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Last fall, Dartmouth College made <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/health-wellness/2025/10/14/dartmouth-builds-its-own-ai-chatbot-student-well">headlines</a> after <a href="https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/10/announcing-evergreen-ai-tool-student-well-being">announcing</a> the development of a new A.I.-powered tool for student wellbeing, called <a href="https://evergreen.dartmouth.edu/">Evergreen</a>. At a moment when concerns about the use of A.I. for mental health were coming to a head, Evergreen’s emergence signaled a continued interest in employing the technology in this way, in the right way. Already, Dartmouth has amassed $7 million of its $16 million fundraising goal to support Evergreen’s production.



But not everyone is equally ready to embrace the app. Over the last several months, students have expressed skepticism of the emerging resource, which has taken up a notable space in campus discourse. As institutions navigate how best to both regulate and leverage A.I. for students, the response at Dartmouth offers insight into when and how young people seem willing to accept the technology in their lives, as well as the kind of communication they may require from institutions introducing it in new ways.



Evergreen is far from Dartmouth’s first foray into A.I., nor digital health innovation. The Ivy League college has a longstanding tradition in both realms, including as the site where the term “artificial intelligence” was coined 70 years ago. In the spring, <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/25/business/dartmouth-college-artificial-intelligence/">The Boston Globe</a> reported on how the college has strived to live up to its history, outpacing its peers in the speed and breath of its rollout of A.I., to mixed reviews. Evergreen is discussed, with a focus on Dartmouth’s recent partnership with the A.I. company Anthropic and potential plans to "integrate the tech into most facets of campus life.”



Meanwhile, since 2011, Dartmouth’s <a href="https://www.c4tbh.org/the-center/">Center for Technology and Behavioral Health</a> (C.T.B.H.) has been ground zero for pioneering research on digital interventions for the treatment of behavioral health issues. Lisa Marsch, the center’s founding director, described the goal of C.T.B.H. as leveraging the accessibility of modern technology, like phones and wearables, to make a broad and meaningful impact on health and wellbeing. Marsch, who specializes in technology and addiction treatment, is known for developing a related mobile tool which became the first F.D.A.-authorized “prescription digital therapeutic.”



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"How do we think about the whole student body and ways that we can bring the science of flourishing to students in a way that scales?"
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It's now Marsch and several of her fellow experts at C.T.B.H., including psychiatrist Nicholas Jacobson and computer scientist Andrew Campbell, who are spearheading the Evergreen project. It launched as an opportunity to tackle the wellbeing challenges young people are facing nation- and worldwide, Marsch said, as well as fulfill an institutional priority laid out by current President Sian Beilock to better support student mental health at Dartmouth specifically. Unlike the counseling center, aimed at treating or diagnosing mental health conditions, a digital tool could offer everyday, in-your-pocket tips to strengthen wellbeing and ward off more serious crises.



“It's about prevention,” Marsch said of her vision for Evergreen. “It's about, how do we go upstream? How do we think about the whole student body and ways that we can bring the science of flourishing to students in a way that scales?”



In its current form, Evergreen has a few different functions. The interface is an A.I. chatbot, named Evie, through which students can engage with educational modules on different behavioral health topics. The first version of Evergreen’s A.I. isn’t generative, like well-known chatbots ChatGPT or Claude, meaning it doesn’t offer original or spontaneous responses. Instead, all the content comes from pre-scripted, expert-reviewed dialogues that offer insight into college-relevant issues, including sleep hygiene, nutrition, and physical activity.&nbsp;



Those interested in a more personalized Evergreen experience have that option. By allowing the app to collect passive data on different contextual elements of their life, like step count, heart rate, and sleep patterns, students can receive targeted assistance for their health needs. Someone whose sleep cycle has fallen out of whack, for example, could get a nudge from the tool to review the sleep module.&nbsp;



Evergreen’s capacities differ from traditional wearables because the app was designed with a Dartmouth-specific experience in mind. If users provide data on upcoming assignments and deadlines, the app can support them with time management. If they tell it about their extracurricular interests, it can point them towards relevant events on campus. If they decide to track their meals, it can show them the nutritional information for that day’s spread in the dining hall.&nbsp;



As Evergreen takes in individual student data, it will also be able to spit out campus-wide trends. Another of the app’s services will be to present these types of broad insights into user behavior, so students can understand their wellbeing collectively. Throughout the semester, they could track how many hours of sleep their peers are averaging. During exam periods, they could watch what happens to visits to the fitness center or time spent outdoors.



It’s important to note at this point that Evergreen is still far from a live product. A year since its announcement, the app has only just entered an initial round of testing, involving 15 students, although that number is expected to jump to 200 in the fall. A second, more advanced version of Evergreen that does involve generative A.I. is being developed simultaneously and isn’t estimated to start testing until 2027.



