” students are motivated by learning, personal growth, and identity development, including gaining knowledge and developing a sense of who they are and what they are good at. “Career-oriented” students named getting a job as their primary motivation.&nbsp;



At one end of the spectrum, community-oriented students indicate the highest levels of participation across nearly all high-impact practices. These students demonstrate especially high engagement in internships (74 percent), mentorship (86 percent), service learning (78 percent), research with faculty (67 percent), and study abroad (46 percent), far exceeding other groups. However, only 2 percent of respondents listed giving back to the community as a top reason for being in college; 23 percent ranked it in the top three reasons.



Growth-oriented students also reported engaging at relatively high levels across many experiences, though somewhat less consistently than their community-oriented peers. Participation remains strong in areas such as mentorship (71 percent, 51 percent, and 55 percent, respectively), service learning (62 percent, 45 percent, and 53 percent), and learning communities (71 percent, 65 percent, and 71 percent), suggesting that internally driven motivations are tied to engagement across high-impact practices.



Students that named career as their primary motivation show somewhat more moderate and uneven participation in high-impact practices. While many still said they engaged in key practices like internships (39 percent), their participation rates lag behind community- and growth-oriented students, particularly in mentorship (49 percent), learning communities (64 percent), and service learning (43 percent).



Motivation for being in college is also associated with student wellbeing. Using the PERMA framework, students reported an overall average wellbeing score of 6.88, with meaningful variation across motivation types.



Community-oriented students reported the highest average wellbeing (7.95), followed by those motivated to grow as a person (7.02) and to support their family (7.00). Students motivated by learning and gaining knowledge reported an average wellbeing score of 6.93, while those who named “getting a good job” as their primary motivation reported 6.90.&nbsp;



Implications for Higher Education



The insights gained from this survey strengthen the argument that career development and human development are not competing priorities but rather interdependent goals for higher education that are often mutually reinforcing. Young people&nbsp;are not a monolith, and how colleges and universities balance students’ varied motivations and communicate those through messaging and policies will be important.&nbsp;



The data is consistent, however, that relationships are one of the most valuable dimensions of college life, with faculty mentors and relationship-rich experiences reported to be highly sought after.&nbsp;This is another crucial point to keep in mind when formulating new programs and policies in the age of A.I.&nbsp;Finally, the findings, which align with other research on the benefit of high-impact practices, support working towards closing the access gap for these experiences with curriculum and/or financial accommodations that allow more students to participate.&nbsp;&nbsp;



*The LearningWell Coalition is the publisher of LearningWell magazine.



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

Why Students Go to College and What They Gain

When Adam Delaney entered college in 2024, he’d already honed a remarkable set of skills. He wasn’t fresh off captaining a high school team or founding a club like many other first-years. Around the time most of his classmates were born, Delaney was 19, joining the Marines, and readying for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his 20s, he was concerned about life or death, rather than As or Fs.&nbsp;



That doesn’t mean navigating higher ed came easily when he decided to go back for his bachelor’s at 40. His time in the service made him supremely competent at tackling situations most civilians can’t imagine; it also made doing anything else afterwards challenging in a way most will never understand.



So what can colleges and universities do to give veterans like Delaney the greatest shot at success? At Arizona State University, the expansion of services for military-connected students has been critical amid the ballooning of that population — up nearly 15,000 in the last four years alone. The approach, though, has gone beyond streamlining systems for processing G.I. benefits, as important as those are. Leadership at A.S.U.’s Pat Tillman Veterans Center is investing in a tailored and deeply relational style of support, aiming to pull in those like Delaney and keep them — through to graduation. 



While Delaney knew little about the Pat Tillman Center before enrolling at A.S.U., he now attributes it with restoring a sense of family he didn’t realize he'd missed. “It makes it feel more like we [veterans] belong than anything else,” he said. “Students who are there just out of high school or something like that, they all share that; they have that community with each other. So it was cool to have our own community as well.”



The Uphill Battle



In 2011, the Pat Tillman Center launched to offer military-connected students, who include current and former service members and their dependents, a designated space for advising and connecting with each other. Spanning&nbsp;<a href="https://news.asu.edu/content/pat-tillman-veterans-center-opens-asu">3,340 square feet</a>&nbsp;in the basement of the student union on the main Tempe campus, the facility replaced the old face of A.S.U. veteran support: a window in the registrar’s office where students could go, slip their paperwork under the glass, and be on their way.&nbsp;



When the center opened, fewer than 2,000 military-connected students attended A.S.U. Now there are&nbsp;<a href="https://www.asu.edu/about/facts-and-figures">25,000</a>. A surge in remote learning has been key to the rapid expansion of both the university's military population and its general one. Of the 194,000 students at America’s largest public university, more than a third are remote; at least&nbsp;<a href="https://asuonline.asu.edu/admission/military/">11,000</a>&nbsp;of them are military-connected.



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The expansion of services for military-connected students has been critical amid the ballooning of that population — up nearly 15,000 in the last four years alone.
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Shawn Banzhaf, the executive director of the Pat Tillman Center, believes the center has helped drive enrollment, whether online or off, by sending a message to service members that they matter here. “The more you can understand them, the more they feel like they belong, the more they'll stay here, and the more they'll tell their buddies about it,” he said. The strategy is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: The more vets who come in chasing the promise of community, the stronger it gets. Eventually it's 25,000 and counting.



Of course, the numbers mean very little without the necessary support to back students up and bring them together. A point of pride for the Pat Tillman Center staff is that most served in the military, so they’re intimately familiar with the challenges their students can encounter. Banzhaf described a road through college riddled with fits and starts. In 1991, he enlisted in the Army National Reserve freshly out of high school, in large part to be able to pay for higher education. Once he found himself juggling a civilian career as a police officer, a family, and deployments, including 15 months in Iraq, he was forced to adapt. In the end, 20 years passed before he finished his degree.



<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Adam-2-6-1024x768.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-3712" style="width:709px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">From 2003 to 2010, Adam Delaney completed multiple combat deployments in the Middle East. Photo credit: Adam Delaney</figcaption></figure>



Banzhaf said the challenges veterans encounter in college —&nbsp;and the Pat Tillman Center aims to address — are wide-ranging and sometimes surprising, especially to those on the outside. One of the most underestimated, he finds, is the financial strain. While the G.I. Bill may cover expenses like tuition and housing costs, it can leave others, from food to gas to medical bills, to pile up, while income has often stopped coming in.&nbsp;



Adam Delaney had been out of the Marines for more than a decade when he decided to go back to school. Nervous about abandoning his six-figure salary as a sales manager at O’Reilly Auto Parts, he turned to the Pat Tillman Center early on, finding staff could walk him through options — scholarships, work-study, federal aid — to lighten the load. They armed him with a detailed&nbsp;<a href="https://veterans.asu.edu/veteran-checklist">checklist</a>&nbsp;to guide him through finding and completing the necessary forms. “They took the stress away,” he said. “I could do this without having a job and, you know, survive.”



Other concerns for student veterans are more cultural. They don’t just tend to be older or in a different life stage than their peers; they’re adjusting to a vastly different way of life. Military tradition emphasizes structure, disciple, and respect for hierarchy, Banzhaf said. “Veterans are used to you saying, ‘Do this, then go here. Do this, then go here and do this.’ And if you don't do all these things, somebody gets killed.” In college, there are far fewer rules and almost no play-by-play instructions. Veterans often chafe, Banzhaf said, at the sight of students glued to their phones in class, ignoring their professor.&nbsp;



To help with this transition, A.S.U. offers specific orientations and a first-year College 101 course tailored to veterans’ needs and experiences. “Veterans don't need to know how to live in dorms,” Banzhaf said. “They don't need to know the best practices of staying away from the bars.” Instead, Student Success for Veterans covers issues like the “hidden curriculum” — rules and expectations often implicit in higher ed but unknown to those who have been out of school for a while. Students also learn how to help others navigate trauma, and Banzhaf said many come to realize the ones most in need of help are themselves.&nbsp;



Trauma is a critical barrier the Pat Tillman Center recognizes can impede veterans’ success. Delaney said his alcoholism, which spawned from post-traumatic stress disorder after his tours in the Middle East, led to two uncompleted degrees at two different community colleges before he got to A.S.U. That’s why he’s now pursuing a degree in social work to support other veterans on similar recovery journeys. It’s also why Banzhaf and his team continue to build out a range of programming for holistic wellbeing, from equine and art therapy to guitar and cooking classes. “If you can think of a way,” Banzhaf said, “we're doing it.”



Trekking Through



One of the Pat Tillman Center’s most unique offerings is a program called Treks for Vets, which involves leading a group of student veterans in a rigorous, multi-day hiking trip. Banzhaf was part of a team that started the program after participating in a similar one with a Colorado-based nonprofit, Huts for Vets. He spent four, ten-hour days in the Aspen Mountains, climbing between 9,000 and 12,000 feet in elevation, and found the experience as rewarding as it was exhausting. In the wild he learned he hadn’t resolved his trauma from the war as completely as he’d thought.&nbsp;



Back at A.S.U., Banzhaf was committed to helping recreate the opportunity for his students. Now, twice a year, he takes a group of seven to 10 A.S.U. veterans to a base camp in northern Arizona for four days of trekking — and then some. The students do readings and discuss them together. They relish in nature, disconnected from technology. They participate in morning Qigong, a meditative movement practice. They eat nourishing meals.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
The bonds that form during this time are not so dissimilar from ones formed in military service.
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The bonds that form during this time are not so dissimilar from ones formed in military service, Banzhaf said. In both contexts, participants are pushed together in a uniquely close way and made vulnerable by grueling exercise. An important differentiator is that, on Treks for Vets, students have the opportunity to be open, whether on the trail or in organized conversations, about some of the most challenging and raw elements of their service. There’s no rank or title here, Banzhaf likes to remind them.&nbsp;



<div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:42% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Adam-1-7-768x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-3725 size-full"/></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
“All of a sudden these hard chargers that are used to not showing any emotion at all, because it could cost you your job or it could show that you're weak and it could hurt your pride, start opening up because it really, truly doesn't matter,” said Delaney, who was a participant in Treks for Vets before becoming a trip leader. He’s seen conversation topics run the gamut among his expeditions, though the through-line is veterans being open and connected in a rare and freeing way. Sometimes they talk about combat and trauma. Other times it’s the transition to college. “And that's fine too,” Delaney said, “because it's something people have been holding in, and we all sit and talk about it.”