By students, for students



The reason that Evergreen has already managed to secure an active role in the minds and lives of Dartmouth students is likely because hundreds of them have been employed to work on the project. Upwards of 250 of these project assistants, as they’re called, have been helping engineer the technology, deliberating on the issues Dartmouth students might need the app’s help navigating, crafting the scripts for the dialogues, and producing and narrating supplementary videos. It was a student’s idea, for example, to integrate the dining hall menu. And it was students who suggested Evergreen provide designated support for those who weren’t admitted to the fraternity or sorority of their choice, or at all.



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The assertion of its student-centered ethos seems to have opened Evergreen up to particular scrutiny from, well, students.
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It's a key point of pride for Evergreen that it’s “Built by students, for students” (that’s essentially the greeting line on the home page of the app’s <a href="https://evergreen.dartmouth.edu/">website</a>). But ironically, the assertion of its student-centered ethos seems to have opened Evergreen up to particular scrutiny from, well, students. The promise that they’re in the driver’s seat ends up deepening skepticism of the enterprise altogether when they sense that they’re not.



In January, students’ hackles were raised after the editors of The Dartmouth, the student newspaper, revealed the author of <a href="https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2025/11/roberts-why-evergreen-ai-deserves-a-chance">an op-ed supportive of Evergreen</a> had received payment from his employers at the app for the time he spent writing. His supervisors at Evergreen also provided feedback on a draft of his essay, which was titled “Why Evergreen.AI Deserves a Chance.” That headline alone suggests reservations about the tool were already brewing. Now there was another reason to imagine students weren’t really in charge at Evergreen.&nbsp;



Then, later this spring, a similar publicity snafu rocked evergreen when The Dartmouth again turned up some <a href="https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/05/klee-miller-evergreen-ai-writing">incriminating details</a> about student involvement in the project. Three different student workers had come forward to admit they used A.I. to write dialogues for the Evergreen modules, which were branded as intentionally student — not A.I. — generated.&nbsp;



In the article, Lisa Marsch affirmed this conduct was against the rules put in place to preserve the student voice of the content. More recently, she amended that, given the extent of the editing process for these scripts, some of the language having been originally A.I.-generated isn’t inherently concerning. “I don't know that it would be that much of a problem because we have such a careful, thorough review of the quality from peers and experts that ultimately nothing's going to make it into this that hasn't gone through that rigorous process,” she said.



The biggest barrier to overcome for Marsch and her team moving forward may be how students feel about Evergreen. These feelings could be mixed up in views on A.I. generally, as well as Dartmouth’s specific efforts to champion it. To Trace Ribble, a rising sophomore, Evergreen is part of his school’s larger mission to “claim” A.I. as its expertise. “We want to be the A.I. school. We want to be on the cutting edge,” he said. By his account, he added, “there's not much student support for it.”&nbsp;



Ribble was responsible for <a href="https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/03/ribble-evergreen-ai-is-not-good-for-dartmouth">another op-ed</a> in The Dartmouth, expressing his view that “Evergreen.A.I. Is Not Good for Dartmouth.” He writes from a background in youth mental health advocacy, having founded a nonprofit to make resources accessible in rural areas like his home in Oklahoma. His concerns about Evergreen center on a wariness of the newness and therefore efficacy of A.I. for mental health support. Evergreen, he writes, is a “multi-million dollar cash sink designed to generically ‘support student success.’” The funds raised, he believes, would be better spent on expanding in-person care.



It’s true that people struggling with their mental health have turned to A.I. chatbots and received dangerous guidance, or lack thereof, in recent years. Generic large language models often aren’t trained to recognize warning signs or offer referrals for behavioral issues. Around the time students were first hearing about Evergreen, one <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/magazine/character-ai-chatbot-lawsuit-teen-suicide-free-speech.html">major news story</a> featured a teen boy who died by suicide after falling in love with a chatbot and his family’s effort to hold the A.I. company responsible. His parents <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx-s1-5545749/ai-chatbots-safety-openai-meta-characterai-teens-suicide">aren’t the only ones</a>.



Ribble understands Evergreen isn’t positioning itself as therapy, but he worries the slope is slippery. “They're walking this fine line where they're like, ‘Oh, we're not trying to replace traditional therapy.’ But then they're lauding their connection to, I think it's called Therabot, which is just exactly what it sounds like — therapy A.I.,” he said. “I don't know. It's really icky to me.”



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The biggest barrier to overcome moving forward may be how students feel about Evergreen.
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Therabot is indeed the generative A.I.-therapy chatbot designed by Dartmouth psychiatrists Nicholas Jacobson and Michael Heinz, who are also leaders of Evergreen. In a recently published clinical trial, <a href="https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/03/first-therapy-chatbot-trial-yields-mental-health-benefits">the first of its kind</a> for this kind of software, users were found to have experienced a 51 percent average reduction in symptoms for depression and 31 percent for anxiety.



Still, Heinz confirmed Evergreen’s work is different. “I don’t think it’s the place for this app to deliver mental health services,” he said. Even the second version of the app that, unlike the first, will have a generative component will be “purpose-built in a way that it knows what it is,&nbsp;it knows its limitations.” So if a student started chatting with the bot about a serious mental health issue, it would be able to refer students to better resources for help. “It would know the off-ramps,” Heinz said. “We're training this in right now, so it knows the resources at Dartmouth, and it's able to connect students to those resources.”



The “off-ramps” are key to Evergreen, Marsch agreed. This digital resource is different from typical online content, she said, because it actually wants users to get off and engage beyond. “Unlike a lot of social media and other online things that people can do, which have algorithms designed to keep your eyes glued to the screen, this is all about the opposite. It's about giving you resources to connect you to the real world.”



Keene Dampal, another mental health advocate at Dartmouth, is a project assistant for Evergreen. He said he knows that the app isn’t “the best perceived” among his peers, but while he’s an enthusiastic supporter, he doesn’t necessarily think the wider hesitance is such a bad thing. “In fact, I think it's a very useful thing,” he said. “It just shows that people are critical before they actually just say yes to something that's new.”



Clarifying the mission of Evergreen will be important, Dampal continued, but in the end, not everyone may want to use it. That’s okay, too, he said, as long it helps someone who does.



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.

Digital Wellbeing at Dartmouth

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

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Not for Everybody



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



An opportunity for experiential learning&nbsp;



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

"College-in-3"

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On this episode of LearningWell Radio, John Volin, the president of Gustavus Adolphus College, and Dan Currell, a Gustavus trustee, pair up to discuss the major changes coming to higher education and what they might mean for colleges and universities that prioritize personal growth and development.



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

The Future of Holistic Higher Education with John Volin and Dan Currell

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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

Exploring the Purpose of Higher Education

When Ezra Hall arrived at Furman University as a freshman, he signed up for the school's Adopt a Grandparent program expecting a light volunteer activity. In the introductory session, students met residents of The Woodlands at Furman, a retirement community bordering campus, in a kind of speed-dating event. There, they chose whom they wanted to spend time with over the coming year.



Hall connected with retiree Jeanne Christie. At first, they met for meals or campus events. Before long they were attending church together, celebrating birthdays and graduations, and talking about everything from family to books and career plans. Christie eventually encouraged Hall to call her Mimi, the name her own grandchildren use. It stuck, and so did the relationship, which influenced more than his college experience. After interning at The Woodlands while he was a student, Hall decided to work at the retirement community full time after graduation. Now, as the director of philanthropy and engagement, he helps create opportunities for others to have similar intergenerational relationships.



Hall's was a fortuitous match. But the circumstances that brought him and Christie together are becoming increasingly intentional. Across the country, a growing number of colleges and universities are partnering with retirement communities — or building their own — as an extension of their educational mission. Since the mid-1980s, <a href="http://UniversityRetirementCommunities.com">more than 80 of these types of residences</a> have opened across the U.S., including The Woodlands at Furman University, Mirabella at Arizona State University, University Commons at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Oak Hammock at the University of Florida. Demand has increased along with the aging of boomers, and waiting lists for openings is common. The Woodlands, for example, has a wait list of 500 people for its 280 residences.



The opportunity starts with the chance to continue learning. Residents can audit university courses, attend lectures and performances, use campus libraries and athletic facilities, and remain connected to an intellectually vibrant community. Some are retired faculty members or administrators, and others are alumni or even relatives of matriculated students. But most are people with no previous affiliation to the institution but want to live in an environment where ideas continue to enliven their world.&nbsp;



And while the intellectual stimulation is a draw, these communities are increasingly discovering that some of the richest forms of lifelong learning happen outside the classroom — and that it goes in both generational directions. Students and residents mentor and tutor one another and form friendships that span generations. In the process, lifelong learning comes to mean something broader than continuing education. It becomes an ongoing exchange of experience, curiosity, and perspective that continues long after formal schooling ends and underscores the value of age-accumulated experience.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
And while the intellectual stimulation is a draw, these communities are increasingly discovering that some of the richest forms of lifelong learning happen outside the classroom — and that it goes in both generational directions.
</blockquote>



The experience within these communities also reflects wider evidence on the benefits of intergenerational connections. For&nbsp;<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33017736/">older people</a>, being in relationship with a younger person leads to greater wellbeing and quality of life. Likewise, a review of intergenerational programs found that&nbsp;<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29163269/">younger participants</a>&nbsp;experience greater empathy, self-esteem, and social and communication skills through their relationships with older adults.&nbsp;Given these benefits increase with stronger connections, the longer-term living/learning arrangements of campus-based retirement living pose to be particularly effective.&nbsp;&nbsp;



There are a number of compelling practical advantages to these programs as well. A.S.U. graduate student and musician Caleb Bailey is one of a handful of young people living at Mirabella. Initially, the arrangement was actually motivated by a financial issue. Growing up in rural Maryland, Bailey never imagined graduate study in classical guitar was within his financial reach. His mother managed a Lady Foot Locker store; his father’s income came from buying and reselling items on eBay. As a first-generation Hispanic college student with A.D.H.D., Bailey felt talent alone wouldn't cut it to cover tuition or rent.