Not everyone signs up for Treks for Vets wanting or expecting more than a camping trip. But most, Banzhaf suspects, “come because they need something.” Maybe it’s a change of scenery; maybe it’s connection or direction or meaning. Students who were contemplating suicide have told Banzhaf the trip kept some them from attempting. “It brought them to a place of hope and encouragement and community and all the things that all of us need anyway, but they just hadn't found it, yet.”
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Banzhaf’s only regret where Trek for Vets is concerned is that it can’t reach more students. Ideally, he said, he’d be running trips four times a year, but without the funding to train new staff, expansion just isn’t in the cards right now. At $15,000 per trip, Treks for Vets ends up eating up about a third of the Pat Tillman Center’s $100,000 annual operating budget, which depends on a per-student stipend from the&nbsp;Veterans Affairs Department. The university covers salaries for staff, but there’s always room for more. Where the V.A. recommends universities hire one School Certifying Official&nbsp;per 125 student G.I. Bill users, Banzhaf has just eight, attending to thousands.



The limitations on staff make the strength of connections among students that much more important. Delaney believes he’s never felt like a “number” among vets at A.S.U. because of the emphasis on peer support. In his first fall, it was often students — some working for the Pat Tillman Center, others not — who were his confidants and helped him learn about new opportunities for military-connected students or talk through challenges. This semester, Delaney and a friend from Treks for Vets buddied up to take all the same classes after discovering they share the same field of study. “We know who the other veterans are when we see them walking down the hallway like, ‘Yep, that guy's a vet, or that girl's a vet.’ You can spot them,” he said. “That starts the conversation.”



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

A Soldier's Journey

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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“Higher ed needs to be reimagined in all kinds of ways, and this is a very practical way to create a catalyst for rethinking undergraduate education."
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Nationwide, about 64 percent of students who start a degree program finish it within six years, with an average loan debt among borrowers of $29,300, according to the College Board. In 2023, Carrell testified to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development about how the College-in-3 concept could improve student retention, degree completion, and career launch, either by developing accelerated 120-credit degrees or creating new curricula that reduce the credit requirement to 90.



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



Not for Everybody



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



An opportunity for experiential learning&nbsp;



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

"College-in-3"

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On this episode of LearningWell Radio, George Abalekpor, a Georgetown graduate from the class of 2024, reflects on his experience over the last two years working inside the administration at his alma mater. As a Hoya Fellow, he has used his firsthand experience and insights into the Georgetown student experience to help guide the Division of Student Affairs.



In particular, Abalekpor has been focused on efforts and issues around student thriving. With LearningWell, he discusses some of the pressing concerns and potential solutions in this area, with an emphasis on the role of Hoya Fellows in bridging gaps between students and staff.



Listen now on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/10cIU7PJduQNmW8Bqd6RhZ?si=mu2yop08QgKCyBjPXbOjRg">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/putting-the-student-in-student-affairs-with/id1732284927?i=1000772975751">Apple Podcasts</a>.



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

Putting the Student in Student Affairs with George Abalekpor

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Two colleagues from different institutions share their experience and wisdom in how to lead campuses in wellbeing promotion. &nbsp; &nbsp;



Listen now on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1vOCIYnz2yf0xROhCButP4?si=09a805bad6634a88">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wellbeing-leadership-in-higher-education-with-drs/id1732284927?i=1000770756826">Apple Podcasts</a>.



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

Wellbeing Leadership in Higher Education with Thaddeus Mantaro and Ryan Travia

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On this episode of LearningWell Radio, psychiatrist Mathilde Ross of Boston University shares wisdom and advice for students heading off to college — and their parents — from her new book, "How to Thrive at College: A Guide to the Ups and Downs of Mental Health on Campus." Ross’ candid and thoughtful account of her work with young people is at once surprising, instructive, and hopeful.



Listen now on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/4KOYPR7BfJcsgVeINf0baT?si=bbd26638124742e7">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-thrive-at-college-with-dr-mathilde-ross/id1732284927?i=1000767379452">Apple Podcasts</a>.



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

How to Thrive at College with Mathilde Ross

This spring, a few months after starting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jane Laurence deleted all her social media accounts.



For years, she’d tried different strategies to limit her screen time, including taking intermittent breaks from various apps. But her habits continued to be consuming and compulsive. When she finally managed to wipe the slate clean, she was stunned by the amount of time freed up on the other side. “It felt,” she said, “like quitting a part-time job.”



It’s no secret that college students around the country are struggling to reclaim their time from technologies powered by the ability to capture and retain people’s attention. What’s less clear is how or whether institutions might be able to intervene in this slippery “attention economy,” which appears to be threatening engagement not only in the classroom but, well, everywhere.



At U.N.C., a new initiative called&nbsp;<a href="https://tarheels.live/attention/">Educating for the Virtues of Attention</a>&nbsp;(EVA) has set out to be that intervention. Unlike typical digital detoxes, EVA is less about eliminating the distraction than it is centering what’s truly worthy of our attention. The goal is to help students reflect on their habits of attention and build more intentional ones through opportunities for deep in-person engagement across campus.&nbsp;



Funded by&nbsp;<a href="https://college.unc.edu/2025/07/educating-virtues-attention/">a nearly $800,000 grant</a>&nbsp;from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, which supports character education efforts at colleges and universities nationwide, EVA is rooted in the idea that the ability to pay attention is a critical character virtue and one in need of cultivating now more than ever.&nbsp;



An inconvenient virtue



Today, conversations about attention tend to center ideas about technology and productivity. But long before the invention of the smartphones or concerns about short-form media content, philosophers were thinking about human attention as a character virtue.



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Long before the invention of the smartphones or concerns about short-form media content, philosophers were thinking about human attention as a character virtue.
</blockquote>



Michael Vazquez is a teaching assistant professor in U.N.C.’s philosophy department and has been one of the leaders of EVA since its launch a year ago. He explained how the understandings of attention promoted by two particular 20th century philosophers, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, underpin EVA’s guiding principles.



“I think one way to put it is they [Weil and Murdoch] both think there’s a reality and a world that’s much bigger than us, and attending is a matter of seeing that reality as it really is — the reality of other people, the reality of the world, the natural world, and so on,” Vazquez said.&nbsp;



In other words, to attend is to be more active participants in the world outside ourselves. And the more we attend, the more likely we are to become people who understand and care about that existence beyond us.&nbsp;



Of course, the fickle thing about virtues is that they’re famously difficult to acquire, not to mention maintain. That pattern holds true when it comes to developing attentional habits, which requires leaving the safety of our controlled internal reality to confront a far less predictable and potentially less pleasant one beyond.&nbsp;



“They're comfortable illusions, they're self-reinforcing, and they tend to be convenient,” Vazquez said of our inward tendencies. “It is awfully inconvenient to build attentional habits that make you susceptible to the reality of other people because that challenges your assumptions, your desires, your projects.”



Still, there’s a silver lining. Attending may demand more work than not, but the payoff can be quite satisfying for those who manage it, especially young people less accustomed to trying.



“It turns out if you just put the phones away and you have analog experiences with other people, whether you're looking at art together or reading a book, you tend to feel pretty good about it,” Vazquez said.&nbsp;



Perhaps a single in-person experience isn’t enough to make us virtuous right away, Vazquez added, but there are reassuring signs that it’s still the way to deeper feelings of purpose and meaning. That attending can improve not only the lives of others but our own is what he called “the icing on the cake.”&nbsp;



Campus arteries



Vazquez described EVA programming as having three pillars: faculty and staff programming, student curricular programming, and student extracurricular programming.&nbsp;



For faculty and staff, the main activity is communities of practice. These are opportunities for educators who apply to come together and discuss, as Vazquez put it, “the place of attention in the classroom.”



While the parameters of these conversations are left purposely broad, Vazquez said faculty veer towards using the forum to talk about how they’re seeing students struggle attentionally, as well as to workshop possible interventions.



“Does it seem like students are more distracted?” Vazquez said professors ask each other. “Does it seem like these technologies are not enabling or facilitating but actually inhibiting what happens in the classroom? Longform reading, is it on the decline?”&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/IMG_8380-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-3867" style="width:667px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">EVA communities of practice unite faculty to discuss attentional issues in the classroom. Photo courtesy of Michael Vazquez</figcaption></figure>



One particular community of practice is designated for the instructors of a class called College Thriving. All first-years at U.N.C. are required to take this one-credit, intro-to-college course, which offers resources and strategies for academic success and, especially, personal wellbeing.



College Thriving is also the junction where EVA’s work with faculty and staff bleeds into efforts to impact student curricula. A major goal of the instructors’ community of practice is to think about ways to incorporate lessons and exercises around attentional habits into the course content.&nbsp;



Devon Almond, a U.N.C. advisor and College Thriving instructor, helps lead the community of practice for his colleagues. He said there’s no single, standardized way the instructors are meant to bring attention-minded content into their class, nor is any staff member who teaches the course forced to be part of the discussion group.



But attention practices are important to Almond, who came to U.N.C. after working in an alternative college setting that focused on contemplative practices like meditation. That background has made him attuned to the prevailing culture at Chapel Hill that prizes constant movement and pressure to be productive.&nbsp;



“There's all of this noise and activity and socialization and competitive scarcity that comes at the expense of recognizing the stillness, the silence, the solitude, and the slowness that gives rise to a steadfastness,” Almond said.



The buzz of a college campus can be exciting, Almond added, but he likes to use College Thriving as an opportunity to encourage students to slow down. He often hosts sessions outside the typical classroom, like at the campus museum or planetarium, where students can observe new spaces with time and intentionality that are rare for their packed daily schedules. “The campus is our canvas,” he said.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
Attending may demand more work than not, but the payoff can be quite satisfying for those who manage it, especially young people less accustomed to trying.
</blockquote>



Other class activities include a deep listening exercise for students to do in pairs, where one talks for four minutes straight and the other cannot interrupt or contribute in any way — just listen. And at the start of every class, students place a tented card in front of them that lists not only their name but their hometown and a few of the class themes and larger world causes they care about most.&nbsp;



“It's attending — it's caring — to who and what is in front of you as well as what's within you and the environments and the settings that create that,” Almond said.



The most focal component of EVA, though, is the extracurricular one. This involves both creating and incentivizing opportunities across campus for students to engage deeply with each other and new spaces and activities.&nbsp;



At this point, EVA had forged partnerships with most of the “major arteries” on campus, Vazquez said. Last year, the events ranged from a professional Shakespeare production at the performing arts center to a guided exhibition tour at the art museum to a reflective exercise in the botanical garden.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/IMG_8467-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-3869" style="width:665px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">EVA activities place students in new environments to pause and reflect. Photo courtesy of Michael Vazquez</figcaption></figure>



The point isn’t just to get students to participate in activities. Each event also features what Vazquez calls additional “scaffolding” to ensure the students understand exactly how they’re practicing attentional habits and why they’re important.



“Because you can go to the orchestra and you can have an intentional experience and you may even grow in your attentional capacities in some way or other, but you might not be able to name it yet,” Vazquez said. “You might not be able to think of attention as a skill that you can develop until you're given a vocabulary.”