"I was trying to figure out how graduate school was even going to be financially possible," Bailey recalled. At A.S.U., Mirabella houses a few graduate students in the arts free of charge each year in exchange for performances and engagement with residents. Bailey had participated in a similar artist-in-residence program while earning his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University, and the arrangement made graduate school financially feasible.



There, and at A.S.U., he has found much more than affordable housing. Residents attend his recitals and ask about his research. They remember upcoming performances and stop him in the hall to ask how auditions went. Others simply became enthusiastic supporters of a young artist trying to build a career. Casual conversations after concerts often stretched longer than the performances themselves. "It's like having 300-plus grandparents," Bailey laughed.



The relationships changed his musicianship as well. Residents weren't interested only in technical perfection. They wanted music that moved them, comforted them, surprised them, or reminded them of someone they loved. Bailey began thinking less about performing for judges and professors and more about performing for people. Some residents decided to rediscover instruments they had abandoned decades earlier. One resident, a retired engineer, had spent years quietly writing songs for his wife. Bailey worked with him to arrange and perform them.&nbsp;



"I realized music is about serving the listener. That shifted my whole perspective," said Bailey, who is attuned to giving residents a choice in what they’d like to hear. This is especially true of those in a higher level of care. People with limited mobility or serious health issues may have less agency in their daily routines. “It’s always nice to be asked what you’d like to hear.”&nbsp;



The experience also reshaped his professional ambitions. Today, Bailey is developing a nonprofit organization designed to expand artist-in-residence programs like Mirabella's to retirement communities around the country, making graduate education more financially accessible while enriching the lives of older adults through sustained artistic engagement. His story illustrates something advocates of university retirement communities have been observing for decades: Meaningful intergenerational learning rarely emerges from occasional programming alone.



"It doesn't happen by accident," said Andrew Carle, a nationally recognized expert on university retirement communities who has spent more than 20 years studying their development. Simply building senior housing next to a campus isn't enough. The strongest communities create intentional opportunities for residents and students to cross paths through academics, the arts, athletics, volunteerism, and everyday campus life. Over time, those encounters accumulate into relationships that no one could have predicted.



Carle describes the model as having five essential pillars, including formal lifelong-learning opportunities, access to campus life, intergenerational engagement, wellness, and a close institutional partnership with the university. Remove any one of those elements, he said, and the experience begins to look less like an extension of the university's educational mission and more like housing with a convenient address.&nbsp;



That philosophy has become central to how Mirabella approaches lifelong learning. When the community opened in 2020, administrators expected residents would primarily attend lectures and audit classes. But over time, something more dynamic emerged.&nbsp;



“I would say the vast majority came in saying, ‘I want to take A.S.U. classes.’ And as they've lived here for some years, just about 40 to 50 percent of the residents actually audit classes,” said Lindsey Beagley, Mirabella's senior director of lifelong university engagement. That’s because there are so many different avenues to intellectual and psychological enrichment. International students are invited to Mirabella to interact with others interested in speaking their language or to find companionship for a Thanksgiving meal when much of the campus empties out. Retired entrepreneurs step in as judges in departmental competitions; mentors in clubs give students a better sense of their profession.&nbsp;



“There's 400 residents who have full access to campus, so there's 400 completely different experiences, and that's what's exciting about this model,” Beagley said. “It's really their own question to answer: How do you want to spend your time? What's important to you? What do you want to learn?”



For Kathie Zurfluh, a 74-year-old former elementary school teacher, the classroom was what first attracted her to university retirement living. She and her husband had already built what they assumed would be their forever home further away in Arizona. But as they began thinking about the next stage of life, they were drawn to the idea of remaining intellectually engaged.



"The opportunity to take classes was just right up our alley," she recalled. They put their name on the list at Mirabella and sold their forever home. Today, she continues to audit university courses. But some of her most meaningful learning happens outdoors, in regular conversations with students that offer insight into the lives of young people today. Two mornings each week, Zurfluh has a volunteer shift on a Friendship Bench beneath the shade of a tree with her certified therapy dog beside her. Students know that anyone sitting on the bench is open to conversation (the banner says, “I’m all ears”). Sometimes they stop because they're homesick. Sometimes they're overwhelmed by exams or relationships. Sometimes they simply miss having an older adult to talk with. Some conversations last just a moment while students pet Griffy, her Golden Retriever, while others continue for months, with students seeking her out regularly in her expected Tuesday-Thursday place.&nbsp;



“If they call Griffy’s name when they’re coming out of class, he gets so excited I have to hold onto him,” Zurfluh said. She and Griffy have celebrated acceptances for internships and graduate school and watched nervous freshmen struggling with loneliness grow into confident seniors. In return, the students have introduced her to new music, new ways of thinking, and shared their feelings about school shootings and other realities of growing up in a very different generation.



The exchange is precisely what Carle believes distinguishes successful university retirement communities from traditional senior housing that just happens to be located near a campus. The goal isn't simply to give older adults access to university resources or proximity to students. It's to create enough regular opportunities for authentic encounters that relationships can develop organically.



Rick Brackett, the president and C.E.O. of The Woodlands at Furman, has watched those relationships ripple outward in unexpected ways. International students who may be thousands of miles from their own families often find surrogate grandparents in the community. One Japanese student would come share meals at The Woodlands with a former director of Asian Studies. After the student graduated, the former director and his wife traveled to Japan to visit and meet her family.



There are paid conduits to relationships, too, with student interns receiving a stipend to work in the dining hall or teach classes at The Woodlands. “Some of the most successful are the athletes that intern in our wellness facility and teach exercise classes,” Brackett said. “The residents love the football players and soccer players that come over — they’re just superstars.” At games, the prime tailgating spots going into the stadium are lined with residents cheering for the players they know who march by.&nbsp;



The residents can be superstars in their own way, too, with decades of professional experience and connections. Students preparing for careers in medicine, business, education or public service benefit from regular access to people whose professional lives span decades. Residents contribute institutional memory, hard-earned perspective, and even networking opportunities. One retired physician recognized that pre-med students needed a place to talk candidly about burnout, uncertainty and the emotional realities of medicine. He helped launch the Future Physicians Forum, creating conversations that complement what students learn in the classroom.



At the same time, residents remain connected to emerging ideas, technologies, and cultural shifts through daily interactions with younger people studying their field. That reciprocity represents some of the quiet innovation at the heart of university retirement communities.



For decades, lifelong learning has often been understood as continuing to accumulate knowledge through classes, lectures, and books, and through campus-based programs like the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, with 125 chapters on campuses across the United States. But the stories emerging from communities like Mirabella and The Woodlands suggest a broader definition. Perhaps the most enduring lesson these communities offer is that lifelong learning isn't just the pursuit of new knowledge. It is remaining part of a community where curiosity, generosity, and perspective continue to shape us, regardless of age.



Ten years after meeting Jeanne Christie, Ezra Hall still meets her for lunch almost every week. He continues to be influenced by the vitality of her mind, and through his career path at The Woodlands, he plays a role in future students having personal relationships of their own with future seniors.&nbsp;



“Retirees still have a lot to offer. Retirement has changed in recent years. No one wants a rocking chair on the porch anymore,” Brackett said. “Students get to see how active and engaged you can be into your 80s and 90s, if you stay healthy and still contributing to a community. It’s inspiring, and it’s a new roadmap for the students going forward.”

Learning for the Ages

At a recent talk at Villanova University, the author and commentator David Brooks told students, “Know what you want. Want it well and want the things that are truly worth wanting.” The advice was not original to Brooks but rather to St. Augustine, who believed that knowing what you’re passionate about is critical in a world where human beings are driven more by desire than by reasoning.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Interpreting the wisdom of St. Augustine is, in many ways, the&nbsp;raison d'être&nbsp;of Villanova. The Catholic university in Pennsylvania is considered the world’s premier institution for Augustinian scholarship. Pope Leo XIV is among its graduates. But while Villanova’s Augustinian roots run deep, one might ask: What does the work of the late fourth century Christian theologian really mean to a modern university with 21st century students?&nbsp;



This is the underlying question behind a new character education initiative at Villanova called Pilgrim Virtues. The name refers to a central pillar in Augustine’s work — that human life is a pilgrimage. The program seeks to highlight what is distinctly Augustinian about character education at Villanova and share that with the campus community as well as others working in this field.&nbsp;&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“I think the character movement has really tapped into something real, something essential in higher education, and we wanted to become a part of that from our own distinct tradition."
</blockquote>



The initiative began two years ago with a Capacity-Building Grant from the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) at Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character. In 2025, Villanova received an Institutional Impact Grant of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.villanova.edu/university/media/press-releases/2025/educating-augustinian-character.html">$822,258</a>&nbsp;from Wake Forest to build out an institution-wide series of character education programs, aligned with Augustinian teaching, both curricular and co-curricular. The idea was to coordinate, catalyze and accelerate the many character education activities that were taking place within three areas at the university: the Department of the Humanities, the Honors Program, and the Augustinian Institute.&nbsp;



“I think the character movement has really tapped into something real, something essential in higher education, and we wanted to become a part of that from our own distinct tradition,” said Anna Moreland, who heads the Honors Program.&nbsp;



Moreland and her colleague Michael Tomko, the chair of the&nbsp;Humanities Department, are the driving force and guiding spirit behind Pilgrim Virtues. Moreland’s sought-after “Shaping Initiative” course series (“Shaping a College Life,” “Shaping a Work Life,” and “Shaping an Adult Life”) helps students transition to college and walk through the experience intentionally, thinking deeply about their professional callings and their life beyond campus.&nbsp;