As for getting students to show up, EVA has cultivated a few strategies. For one, EVA events are accredited with a program called Campus Life Experiences. These include a variety of events, from resume writing workshops at the career center to open mic nights with the music department, of which all new U.N.C. students need to complete a certain number each semester.&nbsp;



In terms of more intrinsic incentives, Vazquez said the most important is ensuring the main EVA activity is fundamentally interesting to students. That appeal, he added, requires that events are always free of cost and, of course, involve some kind of food.&nbsp;



Carolina Unplugged



Now coming up on its second year, EVA will continue to run the main programming it started in the first, as well as build out some additional projects.



One of these additions will be Carolina Unplugged, another community of practice-style forum that will bring together groups of students to try out or reflect on different attentional efforts that counter time on their phones.&nbsp;



Right now, Vazquez plans for one cohort of students to agree to use Bricks, which are physical devices that attach to smartphones to block distracting apps, throughout the semester and meet weekly to discuss the impact.



Another group he has in mind would similarly gather weekly but instead engage in in-person activities, like cooking or reading, that simply allow them to be present in each other’s company.



Jane Laurence, the soon-to-be-sophomore who recently deleted all her social media apps, is looking forward to being involved in Carolina Unplugged and EVA broadly as a research associate. She will assist Vazquez and the larger EVA data collection team working to both determine the program’s impact on students who participate and analyze general trends in how people approach and build attentional habits.



“I don't think that these platforms are going away, so how can we develop better relationships around them? What types of people can or can't?” Laurence said of her research interests. “What's the impact of a community that's trying to have different types of conversations about social media usage?”&nbsp;



Another student, Diya Kayaleh, is a rising junior who will help coordinate the Carolina Unplugged groups. She, too, is especially excited to see how even smaller cohort-based work can influence the larger student body.



“Okay, there's this group of people on campus doing something with attention,” she imagines even uninvolved students will begin to think. “What kind of reflection does that call within me?”



Often, Kayaleh added, she thinks there’s a tendency to underestimate the value young people place on in-person experiences and their desire to be active and offline.



“We want to collect those experiences, and there's no reason that we shouldn't,” she said. “It's not that we're so fundamentally broken or far gone that we can't. We absolutely can.”



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

Focus and Flourish

Starting next month, Angela Lindner will lead the LearningWell Coaliton, taking over from the capable hands of Keith Buffinton. Like Buffinton, Lindner is an engineer. She has recently retired from the University of Florida, where she was the director of the Engineering Leadership Institute and vice provost for undergraduate affairs, as well as an associate professor.



Like all organizations, the LearningWell Coalition, the publisher of LearningWell magazine, is a reflection of the people who drive its mission, and in this interview, Lindner gives us a window into how she might make her mark. She describes her body of work in student-centered education, her perspective on higher education’s most pressing problems, and what drew her to the work of the Coalition — including the memorable way she was introduced to it.



The LearningWell Coalition is a growing network of colleges and universities — large and small, public and private — dedicated to ensuring that every student is prepared to flourish in work and in life. Through collaboration, networking, and access to evidence-based practices, they help&nbsp;institutions create and scale initiatives and opportunities to prepare students for lifelong flourishing.



LW:&nbsp;Welcome to the Coalition, and congratulations on your retirement from the University of Florida!&nbsp;



AL:&nbsp;Thank you. Yes, it's retirement in the sense that I'm emeritus status there, and I may come back and teach a class periodically, but it's no longer my work to do. It's bittersweet, but I'm a big proponent of allowing the next generation to lead and do great things and make mistakes, just like we did. There's far too many faculty who stay way too long, and it's blocking the ability of younger people to come in and lead.



LW:&nbsp;It’s worth noting that you’ve been teaching at the flagship school in the state that’s been at the epicenter of recent political pressure and change. What has that been like?



AL:&nbsp;That's a great starting point for a conversation about&nbsp;these big topics of “Where are we headed in higher education?” — especially in states like Florida.&nbsp;The change is rapid. In that sense, we're going through so many changes — forced changes. At the University of Florida, our nose is right out there. We're going through a third presidential search attempt right now as we speak, and it's very critical to many disciplines and to faculty. It’s existential.&nbsp;



I went to the College of Charleston, which is a city that cannot hide its history. And that's the beauty of Charleston — it's right out there, right? I left college fully believing in the liberal arts education and what that truly means, opening your mind to many different ideas, and sifting through the core values that you had from your family and your faith tradition — to be more accepting and to understand inclusion was not a bad word.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;What were your pre-U.F. days like? What drew you to academia?



AL:&nbsp;I worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Ann Arbor as a chemical engineer from 1986 to 1989, followed by working as a project engineer at General Motors Corp. in Warren, Michigan from 1989 to 1991. I had an “epiphany” moment in my car on a commute home from G.M. one day: I wanted to teach and mentor undergraduate students.&nbsp;I was seeking a purpose higher than making profit for my company. That is when I nurtured the resolve to visit the University of Michigan’s campus to meet with two environmental engineering faculty members, who ultimately admitted me into the Ph.D. program.&nbsp;Ironically, given the tensions that are swirling in the U.S. Department of Education today, I was admitted to the University of Michigan with a scholarship from the D.O.E. for women pursuing doctorates in engineering.&nbsp;I suspect this scholarship would not be allowed today.



LW:&nbsp;How did you get to the&nbsp;University of Florida?



AL:&nbsp;I've been at the University of Florida since 1998.&nbsp;I chose U.F. as my career home because the faculty in the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences, especially the chair, Dr. Joe Delfino, exhibited a strong care for their undergraduate students. I was convinced this was the best place for me to pursue my solidified purpose in undergraduate and graduate education. The moment I decided to accept U.F.’s offer was when I received a packet from Joe that included a hand-written note affixed to a sheet of paper saying, “We covered this in our faculty meeting today.” The sheet of paper had text that reminded the faculty that the student is the reason why they were at U.F. I have cherished that original piece of paper throughout my career at U.F., and it followed me into my associate dean role in the U.F. college of engineering and onto my role in the U.F. provost’s office.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;What first&nbsp;put the LearningWell Coalition on your radar?



AL:&nbsp;There are seminal moments in in one's life that they remember exactly where they were when something happened. This was one of them for me, actually. I was in my garage at home on the exercise bike back in early June 2023, listening to [former editor of Inside Higher Ed] Doug Lederman on his podcast interviewing this Rick Miller [president emeritus of Olin College]. I knew about Olin because I come out of engineering, but I was fascinated by what Rick was saying about the work of the Coalition and the core values of higher education. I immediately went into the Coalition’s website and found out how to contact them through an online form. University of Florida has a project called U.F. Quest, and it aligns so beautifully with the language that was shared in this podcast. And I'm still on the bike, and I'm writing, “How can I talk to you about becoming a member?”



Within hours I get an email response, and that week, we were on Zoom together, Rick and the executive director Keith Buffinton and I. And I just sort of laid out the whole situation we were in at the time with U.F. Quest and with our general education in the state of Florida. I left that call with a deep, profound sense of calmness that we have advocates outside of the state of Florida that will help us to tell the narrative of U.F. Quest and the transformational impacts. They get it.&nbsp;



From there, it's been just an incredible, tremendous relationship between the University of Florida and the Coalition. I can't emphasize enough the importance of having that external validation of what we were doing. Which is why I think expanding the membership of the Coalition is so critical.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Is that one of the key priorities as you step in as E.D.?



AL:&nbsp;It’s one of them. And also, how do we recognize and measure the goodness of the initiatives that are going on in the member institutions? I’m excited to see the numbers double and see its role expand, not just next year, but 10 to 15 years from now, because I think it's going to take us that long for higher education to really be able to ask the right questions — to take a good internal look at ourselves, at why higher education has lost public trust and what we should be doing to prepare the whole student for the evolving world.



LW:&nbsp;Let’s talk about that issue of public trust. This is a critical time in higher ed and redefining people’s expectations of it. What role can the Coalition play during this realignment?



AL:&nbsp;That's a good question. A critical element of the work of the Coalition is to keep asking questions. Higher education is out of equilibrium right now and for many different reasons. Being out of equilibrium is a journey of going from order, to disorder, and reorder. Higher ed is on that path now, and the Coalition, I believe, provides this other place to discuss what we all agree is the mission of higher ed, or should be.&nbsp;For us, it is keeping the personal and professional development of students at the center of all we do.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
"I think with A.I. upon us, my hopeful side — which comes out most days — believes that all of this is going to force us to ask some fundamental questions: What is the purpose of higher ed? What does it mean to be an educated human?"
</blockquote>



I think with A.I. upon us, my hopeful side — which comes out most days — believes that all of this is going to force us to ask some fundamental questions: What is the purpose of higher ed? What does it mean to be an educated human? How do we have that conversation, and agree? I believe that's what higher ed is for — to form and shape and at least point students in a direction of being able to impact humanity and the world in positive ways. It goes back to core values. What's our unifying principle? I do think we're being asked that question, and I think the Coalition is going to play a major role in helping support institutions towards that goal. 



So yes, we're in the disorder now. I can't tell you how long it'll last. I am confident that when we're back in the reorder, whatever it looks like, we're going to look back and be grateful for the disorder because there would be no other way that we would have gotten to the next place.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;When we talked earlier, you mentioned the Gallup-Purdue Big Six, which&nbsp;correlates to lifelong wellbeing and career success.&nbsp;How can we continue to prioritize those pillars, like mentorship and belonging, when so much of the conversation has shifted to tangible R.O.I.?&nbsp;



AL:&nbsp;No question some institutions of higher ed do it better than others.&nbsp;I come out of one of the largest public institutions in the country, which creates an environment with the biggest opportunity for nurturing the Gallup Big Six experiences.&nbsp;First, do they align at all, R.O.I. and the Gallup Big Six? The Big Six is implying that if you offer these experiences to undergraduate students, it means that they matter in the mission of your university. Why?&nbsp;Because it means that faculty's time spent on the formation of students, with students, is valued. Pure and simple, you cannot replace any faculty member with a machine or A.I. If you were going to fulfill the Gallup Big Six, a student must know a faculty member cares about me as a person, right? That's what's implied with the Gallup Big Six. Taking that further, one would assume that if that is of value to the institution, then the faculty — and tenure and promotion — are evaluated based on the amount of meaningful time they spend with the students.&nbsp;



The other side of this is that we would have to assume — and it’s not a correct assumption, as we're learning in the Coalition's faculty learning communities — that faculty know how to do these things. Many of the faculty were students who did not have access to these principles in practice. We've just had two years of faculty learning communities, and I would say over half of the faculty that participated said they joined so they could learn how to connect with their students — how to keep the student at the center of their teaching. That shocked me. I just thought we were, you know, picking the low hanging fruit here. So we need to coach faculty on how to do these things.



What R.O.I. implies is that money leads. That's what's driving everything, right? And it's corporatizing the institution. There is great value in making sure that that the institution uses the tuition dollars and state dollars and philanthropy dollars in a responsible way. But not without leadership that guides the community in shared values, hopefully including the value of spending time with our students — which by the way, short of time for the faculty, costs nothing, right?