Courses in the Department of Humanities study the questions that matter most for living a good and deeply human life.&nbsp;&nbsp;Indeed, much of the work Moreland and Tomko were doing in their classrooms already bore the imprint of both Augustine’s teaching and the character education movement. They were curious about how to connect the two and scale the work so that it touched everyone on campus. But the challenge included engaging an audience that may only be tangentially aware of, or influenced by, the saint himself. First year students are required to read Augustine’s seminal work, “Confessions,” but for many, that will be their only exposure. And while Villanova is a Catholic university, a good percentage of the students are not, or are not practicing.&nbsp;



To explore all of these considerations more deeply, Moreland did something unusual in higher education: She looked outside her university for partners. There, she “stumbled” upon the E.C.I. “We work in our silos so effectively that sometimes we reinvent the wheel,” she said. “But through the E.C.I., I realized there are all these good people around the country who are doing similar work. What we needed to do was get to know one another.”&nbsp;



Moreland and Tomko drew on the expertise of the E.C.I. to examine other character education customs, including the more recognized Aristotelian tradition. In doing so, they quickly realized they had something to offer as well as to gain. “Through our work with the E.C.I., we were able to bring the Augustinian framework — those insights and experiences — to the broader field of character education,” Tomko said. 



The leaders believed that the examination of what Villanova had to offer required introspection and input from a wide cross-section of the university. Fortunately, the Capacity-Building Grant Villanova received covered a faculty and staff workshop pilot that would be the first foray into bringing diverse voices together on campus to revitalize Augustine’s teachings in a meaningful and visible way. The method they used was emblematic of the tradition they were reawakening.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“We were drawing on the knowledge and inspiration of this group we had assembled,” Tomko said. “We not only had ideas but also the practical experience of how to live well in community.” Moreland said coming together to understand what it meant to teach character at an institution like Villanova was the most profound experience she had had at the university. “We brought our whole selves to those conversations,” she said.&nbsp;



An important voice in the discussions was Paul Camacho, the associate director of the Augustinian Institute at Villanova and an associate professor of philosophy in the Humanities Department. The institute exists to&nbsp;promote the study of Augustine and his legacy&nbsp;within the pedagogy at the university. As an Augustinian scholar, Camacho helped clarify the distinctions within traditions.&nbsp;



“A lot of what has emerged in character education is based on Greek philosophy, which sometimes presents a list of virtues that could be somehow obtained like credentials, as Benjamin Franklin famously attempted in his virtues checklist,” Camacho said. “Augustine reminds us that virtue is not something that you acquire but rather is a dramatic and dialogical narrative unfolding across the whole of your life.”&nbsp;



St. Augustine of Hippo was a Late Antique philosopher, theologian, and bishop known for his insights into the human condition and one’s relationship with God. He argued that human beings are fundamentally desiring&nbsp;rather than reasoning creatures and that we are shaped by what we love. Augustine’s pilgrimage through life, his self-examination and conversion as captured in the “Confessions,” is perhaps his defining characteristic.&nbsp;



“Augustine believed the good that we are striving for is always something that’s in process, always on the move, and always in relationship with other people,” Camacho said. “The task of being human is never really accomplished.”&nbsp;



It was this journey through life that resonated most with the Villanova community and its students navigating their own education and personal growth. In identifying the pilgrimage theme, the initiative’s leaders explored what virtues would be critical for students traveling this road. If, for Augustine, love is the beginning and the end, what do you need along the way?&nbsp;



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“Augustine believed the good that we are striving for is always something that’s in process, always on the move, and always in relationship with other people."
</blockquote>



The five virtues they arrived on are: humility, forgiveness, patience, wonder, and conviviality. While the first three are more easily understood, wonder and conviviality, as seen through an Augustinian lens, merit definitions. Wonder, for Augustine, was an impassioned search for beauty “so ancient and so new,” as written in “Confessions.”&nbsp;Conviviality, from the Latin term&nbsp;con-vivere&nbsp;or ‘to live together’ binds its members in a common project, toward a shared goal.



The Journey Continues&nbsp;



As the early work of the initiative laid the philosophical groundwork for the pilgrim virtues, the Institutional Impact Grant is bringing theory to practice. The new grant covers a series of programs, courses, lectures, and fellowships that are all ultimately student-facing. This fall, a new course called “Augustine the Pilgrim,” to be led by Camacho, will follow the footsteps of Augustine’s life, culminating in an actual pilgrimage to Italy.&nbsp;



The faculty and staff workshop pilot is now an established program with a waiting list. The year-long workshop supports professors and practitioners in incorporating the virtue framework into classrooms and co-curricular activities. In bringing together diverse professionals from all areas of the university, the workshops have yielded positive results, both intended and unintended.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Sunny Gaye Hallowell, a professor in Villanova’s nursing school, often wondered what the world was like for her colleagues in the humanities. She felt her students, while proficient at the scientific material, had limited opportunities to connect the meaning of nursing practice to who they were becoming as adults. When she heard of the Pilgrim Virtues workshop, she was the first to sign up.