We need to ask the same questions that we force our students to ask themselves. Why are we here? What's our purpose? The answers to these big questions translate into where the money flows and how we evaluate our performance. That can translate to large class sizes where students’ hearts are not engaging because you're swimming in this water of R.O.I. and you're being rewarded for efficiency. But I also say, from a very hopeful side, that these aren't polar opposites here — that if you look at it from like a long game perspective, R.O.I. is very much connected to having students who come out courageous and well-spoken with communication skills, with great ideas to go up and take leadership positions.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;What is the wellness environment the Coalition is looking at right now? Are there ways the Coalition could shift the conversation about wellbeing? Does it need to be shifted?&nbsp;



AL:&nbsp;One of the more promising happenings in higher ed is that we're seeing the language of wellbeing used much more frequently and at the drop of a hat. At the individual level, at the program level, at the institution level and national level. I am concerned that if we just run so fast with the wellbeing terminology, we don't have a shared sense of what it means. But I'm so excited that the Coalition is trying to lasso that — to have some pillars that define wellbeing and how we measure it, assess it. I see this as incredibly positive. Our students recognize this, and what is so remarkable about these students is they are determined that their career is not going to take over their life. We never thought about those things in my generation, but they're dogged about it, and fearless.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Tell me more about that. What are they fearless about?



AL:&nbsp;They are standing up for their life balance even while they’re speaking to their future employers. Here’s one example: At the University of Florida, we brought in guest speakers who were current C.E.O.s or former presidents, and students would raise their hand and ask, “Working in a national lab, tell me about what you did to promote life balance outside of work. What did you do to promote families?” One guest lecturer was the former C.E.O. of a major defense company and very traditional, and she just point blank looked at him and said, “There is no balance. If you love your work, there's no balance.”



You should have seen the student essays writing reflections on what they heard. They excoriated that. They all wanted photos with her, but the essays were just like, “No, we're not buying this.” The students are pressing towards a life with wellbeing, and they use terms like balance — in engineering even! Even the guys were saying, “I want to have children.” So we cannot deny this. Students lead the way, whether we admit it or not. It'll be a very interesting clash of cultures, I think, but I find it hopeful because their force is going to be much more powerful in the end. It’s the the sum of the parts, not just a takeover.



I'm a mosaic artist, and every part has meaning in mosaic art. If you leave one out, you know it's not there. In higher education, there is no one part that feels entirely responsible for the outcome of the student. We need to have a unifying leadership to say, “Your part is here; your part is here.” If it's successful, we see students coming out as full, whole persons who felt like they belonged in college. That's kind of what I'm mulling on: how to create this mosaic where every part matters and contributes.



LW:&nbsp;I love that metaphor. And a mosaic artist! Tell us more about yourself. What do you like to do in your free time?



AL:&nbsp;Well, my husband and I rescue greyhounds. Since 2000, we've adopted 10 former racing greyhounds, and we now have two, and they're from Ireland. So, we're dog people.&nbsp;



I used to be a marathon runner, an ultra-marathon runner, and I still like to run, but I'm much more reasonable now, and diversified. I do a lot of gardening. And every day my hands get dirty. It's a good balance.



I'm originally from South Carolina and still consider it my home. I've been in the South most of my life. I understand the South very well. Growing up in a very segregated state, I have been through many of the events that I worry are being hidden or veiled in our teaching. My hometown is Orangeburg, South Carolina, and, in 1968, I was a kid at the time of the Orangeburg Massacre on the campus of South Carolina State College [now University]. Going through a tragedy like the Massacre in such a small town becomes part of your identity, and&nbsp;depending on how parents were at the time, you came out of it with one perspective or another. Thank God my parents were very good at being open and transparent about what was happening at the time.&nbsp;



My mom, who completed high school, grew up very poor on a farm, where her parents, with only a middle school education, were South Carolina tobacco sharecroppers. And so these are the salt of the earth kind of people. My dad went to college because of the G.I. Bill after World War II. In my childhood home, education was something that you don't waste, and that shaped my whole way of thinking — that college was a privilege and you didn't waste it.



I still feel this way.&nbsp;Education is a privilege, and this is all the more reason not only that students should not waste the opportunity but also that our institutions of higher education must deliver on their commitment to their students.

The Students Are Why We Are Here

Inclusive Education 

The Steve Fund is a non-profit organization that promotes the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people, particularly those from underserved and under-resourced communities. Since its seminal report in 2016, identifying and addressing the unique mental health issues of this student population, the Steve Fund has been helping colleges, universities, and high schools strengthen cultures of belonging and build systems of care that support all students. Their Excellence in Mental Health on Campus framework has been utilized at 66 colleges and universities in 23 states, reaching over 1.1 million students. 



Part of the Steve Fund’s contribution to the field of college student mental health comes from the participation of a national network of Mental Health Experts, one of whom is Dr. Rae Lundy, the&nbsp;chief psychologist and director of counseling at Georgia State University. In this first article in a new content partnership series with the Steve Fund, LearningWell interviews Dr. Lundy about how her growth as a clinician aligns with the changing needs of her Black and Brown students. From her lived experience to her expansive body of work, Dr. Lundy explains why a culturally responsible framework for mental health and wellbeing is critical to helping all students flourish.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Tell us about your professional journey and how that tracks with the changing needs of students, particularly&nbsp;those from underserved and under-resourced communities?&nbsp;



RL:&nbsp;I am currently at Georgia State University in Atlanta. We have about 54,000 students on six campuses. I've been&nbsp;in the role of chief psychologist and director of counseling for three years, managing psychiatry and&nbsp;what's called student victim assistance. For me, and for many of my colleagues, this is a calling. I love college students. They're in that developmental space where their identities are emerging,&nbsp;and they are kind of crystallizing who they are.&nbsp;



I completed my training at the University of Notre Dame,&nbsp;where I studied identity and race, looking at how one's racial identity serves as a buffer against discrimination. That was part of my lived experience,&nbsp;and I took that knowledge into my work. My first role was actually at a counseling center at a large P.W.I. (predominantly white institution), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As the only&nbsp;Black psychologist in the counseling center, all&nbsp;Black and&nbsp;Brown&nbsp;students were referred to me,&nbsp;and it was apparent that what I had studied in school, I was seeing in real time in terms of the concerns students were experiencing. On top of anxiety and depression, they were also experiencing issues of belonging and how the intersectionality of their identities impacted their academic functioning. It was a great training ground for this work,&nbsp;so after staying there several years, I went to North Carolina Central University, which was the start of a long stretch of me working at H.B.C.U.s (historically Black&nbsp;colleges and universities).



At North Carolina Central University, I found, like many of my fellow administrators at H.B.C.U.s, that I was carrying like five roles. My students were experiencing distress related to a number of different concerns, including financial&nbsp;concerns. Many of them were first-generation college students,and I felt this overwhelming need to be everything and all things to them. I was working&nbsp;in the counseling center, doing confidential work, but I was also doing a lot of outreach, meeting students where they were. I was an advisor for a student group. And in doing all of those things, it felt like there was this need to support mental health in a way that the institutions at the time didn't understand. It was about stigma,&nbsp;which is looked at very differently today.&nbsp;



The main thing we were doing is to try to get folks to have conversations about mental health. I was doing confidential one-on-one individual counseling, but really what I discovered was that expressive therapies and unique ways of reaching students&nbsp;were&nbsp;a better way of getting them to process and be open to having deeper conversations about how they were feeling. I had some tremendous success with that. We had an increase of students coming to the center. We did what we&nbsp;called interpersonal process groups: So maybe they didn’t want to talk about a specific thing, but they knew they needed and wanted to be around someone like my colleagues and me.&nbsp;



It got me&nbsp;thinking about this idea I now lean into called C.R.I. —&nbsp;compassion, reflection, and intention. I began to share with folks that it's okay to acknowledge and be compassionate towards yourself. We're all compassionate towards our friends. Why would you not give yourself the same attention?&nbsp;This idea of C.R.I. was a way for me to have mental health in all spaces. Oftentimes, in the mental health field, we are going to our therapist location,&nbsp;or now we're meeting virtually. For many college students, we need to bring down this barrier around the conversation,&nbsp;which is&nbsp;what I was really passionate and excited about.&nbsp;



LW:&nbsp;Why was this engagement work particularly important for&nbsp;students, particularly&nbsp;those from underserved and under-resourced communities?&nbsp;&nbsp;



RL:&nbsp;There is research to support that help-seeking behaviors of students,&nbsp;particularly&nbsp;those from underserved and under-resourced communities,&nbsp;are often psychologically and negatively reinforced.&nbsp;There&nbsp;is a sense that one might be punished for asking for help&nbsp;—&nbsp;or that it is a sign of weakness. For Black and&nbsp;Brown&nbsp;communities, asking for help can reinforce&nbsp;the&nbsp;idea that you're not as smart as others. Did you really get here on your own? One might see why it would be more challenging to ask for support.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
"For those from underserved and under-resourced communities, there is a sense that one might be punished for asking for help — or that it is a sign of weakness."
</blockquote>



Or if you think about&nbsp;it,&nbsp;if a student is a first-generation college student, if most&nbsp;in&nbsp;their family&nbsp;havenever had this experience before, who do they ask&nbsp;for&nbsp;help from? That’s true of all support in college. If you're&nbsp;a&nbsp;first-generation college student and you're asking about what you need to do to register for classes or find additional funding, but your parents and your grandparents have never done that, that becomes a barrier and a burden that they might internalize as something they have to handle on their own,&nbsp;while&nbsp;not really knowing what resources to turn to. That is why organizations like the Steve Fund are actively seeking to present themselves as resources for these students.&nbsp;



When you talk about belonging and identity, so much of that is connected to performance, self-care, and wellness, but in some communities, you haven't been given&nbsp;permission to take care of yourself because your identity is wrapped up in how much you're doing for others. What emotional&nbsp;wellbeingand mental health&nbsp;ask&nbsp;of us is to be introspective, to connect, and to see what is going on internally within&nbsp;ourselves. Many times, Black and&nbsp;Brown&nbsp;students either haven't been given that space, or we haven't held space for them to do that. Another issue is&nbsp;exceptionalism,&nbsp;this idea that you're articulate&nbsp;—&nbsp;for a Black or&nbsp;Brown&nbsp;person&nbsp;—&nbsp;or you're smart&nbsp;—&nbsp;for a Black or Brown person. And that’s a lot to carry.&nbsp;



Some of the most prevalent challenges you see are around anxiety. And that's true of college students in general. But anxiety and depression manifest differently for Black and Brown students. Oftentimes, it presents as&nbsp;an&nbsp;irritable mood or what could be misinterpreted as the angry Black or&nbsp;Brown&nbsp;person.&nbsp;My&nbsp;recommendation has been for folks to ensure that we are being culturally responsive and informed as we are doing this work so that we have a good sense of:&nbsp;How does this particular mental health outcome manifest or look differently in varying settings? And then if we think about the concept of privilege,&nbsp;who gets to have emotional responses?&nbsp;Who gets to be expressive?&nbsp;&nbsp;And if we think&nbsp;about your earlier question, you asked whether it's okay for me to ask for help; if it's not, then it's probably not okay for me to appear sad. It's probably not okay for me to appear uncomfortable.