“In my discipline, we teach to competency-based learning objectives. We give students&nbsp;challenging&nbsp;questions and case studies, so they can develop&nbsp;necessary skills&nbsp;to become amazing nurses,” Hallowell said. “But what are we doing in the classroom to cultivate a human being?&nbsp;I wanted to blend art and science to help students explore the human experience of health and healthcare through the eyes of both patients and providers, and to help them form a professional identity.”&nbsp;



Hallowell&nbsp;said attending the workshop and learning the virtues gave her the language and structure to do that. Exposure to colleagues across multiple disciplines was an added benefit. “The chance to cultivate a classroom where we can walk through the virtues&nbsp;to&nbsp;think and engage independent of our own disciplines has been transformative,” she said. “It has given us a point of connection as faculty, and it has&nbsp;introduced me to&nbsp;colleagues and friends that reinforced&nbsp;the presence of an academic community I belong to.”



An important goal of the initiative is the direct engagement of students, both through the classroom and through programs like Augustinian Ambassadors, which was introduced through the Capacity Building Grant. Modeled after the faculty and staff workshops, the Augustinian Ambassadors program brings together interested students to deepen their understanding of Augustine’s teachings through texts and reflection.&nbsp;



Kate DiLella was one of the first Ambassadors and will continue in the program this upcoming year. The rising senior was originally drawn to the Ambassador role because of her Catholic faith and interest in deepening her understanding of Augustinian character, and she believes the program has the potential to benefit anyone on campus. “Many of the students in the program seem to have a similar idea of what we are striving for, but through studying St. Augustine, we are reminded that life is a pilgrimage and part of the beauty is that we can’t foresee all the bumps that will come along the way.”



Once they have become reintroduced to Augustinian virtues, Ambassadors are expected to encourage their peers to participate in numerous ways. The well-attended David Brooks lecture was one option. The hope in offering these character-building onramps is that students may be particularly receptive to them at this point in their lives.&nbsp;



Camacho has a theory on the subject based on what he sees as most prevalent in today’s students: a desire for security. “The culture, their parents, the job market are all telling them, ‘Everything is precarious out there.’ So the decisions they are making are based on fear,” he said. “But when you do that, you become smaller. You are no longer curious, and your relationships with other people become temporary.”&nbsp;



Camacho said the pilgrim virtues offer another way of relating to the unknown. “These virtues tell us we are all on this journey together. If we are willing to grant that we fall short and that other people fall short and have the humility to accept that, we can loosen up a bit. Character formation isn’t another checklist of perfection but instead this wonderful opportunity to expand our attention to become curious about the world and what we love.”&nbsp;



Asked if she believes that exploring the kinds of questions that lead to character development is unusual for students of her generation, Kate DiLella said, “I think questions about life and purpose and who we are and who we are called to be are likely on more students' minds than it may seem, and through Educating Augustinian Character, students are guided in how to think about these bigger questions in life.”



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.

What We Bring with Us 

A young person can have a counselor's number saved in her phone, a clinic ten minutes from campus, and an insurance card that covers the visit — and still not go. Some young people go to counseling or therapy once, sit across from someone who doesn't understand their language, culture, or lived experience, and never return.



That gap between a service being&nbsp;available&nbsp;and a young person being willing to&nbsp;use&nbsp;it is a part of "access" that is frequently overlooked.



We tend to measure access by supply: how many providers, how many appointment slots, how short the waitlist. Those things matter. But for young people, especially those from underserved and under-resourced communities, access is also a feeling. It's whether they feel or believe the person across from them can be trusted. Whether the space feels like it was built with them in mind. Whether reaching out will be met with understanding rather than judgment. A service you don't feel safe using is not, in any meaningful sense, accessible.



<a href="https://stevefund.org/press-release/tsf-harris-poll-students-mental-health/">More than 7.5 million young people</a>&nbsp;from underserved and under-resourced communities in the United States are struggling with their mental health and emotional wellbeing, which amounts to more than one in five. Three-quarters of mental health conditions emerge by age 24, during the period when young people move through the transitions that shape the rest of their lives: adolescence into higher education, college into the workforce. The care that could help isn't reaching them evenly.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nbwji.org/post/contextualizing-bipoc-youth-mental-health">Black and Latinx youth are 14 percent less likely than their white peers to receive treatment for depression. Just 8 percent of the lowest-income communities have a mental health specialist at all.</a>



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That gap between a service being available and a young person being willing to use it is a part of "access" that is frequently overlooked.
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These disparities reflect a set of systems that were never designed for underserved or under-resourced patients. Cost and logistics put care physically out of reach, while a shortage of professionals who share their communities' language and lived experience makes it harder to trust the care that does exist. Stigma — a major barrier to care — makes the first step towards help seem harder. Too often, the models that mental health care is based on feel disconnected from the realities young people actually live. When care doesn't reflect who someone is, "available" and "usable" turn out to be very different things.