LW: I can imagine that all of this experience was useful when you actually created a college counseling center from scratch, correct? 



RL:&nbsp;Yes. I was approached by the&nbsp;president of&nbsp;a smaller H.B.C.U.&nbsp;—&nbsp;Wiley College at the time, now Wiley University&nbsp;—&nbsp;in Marshall, Texas. They didn't have a counseling center or any substantive mental health services for their students. After visiting the institution, I fell in love with the campus, with the students, and I thought,&nbsp;“No&nbsp;student should go without mental health support.” I soon discovered that Wiley was not unique. It was like many smaller institutions that just didn't have funding. In years past,&nbsp;institutions may have thought they had the option of not investing in mental health.&nbsp;This was before universities realized that mental health is directly connected to retention. For smaller schools, retention is directly related to keeping the doors open.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Once the link between retention and mental health was established, we were able to have open conversations around mental health, acknowledging that it’s not an afterthought or a second, third, or fourth priority when you're thinking about academic success. If a student is not emotionally well, they can't show up and be present in class. With that in mind,&nbsp;I was able to advocate for the students. I was initially a counseling center of one,&nbsp;and then we grew to be a fully functioning center. When I left, we had three additional staff, a training program, and a broad range of services.&nbsp;&nbsp;



I eventually brought the knowledge gained from Wiley with me to Georgia State. I moved here for personal reasons, to become a caregiver to my elderly father. It was so interesting to end up here,which&nbsp;is&nbsp;his alma mater.&nbsp;



LW: What have you found to be some of the most effective strategies to deal with the unique mental health challenges of Black and Brown students? 



NL:&nbsp;I believe leaning into forms of therapy and support outside of one-to-one&nbsp;individual counseling is particularly effective — things like group counseling, outreach experiences, ambassadorships, and opportunities for connection in what we call third spaces. We are creating other spaces outside of the classroom, outside of one's home,&nbsp;that become brave and safe spaces for people to simply be and discover themselves.&nbsp;



Group counseling demystifies, or challenges,&nbsp;the&nbsp;idea that I'm alone in experiencing things. Also, Black and&nbsp;Brown&nbsp;students&nbsp;have historically come from what we would consider collectivist cultures; these&nbsp;are backgrounds where you might have two or three generations living in a home. And so this idea around mental health&nbsp;is&nbsp;not just one-to-one individual counseling but also group counseling, some of&nbsp;which&nbsp;reinforces what has felt safe and healing and connecting for them in spaces that were safe,healing,&nbsp;and connecting before they got to college or university.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
"I believe leaning into forms of therapy and support outside of one-to-one individual counseling is particularly effective."
</blockquote>



And then we think of expressive therapies. Movement is a beautiful way to release emotions and connect to&nbsp;oneself. In expressive spaces,&nbsp;the emphasis is not just on what clients are verbally saying but also how they are emoting. We look at somatic interventions, which really connect to the body, which again connect back to this idea of cultures&nbsp;where many&nbsp;Black and&nbsp;Brown&nbsp;communities use movement as a way to express&nbsp;themselves.&nbsp;



I think a lot about meeting students and clients where they are. They may not be ready for traditional forms of treatment, but they are often on TikTok. Some of that information isn't always accurate, but what if we have licensed, competent individuals who share it and can provide meaningful content onwellness strategies and wellbeing interventions? When this happens, students have agency to take in information in ways that are digestible for them. It’s true we have standardized, evidence-based treatments and a certain language within the mental health field, but by not engaging on platforms like TikTok, we miss a subset of the population in need of care, and often that population includes our Black and&nbsp;Brown&nbsp;students.



LW:&nbsp;That brings me to my next question. You are about to launch a new passion project,&nbsp;which is an app developed specifically for individuals of color. What is that all about?&nbsp;&nbsp;



It's called&nbsp;Amelia Sage, a wellbeing app for women of color. Amelia Sage combines artificial intelligence with the oversight of licensed clinicians. There will be wellness plans and daily interactions&nbsp;for participants to&nbsp;experience. And the&nbsp;app's goal&nbsp;is to promote flourishing. I've been in the weeds recently, defining what it means to be well and recognizing that wellness is not without itschallenges. The work is grounded heavily in the dimensions of wellness. We look at social, intellectual, financial, and all areas of wellbeing;&nbsp;and within that framework,&nbsp;we promote whole wellbeing. We are currently finalizing&nbsp;details for a 14-day mental health wellness plan, and a primary goal is to share it&nbsp;with college students.&nbsp;&nbsp;



All of this connects back to what the Steve Fund does by putting information and resources readily available at students’ fingertips. For good, bad,&nbsp;right, wrong, or indifferent — everything is at their fingertips. And so we want to make sure that what they are engaging with and really internalizing is information that's going to help them be well and&nbsp;flourish.



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

Mental Health is Personal Health 

For generations of college students, having a campus job typically meant swiping meal cards, shelving library books, and staffing residence halls in shifts squeezed between classes and into the evenings.



Madison LoMedico’s campus job looked different. Three mornings a week, the SUNY Oneonta student went to an elementary school, where she worked with young students in one of the district’s highest-poverty schools. Some days she led reading groups or helped students catch up in math. Other days she floated around the classroom, helping children stay focused while teachers taught lessons. Sometimes she worked with the school counselor in small friendship groups for students struggling socially.



“It was one thing to learn all this stuff in school,” said LoMedico, who just graduated with a major in human development and family studies and a minor in educational psychology. “But it was an entirely other thing to actually be in the field.”&nbsp;



Unlike many students pursuing education or social-service careers, LoMedico wasn’t volunteering or completing an unpaid internship. She was getting paid. LoMedico was part of the inaugural cohort of the Empire State Service Corps (E.S.S.C.), a growing SUNY initiative that pays students to perform community-based public service work connected to some of New York’s most pressing social needs: food insecurity, K-12 tutoring, peer mental health support, sustainability projects, and veterans outreach. In exchange for 300 hours of service during the academic year, students earn wages, professional experience, and, many say, gain a stronger sense of purpose in their larger civic environment.&nbsp;



For LoMedico, the appeal was immediate. “I did want to get a job at school, but I was always stressed about how I was going to balance it all,” she said. “If I could really connect it to what I want to do one day, build my resume, build my skills — that’s something that I’d be really interested in, rather than just working in a store or something.”&nbsp;



When the program launched in 2024, SUNY leaders hoped students would respond enthusiastically. Even they were surprised by how quickly demand exploded: More than 2,000 students applied for the first 500 positions.&nbsp;



The model is deceptively simple but unusually ambitious: Instead of asking students to volunteer for free or cobble together unpaid internships, the program compensates them for meaningful service work tied to both workforce development and civic engagement. More than 40 percent of SUNY students are Pell-eligible, according to program leaders, meaning many come from lower-income households and need paid employment while attending school.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
"I did want to get a job at school, but I was always stressed about how I was going to balance it all.”
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In practice, that means a student interested in counseling might work in peer mental health outreach. A future educator can tutor elementary school children. Students concerned about food insecurity can support campus food pantries or SNAP outreach efforts. Others help high school students complete their FAFSA applications or participate in environmental sustainability projects.&nbsp;



“What we wanted to do was create these paid, meaningful opportunities that address community needs and also help support students in their career path,” said Jamie Frank, SUNY’s senior associate vice chancellor for policy implementation and access initiatives.&nbsp;



Back in 2023, in SUNY Chancellor John King’s first State of the University Address, he introduced the goal that every SUNY undergraduate would have the opportunity for a high-quality internship or research experience before they graduate. Knowing there would be equity issues among students who cannot afford to work for free, he developed the concept behind the E.S.S.C. and received enthusiastic support from Governor Kathy Hochul. Just three years later, E.S.S.C. appears poised for a major expansion. Pending final state budget approval, SUNY officials expect the program to double in size for the 2026-2027 academic year, growing from approximately 500 students to more than 1,000 paid service positions statewide.&nbsp;



The increase comes at a moment when educators, psychologists, and civic leaders are more vocally advocating for national or state-based service programs for young adults. Conversations about civic disengagement, loneliness, political polarization, and workforce preparedness have revived interest in structured public service opportunities as a way to strengthen both communities and democratic culture.



Across political and educational circles, there has been renewed conversation about whether structured public service should play a larger role in young adulthood. Advocates argue that civic participation can strengthen empathy, social trust, and democratic engagement while helping young people develop maturity and purpose with job experience.



E.S.S.C. offers a distinctly contemporary version of that idea: not compulsory national service, but a paid, practical, career-connected model that treats civic contribution as both economically necessary and personally transformative.



Chancellor King has repeatedly framed the program not simply as student employment but as a broader civic investment.&nbsp;"The Empire State Service Corps program empowers our students to take on civics and service opportunities that benefit all New Yorkers,” he said. “Communities throughout the state are enriched, and SUNY students receive real-world experience as they work to improve lives through this program.”



That dual emphasis — practical career preparation alongside civic purpose — may explain why E.S.S.C. has drawn attention from other states and higher education systems looking to replicate a version of the model. Program leaders say colleges around the country have already begun contacting SUNY for guidance about how to build similar initiatives.&nbsp;



Part of the appeal is that the program addresses several problems at once. For students, it creates paid experiential learning. In this sense, it reflects a broader shift in how colleges are thinking about applied learning. Traditional internships often favor students who can afford to work for free. E.S.S.C. attempts to democratize access to career-connected experiences by embedding compensation directly into the structure.



For communities, it delivers labor and support to chronically under-resourced sectors like education, food assistance, and mental health. For universities, it strengthens retention and student engagement. And for the state, it builds a pipeline of graduates with direct experience in public-facing professions.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“What we wanted to do was create these paid, meaningful opportunities that address community needs and also help support students in their career path."
</blockquote>



At SUNY Canton, Associate Director of Career Services Katie Kennedy has watched the impact unfold at ground level since the program’s early rollout. Her campus started with just three students in the first year and expanded to nine in the second, with more expected next year. “We try to keep our students on campus to support places like our food pantry and our different programs that require student success mentoring and support,” Kennedy said.&nbsp;



Students at SUNY Canton have served in food insecurity programs (SNAP/basic needs), peer mental health outreach, FAFSA completion assistance, sustainability initiatives, and student success coaching cohorts. One student helped coordinate wellness programming focused on nutrition, fitness, mindfulness, and journaling. Another worked with Renewal House, a community organization supporting survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Kennedy said the student ultimately received an Excellence in Service Above and Beyond award after exceeding her required hours because she became so invested in the work.&nbsp;



“She really came to be connected with this site, and it really meant a lot to her,” Kennedy said. “As a major in forensic criminology, this is helping her achieve her career goals and develop the durable, transferable skills she needs to be successful when she graduates.”&nbsp;



That idea of durable skills surfaces frequently in conversations about E.S.S.C. Students are not only gaining technical experience in fields they may eventually enter professionally; they are learning communication, teamwork, resilience, problem solving, and relationship building.&nbsp;



That distinction matters deeply to students like Madison LoMedico. Before joining E.S.S.C., she assumed she wanted to become a classroom teacher. Through two years of direct school-based work, however, she discovered something more nuanced about herself. She loved working with children but preferred relationship-centered youth services over managing an academic classroom full-time. Now she hopes to pursue broader youth-service work through agencies and community organizations. This summer, she will continue through the Empire State Summer Service Corps at the Northern Westchester Y.M.C.A.&nbsp;



The ability to experiment professionally while earning income is one reason students describe the experience less as volunteering and more as an integrated educational pathway.



“The program let me kind of put my feet in the water a bit, see what I wanted to do,” LoMedico said. “It was my favorite part of college, honestly. I’m so thankful for the program.”&nbsp;



Across SUNY’s 64 campuses, students work in a strikingly wide range of service categories. SUNY officials said the categories themselves evolved directly from community demand. The first year focused heavily on K-12 tutoring, food insecurity, sustainability, and mental health support. But after requests from local organizations and school districts, the program expanded to include early childhood education and veterans outreach.&nbsp;



Future plans include specialized literacy training grounded in the science of reading, as well as citizen preparedness and disaster response training that could help mobilize students during emergencies.&nbsp;



LoMedico is aware of the dual purpose — paycheck and civic service — when speaking with her fellow students working in the program. “They feel like they’re making a difference,” she said. The structure also intentionally fosters a cross-campus civic identity — of belonging in something larger than themselves. Students participate in statewide summits, monthly meetings, and cohort gatherings where they exchange experiences across disciplines and regions.&nbsp;



LoMedico remembers meeting peers from other SUNY schools and discovering how differently each service placement operated. “Even though it’s this one big umbrella term, we were all doing such different things,” she said.&nbsp;



That collective identity matters to program leaders, who emphasize that E.S.S.C. is designed not as isolated volunteer projects but as a coordinated civic corps. E.S.S.C. operates in partnership with AmeriCorps, allowing eligible students to receive education awards they can apply toward tuition, supplies, or student loans after completing their service. But SUNY intentionally structured the program to remain more inclusive than federal AmeriCorps eligibility requirements alone, ensuring undocumented and international students attending SUNY can still participate.&nbsp;



That emphasis on accessibility has become especially important amid broader national uncertainty around public service funding. Program leaders note that E.S.S.C.’s mixed funding model — combining state support with AmeriCorps partnerships — insulated it somewhat from federal disruptions that affected other service organizations.&nbsp;



Senior Associate Vice Chancellor Frank, herself a former AmeriCorps participant, said those experiences can permanently shape students’ trajectories. “We always talk about students getting the service bug,” she said. “It never really goes away.”&nbsp;



Meanwhile, public enthusiasm for the program appears to be growing. SUNY officials reported that legislators regularly attend service events, especially around food insecurity initiatives. One statewide “Day of Hunger Action” mobilized E.S.S.C. students to participate in campus food pantry work and SNAP outreach. During the program’s first year, students collectively logged more than 102,000 service hours and served over 74,000 New Yorkers.&nbsp;



For students, though, the impact often feels more personal than statistics suggest. LoMedico, working in the Oneonta elementary school, worked to build comfort and acceptance with a shy second-grade girl who needed support services. At first, the child barely spoke to her. LoMedico tried gentle conversation while helping with classwork, reading groups, and one-on-one academic support. Slowly, over weeks and months, the girl began opening up. In LoMedico’s second year in the school, even though she was no longer assigned to the same classroom, the young girl still ran up to hug her in the hallway, eager to share stories about her day.



“That really stuck with me,” LoMedico said. “Seeing how students progress and how just being that one person in someone’s life can really help them — not even just academically but socially.”&nbsp;



Multiply that impact by 500 employed students, she said, each of these past two years, and it’s encouraging to imagine the impact of E.S.S.C. across multiple categories of public engagement and personal fulfillment.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In an era increasingly defined by anxiety about disconnection, programs like E.S.S.C. are betting that purpose and engagement can still be taught — not through lectures but through participation. And that when given the chance to contribute meaningfully — and be paid fairly for it — many students will prove to be more service-minded than adults might assume.

Purpose with a Paycheck 

When many people imagine old-school college career services, they see a basement office, tucked away in some undesirable part of campus. The staff there are well-meaning but not particularly helpful. Mostly, they push resume guidebooks across their desks, offering shallow words of encouragement: “Good luck, and we hope you find your future.”



Joseph Catrino, who runs career services at Dartmouth College, knows this vision is becoming quickly outdated. As students and their families invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, they’re expecting more in dividends than best wishes for a good first job. They want, and need, to know they’re charting a path to a better life; and for that, cover letter advice and interview prep just won’t cut it, anymore.



Increasingly, career centers across the country are retooling their approach to support with the use of a more comprehensive framework, called Life Design. The (somewhat self-explanatory) idea is to help students think broadly about their interests, values, and motivations in order to plot the kind of future that feels meaningful to them. The strategy often involves trying on different types of work as one step in the larger journey towards fulfillment.



Few schools have committed as wholly to the Life Design model as Dartmouth. In less than two years, its career center has become almost unrecognizable — and not just because it opened a new location on the main quad. The operation changed names from the Center for Professional Development to the Center for Career Design (C.C.D.). In February 2025, Catrino, an experienced leader at the intersection of Life Design and career services, came on to spearhead the rehaul. He inherited start-up funding, along with a $15 million anonymous donation to finance unpaid or underpaid internships. Soon he’d helped raise enough funds to match that contribution, while doubling his staff.



The development of the C.C.D. isn’t just serving students in becoming the people they want to be; it’s serving Dartmouth in becoming the school it hopes to be viewed as. After President Sian Beilock took office in 2023, she laid out several priorities, among them increasing the lifelong value of a Dartmouth education and improving student mental health and wellbeing. As these are prime concerns for colleges nationwide, they might look to Dartmouth to see how Life Design manages to move the needle forward on both accounts.



Designing Your Life&nbsp;



The story of Life Design goes back to 2007, when two Stanford professors with roots in Silicon Valley, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, discovered they were interested in tackling the same problem with the same solution. They both wanted to teach their students, restless and confused about the prospect of post-grad life, to apply the tenets of design thinking to mapping their futures. The course that emerged, Designing Your Life, became one of the university’s most popular; then came a book by the same name and, eventually, a movement.



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It was 2017 by the time Catrino caught the Life Design bug. He was working at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., when the opportunity arose to attend a workshop led by Burnett and Evans, who were trying to disseminate their practices in new corners of higher ed. Appointed Trinity’s director of career development shortly afterward, Catrino was quick to infuse what he’d learned from the Stanford gurus into his new work. A few years later, he’d completely remodeled the career center into the Career and Life Design Center.
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Catrino’s efforts at Trinity put him at the forefront of a new brand of college career services centered around Life Design. The first school to blaze this trail was John Hopkins, Catrino said, adding that he estimates around a dozen others have followed suit since then. Many more have incorporated some element of Life Design into the student experience, but not necessarily through the career center and rarely as its “main event.”



In February 2025, Dartmouth hired Catrino with the explicit request that he revamp career services the way he had at Trinity. Once again, he said, the systems he found when he arrived followed a largely “transactional” approach — give resume advice, help with internships (ideally), ask the proverbial question: “What do you want to do for a living?” At Dartmouth, the job was made more challenging by a dearth of resources: There were the same number of staff as at Trinity, despite serving twice the number of students.&nbsp;



Catrino hit the ground running. He ensured all the Dartmouth staff received training in both Life Design and motivational coaching. That pesky, proverbial question was replaced with more constructive alternatives: “What are your interests? What motivates you? What gets you excited? What challenges you? What don’t you like to do?” Some of the most important discoveries, Catrino emphasized, come from knowing what students don’t want.



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Catrino likes to describe his approach as “transformational,” guiding students to new or heightened self-understanding.
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If these Life Design prompts seem better suited to therapy than career counseling, that’s precisely the point. Catrino likes to describe his approach as “transformational,” guiding students to new or heightened self-understanding. There’s not much of a difference, he added, between designing a career and designing a life. “I’d like to give you the skills for life — to navigate whatever it is, whether it’s your love life, whether it’s your job, whether it’s what hobbies you get involved with,” he said. “That’s really what we’re doing.”&nbsp;



Permission to Explore



As important as the guidance of a career coach is, Life Design doesn’t start and end in conversation. The meat of the work is often experiential, as students go out and try on different jobs for size. Iterating, exploring, and maybe even failing are practically requirements.



At Dartmouth, though, exploration hasn’t historically been the dominant career culture. The culture has been definitively corporate, even to the extent that deviating can feel like forsaking a chance at true success.&nbsp;



“What happens is there are students who don’t know who they are, but then they see this path of finance. It’s lucrative. ‘The companies are coming to campus to find me.’ And it seems to be easy, and they just fall into it,” Catrino said. Some end up enjoying the work. Others find themselves back in Catrino’s office a few years later, realizing they took a very wrong turn. For the latter, Catrino added, a little Life Design — some more informed decision-making — might have saved them a lot of disgruntlement.



In the spirit of Life Design, the C.C.D. is committed to shifting student perceptions of the jobs available to them and lifting up a wider variety of options. While tracks in consulting and finance may be both popular and particularly visible, Dartmouth students have been charting other paths for centuries.&nbsp;



Several programs geared at promoting exploration and accessibility for other fields are now underway. Career Communities, like special interest groups, have been dedicated to different professional areas (e..g, Arts &amp; Creative, Good &amp; Green, Law &amp; Policy). Each is led by a career coach and allows students to connect with like-minded peers and learn about relevant opportunities. A related initiative, called Career Treks, helps expose students to industries in the flesh. Recently, students with creative instincts traveled to New York during Fashion Week to learn about the business of fashion. Another more exploratory group toured Boston to meet with a range of local employers there.



Perhaps the C.C.D.’s most notable accomplishment to date has been the $30 million it raised to finance unpaid or underpaid internships for students hoping to try out less bankable fields. This year, the fund could allow up to 250 to 275 students to take on opportunities that might otherwise have been out of reach. As part of the deal, the recipients meet with career coaches after their experience, as well as write a final report on it, to encourage reflection in a Life Design context.



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For Taha Tariq, a sophomore at Dartmouth, the internship fund led to an unlikely job in Egypt and spurred an ongoing relationship with Catrino and his staff. In the fall, Taha had personally managed to secure a unique opportunity to work for the Cairo branch of a nonprofit called Ashoka, which supports social entrepreneurship around the world. How he would afford flights, housing, and food while there presented another question entirely.



With support from the C.C.D., Taha’s plans fell into place. The three months he spent in Cairo ended up being some of the best of his life, he said. Even though the job itself wasn’t perfect, it taught him about himself. He tracked which elements he found most rewarding — working with beneficiaries in the field, interviewing social entrepreneurs — and the least — sitting at a desk, doing office grunt work.&nbsp;
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Interning for a non-profit showed Taha he could be happy and comfortable with a lower salary that afforded him work-life balance. He said he worries in a more corporate job he might “just forget to live.” At the same time, his apparent preference for a routine that involves&nbsp;varied&nbsp;projects, interviews, and site visits made him wonder if consulting work in the Arab world might suit him. Sometimes pragmatism should outweigh idealism, he added.&nbsp;



In some ways, Taha now has more questions than answers. But the C.C.D. has equipped him with the structure to navigate that uncertainty. So really, not knowing doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, he said.



Engaging Alumni&nbsp;



One tool in Catrino’s arsenal that became quickly apparent upon his arrival at Dartmouth is the elite school’s robust alumni network. This closer-than-most group of grads lead inspiring and varied careers. They also exhibit a distinct willingness — in fact, desire — to engage with current Dartmouth students and career services.



Alumni involvement is a critical piece of the larger project Catrino has set out to build. For one, he has set the precedent that the Life Design and other services he and his staff offer will be available to grads at any stage. Before his tenure, only alumni three to five years out could call back for help. But if the Life Design ethos stipulates the process never truly ends, it definitely doesn’t end a handful of years after graduation. Parents return to work after raising their kids. Layoffs throw a wrench in best-laid plans. A new dream spurs a return to academia after decades away.&nbsp;&nbsp;



One particular career challenge as sure to pull in alumni as current students stems from the nature of today’s quickly changing workforce. “You have to learn how to be nimble. You have to be able to understand your skills. You have to understand who you are to be versatile across all this disruption that’s going to be happening,” Catrino said. Life Design, among other tools, may help workers expect the unexpected.



In addition to serving alumni, the C.C.D. envisions wielding their networks and connections for current students. So far, Catrino said, the grads have been more than obliging. “I have alums that are constantly calling and messaging, asking how they can help. Can they be a mentor? ‘Here’s a project-based internship that we’d like to offer.’” So far,&nbsp;<a href="https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2026/04/career-center-built-lifetime-fulfilling-work">127 alumni and parents</a>&nbsp;have contributed $61 million of the center’s $94 million fundraising goal.&nbsp;



The ideal outcome is not necessarily — or only — that alumni boasting the most triumphant corporate careers lead the charge to give back. Enlisting the partnership of grads from a variety of different fields is a key piece of the C.C.D.’s mission to expose students to many paths. Especially for industries whose hiring pipelines are more obscure, personal knowledge and connections can make all the difference for those still looking to get a foot in the door.&nbsp;



On a recent Thursday evening in Manhattan, hundreds of Dartmouth alumni of all ages came together to hear from their president, Sian Beilock. A few dozen from the younger subset, one to ten years out, arrived early. They weren’t just there to sip the peach bellinis passed by servers in white coats and catch up with old friends. They gathered in that mahogany-paneled, chandeliered library up the stairs from the main event space to hear a pitch from Catrino. He told them about the C.C.D.’s new inclusive approach to career services. He told them about his motto for working with grads like them: “Give support, get support.”&nbsp;



In the audience was Caitlyn King, a member of the class of 2024. The former art history major now works in New York for an art advisor but has plans to start a master’s program at Oxford in the fall. She said her experience job hunting while at Dartmouth, prior to Catrino’s arrival, involved more guidance from professors in her department than the career center. But with continuing questions about what might come after her next academic endeavor, and again after that, she found Catrino’s offer tempting. In fact, she said, she might just talk to him about opportunities to engage that night.



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

Designing Your Life at Dartmouth

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In this story, Olin student Hwei-Shin Harriman poignantly shares her lifelong dance with perfectionism. Hwei-Shin was on track to become a professional ballerina before shifting her attention to engineering. Her story is both unique and universal, as everyone encounters trade-offs in pursuit of excellence. In reflecting on her journey, Hwei-Shin now asks us all to consider what it means to be good enough.



To learn more about Storytelling, visit&nbsp;<a href="https://www.olin.edu/thestorylab">Olin College's Story Lab website here</a>.

"Disembodied" by Hwei-Shin Harriman

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Amanda Christy was searching for something and so, it seems, were her students. As a faculty member at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, she was frustrated by her students’ lack of engagement and their reliance on A.I. even for basic work like classroom discussion. She was tired of persuading them of the value of their liberal arts education when they bemoaned not being in business classes. There were days when she thought, “What are we even doing here?”&nbsp;



The burnout Christy was experiencing was soon replaced with renewed energy after she participated in a faculty learning community sponsored by the L.M.U. Intellectual Character Initiative. The initiative seeks to embed six intellectual virtues (“The Virtues of the Lion Mind”) into L.M.U.’s pedagogy and culture — helping students cultivate cognitive habits that lead to critical thinking and active learning.&nbsp;



Christy designed a whole course around two of the virtues: intellectual curiosity and intellectual courage, introducing her students to the concepts, providing self-assessments, and assigning them curiosity journals in which they wrote from the heart in free-form style. At the end of her experiment, Christy found that her classroom had transformed into an active community of reflective learners.&nbsp;



“The goal shifted from just learning the content to learning how to be good thinkers,” she said. “It was kind of utopian.”



To Dan Speak and Jason Baehr, the co-directors of the initiative, experiences like Christy’s are the ultimate outcome of the Intellectual Character Initiative. They hope that by inspiring and empowering faculty and academic leaders to focus on intellectual character formation, they will influence how students learn and grow.



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Though both Speak and Baehr are professors of philosophy, they are quick to emphasize that this is not principally a philosophical project. Professors across the university care about their students growing in curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual perseverance, and the like. Still, it is no accident that both philosophers are particularly interested epistemology — that is, in the theory of knowledge. And, indeed, Baehr is an expert in “virtue epistemology,” which is an approach to the philosophical study of knowledge that focuses on intellectual virtues. 
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Furthermore, Baehr is a highly regarded educational theorist who, in addition to publishing widely on the application of virtue epistemology to education, founded a public charter middle school in 2013 in Long Beach, Calif. The Intellectual Virtues Academy, as this school is known, was built from scratch to help students practice and develop virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and courage. The idea for the L.M.U. Initiative began to take shape when Speak, who serves on the board of directors for The Intellectual Virtues Academy, noted the irony of the deep impact of Baehr’s research and academic vision outside but not inside L.M.U. In 2024, they teamed up to create the blueprint for the L.M.U. project.



Their idea was brought to life thanks to a&nbsp;$943,668&nbsp;grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character. The Center is funded by the Lilly Endowment to seed and steer innovative character education initiatives in schools throughout the country. Like most start-up ventures, the L.M.U. Intellectual Character Initiative is moving in many directions, and no one is exactly sure where it will land. Speak and Baehr are nonetheless pleased with the energy and activity it has already prompted on campus.&nbsp;



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“The goal shifted from just learning the content to learning how to be good thinkers. It was kind of utopian.”
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In this first phase, it is both concept and practice, with university lectures on the virtues themselves and introductory modules for first-year students. A large part of its focus is on faculty training through summer workshops and learning communities. Speak said the initiative has three main delivery points: students, faculty and leadership. “We hope these concepts will take root so that they become part of the whole culture of the university,” he said.&nbsp;



Speak and Baehr believe that the Virtues of the Lion Mind align nicely with the school’s Jesuit mission, which holds dear concepts such as&nbsp;truth, reflection, and discernment. However,&nbsp;they hope these beliefs will, over time, become as prevalent in the school’s pedagogy and culture as they are in its mission statement. Indeed,&nbsp;everything about the three-year initiative is designed to resonate with a campus grappling with a number of realities that exist across higher education, including a decline in the humanities, R.O.I. pressure, viewpoint polarization, and students who report to lack meaning and purpose.&nbsp;



The leaders’ first cultural hurdle was to carefully choose the six intellectual virtues they found most relevant to an L.M.U. education. They arrived at: curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy, intellectual courage, and intellectual perseverance. “Curiosity gets the learning process started,” Baehr said. “We’ve also identified two pairs of virtues that complement and constrain each other. Intellectual humility helps us own our intellectual limitations, while intellectual autonomy compels us to own our intellectual abilities. Similarly, open-mindedness disposes us to give a fair hearing to alternative perspectives, while intellectual courage helps us have the courage of our convictions. Finally, intellectual perseverance keeps the process of inquiry going even when obstacles arise, as they always do.” 



Asked why the initiative feels particularly relevant at this moment in time, the scholars described the need to navigate what they call “a polluted information landscape.” “We need to be appropriately skeptical and cautious, but we also need to be trusting of the right sources, and in today’s digital world, that makes significant demands on who we are as thinkers,” Baehr said. “Intellectual virtues equip us to do this responsibly and competently.”&nbsp;



Another issue the initiative addresses is polarization and the inability of all parties to give a fair hearing to another’s point of view. “We can’t have a democracy, if we can’t listen to and learn from one another,” Baehr said. “Here is where intellectual humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness come to the fore, but also a certain amount of intellectual firmness and courage to engage in public discourse with appropriate confidence and firmness.”&nbsp;



Speak and Baehr said that the growth and ubiquity of artificial intelligence loomed large over their thinking about the project and prompted the late addition of “intellectual autonomy” to the Virtues of the Lion Mind.



“We knew the A.I. stuff would be an issue,” Speak said. “So, we identified intellectual autonomy as a way to frame how students and faculty ought to think about A.I. This intellectual virtue involves thinking for yourself. When you exercise it, you are making the ideas and knowledge your own. The knowledge didn’t just pass through you. You got to the point of understanding by your own agency.”&nbsp;



Practical Virtue



One of the advantages of the initiative is that it provides a language and pathway for a variety of stakeholders on campus, from Amanda Christy’s need to reinvigorate her classroom, to the university librarians who, in service to enlightenment, have embedded descriptions of the virtues in their basic “how to use the library” modules.&nbsp;&nbsp;



For Father Dorian Llywelyn, the virtues promise to awaken fundamental principles of scholarship and learning, and perhaps, a resurgence in Jesuit spirituality. A theologian and historian, Father Dorian leads the Center for Ignatian Spirituality at L.M.U. and sees his role there as connecting Jesuit values to the academic pursuits of the university.&nbsp;



As part of his work, Father Dorian said he seeks to reach people who have diverse beliefs with some kind of common platform.&nbsp;



“I want to give people something of use and value that somehow belongs to them, and they belong to it,” he said. “That is why I was particularly interested in the work of Dan and Jason. What they are doing is 100 percent in keeping with the tradition of Jesuit education, but it rearticulates it in a way that is relatable to many who may see religious terminology as a barrier. Even though they are not coming at this from a distinctly Christian or Jesuit viewpoint, there is great synergy there.”&nbsp;



Father Dorian recently hosted a weekend retreat for people involved in the initiative. Each participant took personal time to ponder what the work might look like in their respective roles. He also sat in on the faculty learning community and came away feeling the virtues could help address some of the lingering ills within higher education, including siloing and what he called “misguided zeal” among faculty.&nbsp;



“Intellectual humility works against indoctrination because you can’t be doctrinaire when you are intellectually humble,” he said.&nbsp;



On the faculty learning communities, he said, “bringing people of all different disciplines together to share their diverse viewpoints is what we should be doing all of the time. Doing so is an intellectual delight that raise us up and brings out the very best of us.”&nbsp;



In supporting this work, Father Dorian can’t help but wonder if the virtues initiative might ignite a resurgence in the interface between academia and spirituality, something that has fallen away over time in most Jesuit institutions.&nbsp;



“What is it to be a thinking person of virtue but also a thinking person of faith?” he asked. “My area of interest is trying to articulate that relationship better.”&nbsp;



With champions like Father Dorian, Speak and Baehr hope that the Intellectual Character Initiative may eventually become an integral part of both the academic and co-curricular life of the university. But there is a long way to go before it transforms from an overlay — a program — to part of the DNA. As cultural change theory dictates, it will be the accumulation of small developments that will eventually move the needle in that direction, which is why the experiences of individual students may be the most promising.&nbsp;



In describing what she learned in&nbsp;Amanda Christy’s class,&nbsp;a young woman wrote in her curiosity journal,&nbsp;“Curiosity helps you question your own assumptions and it pushes you to see different perspectives which can make you more thoughtful when facing problems in the world. Curiosity isn’t about knowing every fact but putting yourself out there to learn and grow. In all, that kind of curiosity is something I’ll carry with me far beyond this class.”&nbsp;



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

Awakening the Lion Mind at Loyola Marymount University

On a weekday morning during spring break, a group of first-year and second-year college students gathered around a patient whose condition began to change. The patient’s blood pressure was rising, breathing growing shallow. Sudden drooling.&nbsp;



It wasn’t a real patient. Behind the scenes, an instructor controlled the simulation using a mannequin. But the patient’s recovery wasn’t the point. The students’ introductory glimpse to the field of medicine was.



For some students, this might have been a confirmation: Yes, this is exactly what I want to do. For others, the realization could have been a cooler response, which would be just as important: Maybe this isn’t for me.



That moment — of clarity, uncertainty, or recalibration — is what Tufts University hoped to spark with its new JUMP-IN pilot program, a weeklong, immersive experience designed to help primarily first-year and some second-year students step, however briefly, into the lives they think they want. Ask a room full of first- and second-year college students what they want to do after graduation, and many will have an answer: Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer. Ask them what those jobs actually look like, day to day, and the answers may resemble vague impressions, a composite of jobs observed on television and heard about through friends and relatives.



This gap — between aspiration and understanding — is not just anecdotal. Surveys from organizations like the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) and Gallup have consistently found that while students feel pressure to choose a career path early, many lack meaningful exposure to what those careers entail. At the same time, research suggests that students who engage in experiential learning — internships, simulations, project-based work — are significantly more likely to feel confident in their career choices and to secure employment aligned with their interests after graduation. In other words, it’s not just about choosing a path. It’s about trying it on to see how it feels.



“We wanted students to begin to think about linking their interests to their academic learning to their career goals,” said Ellise LaMotte, the associate provost for student success at Tufts. The goal is not to arrive at definitive answers in a single week, but to develop the tools — and the self-awareness — to start asking better questions.



And just as importantly, students are encouraged to recognize when the answer might be,&nbsp;no thank you. “We did not want this program to just confirm what students already thought,” LaMotte said. “If someone came in thinking, ‘I want to be a doctor,’ and left realizing they didn’t —that was just as powerful.”



Learning by Doing&nbsp;



Each JUMP-IN participant spends the week in one of five tracks, including pre-med and dental pathways as well as global policy, nutrition, and engineering-focused design. What unites them is a commitment to experiential learning. “The charge was that this needed to be hands-on,” LaMotte said. “The majority of the time was spent with them doing something.”&nbsp;



In the Design Problem Solving (D.P.S.) track, that meant building structures out of melting Oreos — an exercise in material constraints and creative thinking. It meant working with modeling software, experimenting with 3D printing, and tackling real-world challenges. An open deck on top of the Tufts library was enclosed in glass so that it would be a safe place for students. But that design choice had an unexpected consequence: Birds were now flying into the glass. “One of the design flash challenges was: How can these students in this D.P.S. program for the week help to give some solutions to this problem?” LaMotte said. “So, it was a little tech heavy. But if you are somebody curious about how to solve problems, it would be appealing.”



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For some, the experience was exhilarating. For others, it was clarifying in a different way. “There were students who realized, ‘This is harder than I thought,’ or ‘This isn’t what I imagined,’” LaMotte said.
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In Global Policy Lab, students became senators in a climate policy simulation, debating legislation on a mock Senate floor at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston. They explored the role of drones in international security and engaged with local officials on immigration policy.&nbsp;



In the Pre Med Connect track, students practiced suturing and patient care, responding to dynamic simulations that required quick thinking and teamwork. In the Dental Bridge track, students performed tooth wax-up modeling, simulation shadowing, suturing, and align impressions. In the Beyond the Plate track, students conducted “nutrition myth labs,” explored food systems, and visited facilities researching lab-grown meat. Across all tracks, students were asked not just to absorb information, but to apply it — to make decisions, test ideas, and reflect on outcomes.



For some, the experience was exhilarating. For others, it was clarifying in a different way. “There were students who realized, ‘This is harder than I thought,’ or ‘This isn’t what I imagined,’” LaMotte said. “And that’s valuable.”



Building Belonging through Shared Exploration



If JUMP-IN is about career exploration on the surface, it is equally about something deeper: connection. The program, piloted this spring break with 94 first-year students, was intentionally designed to reach those who may not yet have found their place on campus.



“Some of them knew each other,” LaMotte said. “But there were some who didn’t know anybody — and those are the folks we really, really wanted to get in touch with.” The challenge is a familiar one. The first year of college is often framed as a time of discovery and belonging, but for many students, that sense of connection doesn’t come easily. Social circles can feel closed, academic interests uncertain, and the path forward unclear.



From the moment students arrive, the program nudges them toward interaction. They are encouraged to sit with people they don’t know. They work in teams. They share meals, experiences, and, by the end of the week, reflections.



Even small moments matter. On the first day, one student resisted moving from a table where he sat alone, confident that others would eventually fill the space, and they did. Over the course of the week, LaMotte watched him gradually open up — participating more, volunteering, engaging in ways he hadn’t at the start.



Those shifts, while subtle, are central to the program’s purpose. By the end of the week, 96 percent of participants said they would recommend JUMP-IN to a friend, citing connection and community as key reasons. And perhaps more significantly, 84 percent reported feeling more comfortable reaching out to mentors, advisors, or faculty — a critical step in navigating both academic and career pathways.



Measuring What Matters



By traditional academic standards, a weeklong program like JUMP-IN might be difficult to evaluate. There are no grades, so the metrics that matter are different: curiosity satisfied, realism gleaned. It’s hard to measure some shifts in attitude because they might only appear downstream later — in the form of keeping one’s eyes open more keenly or an increased willingness to make inquiries of someone who does something you just might want to know more about.



At the most immediate level, student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. In addition to the 96 percent recommendation rate, students reported gains in career clarity, networking skills, and confidence in seeking support.



Thirty-two percent said the program led them to change their academic plans — a striking figure for a cohort just beginning their college journey. Another 38 percent reported feeling better equipped to leverage networks and support systems. Even exposure to research — a domain often reserved for upperclassmen — emerged as a meaningful outcome, with 17 percent of students reporting new experience in that area.



But the longer-term measures may prove even more significant. Tufts plans to track JUMP-IN participants and their progress over time, examining retention rates, academic trajectories, and career outcomes. Do students who participate feel more connected to the institution? Are they more likely to persist, to pivot when needed, to engage with mentors and opportunities? “We want to follow them along their path to figure it out,” LaMotte said. “They were in the JUMP-IN program and were interested in engineering; now they’re in political science. Why did that happen? Without surveying them to death, we would like to determine if JUMP-IN helped them make that change. Did they get support they need to be successful?”&nbsp;



Lessons from the Pilot



Like any new initiative, JUMP-IN’s first iteration revealed areas for growth. The first was critical: using faculty to design and lead the program. “It took us a minute to figure out that faculty needed to run this and not staff. And once we made that decision, it made more sense because this is their area of expertise. Once we got faculty involved, we were able to really develop programming.”&nbsp;



The most consistent feedback from students was the need for more unstructured time. The schedule, while engaging, was also intense. By midweek, small signs of fatigue had set in. “It was too structured,” LaMotte said. Future versions of the program will likely include more downtime and social activities — opportunities for students to build relationships outside of formal programming. “We need to give them more time to just connect and be with each other.”&nbsp;



There were also logistical challenges, from coordinating transportation between campuses to managing meals while the campus is closed. But these are solvable problems, LaMotte noted, and, in some ways, evidence of the program’s scale and ambition.



Demand exceeded expectations, with 124 students applying for 100 spots. Plans are already underway to expand the number of tracks and increase capacity.



Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of JUMP-IN is what comes next. The program is envisioned not as a standalone experience but as the first step in a four-year developmental arc. Tufts plans to introduce sophomore, junior, and senior versions of JUMP-IN, each tailored to students’ evolving needs.



The first-year program focuses on exploration and connection. Future iterations may emphasize deeper skill-building focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, negotiation, navigation, along with civic impact and career development.



“We want it to grow with students,” LaMotte said, “and integrate JUMP-IN into the ethos of the undergraduate experience at Tufts.”&nbsp;



In that sense, JUMP-IN reflects a broader shift in higher education — from viewing career development as a late-stage concern to embedding it throughout the undergraduate experience.



Capping the week, LaMotte was gratified to find the best evidence of the program’s success: In a session at the end where participants broke into sub-groups to share experiences, there was a buzz of animation in the room as students reflected on: what brought them joy, if their career focus changed, what skills they need to learn next, and how Tufts can further support them. For some, the experience reinforced a sense of purpose. For others, it raised new questions. But for all of them, it transformed an abstract idea —&nbsp;being this thing&nbsp;— into something tangible, complex, and real.



That transformation may be the most valuable outcome of all. Because the goal of programs like JUMP-IN is not to provide answers but to create encounters with possible futures and versions of themselves. In a higher education landscape increasingly defined by uncertainty, that kind of clarity — earned, and personal — may be just what students need to begin.

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