Belonging is a protective factor in its own right. Research points to a consistent set of protective factors: a strong sense of self, supportive relationships, and, above all, a sense of belonging that help young people stay well and navigate challenges as they arise. Culturally responsive care is what activates protective factors. It's the difference between a young person being treated as a case and being seen as a whole person in the full context of their family, culture, and community.



What does that look like in practice? It starts with mental health professionals who come from the communities they serve and bring cultural fluency into the room. Quality mental health care treats identity and community as strengths to draw upon. It means meeting young people where they already are in peer communities, on campuses, in the spaces they already trust, so the first conversation doesn't require a leap of faith into an unfamiliar system.



For colleges, employers, funders, and community organizations, these expectations reframe the work. The goal is to add capacity and more counselors&nbsp;and&nbsp;to build an environment that young people will trust enough to use. That means investing in a workforce that reflects the communities it serves and designing programs alongside the young people and their families. It also means treating belonging as a real outcome of care.



When care is built around trust and grounded in culture, young people show up, stay in care, and achieve better healthcare outcomes. The challenge is to build services in a way that makes them worth walking into.



This work requires collective action from schools, providers, families, funders, and young people themselves committed to the same vision: that every young person is supported by people and places that understand them.



Access is the door. Trust is what gets someone to walk through it.



If you or a young person you know is struggling, support is available. Text STEVE to 741741 to reach a crisis counselor, or call or text 988 for the Suicide &amp; Crisis Lifeline.



Dr. Annelle Primm is senior medical director of The Steve Fund, a leading nonprofit dedicated to promoting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people from underserved and under-resourced communities.

Mental Health Access Is More than an Appointment

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;



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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 has 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. 



<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

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 

I pole vaulted in high school. For your reference, I stand a mere one inch above five feet, and I’ve got the build of a gymnast rather than a jumper. I was atrocious. I skewered myself semi-regularly, and my most spectacular failure involved a nine-foot pole ending up in some seven different pieces. 



I absolutely loved it.&nbsp;



When I moved across the country before middle school, and then again before high school, and then again to college, my mom said the same thing every time: “Join things.” Importantly, she forgot to tell me to be good at them. I became a pole vaulter, debater, figure skater, choir singer, volunteer, and even a defensive end on a flag football team. (Let us remember again that I am 5-foot-1.) I met my people in these activities and found the things I loved, outcomes not at all correlated to my natural aptitude. 



The third time I started over, I was alone, beginning my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. I had my formula down. I threw myself into everything I could: a capella, spoken word poetry, club figure skating, chamber choir, consulting clubs, campus tours, tutoring. Two weeks later, I was bawling into the phone telling my mom I had chosen the wrong school. No matter how hard I tried, what angle I approached from, I was rejected from everything.&nbsp;



This was new for me. Not because I had been talented at everything I had tried before, but because I had never encountered such high barriers to extracurricular activities. I had only ever needed two things: a willingness to walk in the door, and a willingness to fail on the way to being better. At Penn, that was not enough. In fact, those skills weren’t even recognized. 



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In an institution that prides itself on education, the true learning that inevitably involves failure was nowhere to be found.
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Trust me, I ran the gauntlet in terms of getting in: Four rounds of interviews, 10 essay questions, and a name-drop-who-you-know competition were the bare minimum. But I could never figure out the system. I spent my entire freshman year activity-less. Woe was me. But it was less my personal experience with a lack of extracurriculars that discouraged me, and instead the broader attitude towards failure — or even just non-perfection — within the Penn community. It was truly frowned on to be bad at anything. Embarrassing, actually. In an institution that prides itself on education, the true&nbsp;learning&nbsp;that inevitably involves failure was nowhere to be found. I was incredibly disappointed to be surrounded by brilliant, qualified, astounding peers, none of whom were excited to leap into something they weren’t already good at.&nbsp;



That is not to say, however, that I blame those peers. The atmosphere of the East Coast, Ivy League schools, and higher education in general, carefully avoids promotion of failure. In a school where everyone already seems to have a head start — something that “got them in” — you’re better off leaning into where you’re already talented rather than playing the field to find something new. Consulting clubs who work for real clients need students who know what they’re doing. Firms start recruiting sophomore year. Connections are made from the first time you set foot on campus. No one has time for failure. This is compounded by the fact that all 10,000 Penn students absolutely ran the schools they came from, and no one wants to go from the top of the stack to the bottom. Starting all over is not only intimidating but terrifying in this peer group, comprised of people who are no longer impressed by anything you’ve ever done.&nbsp;



These are the conditions, unfortunately, that pose a problem for someone like me, who happens to enjoy things that she’s terrible at. I don’t mind being the first person to fall down and laugh at themselves, and I like&nbsp;improving&nbsp;almost more than I like&nbsp;succeeding. I’ve always been “coachable” rather than talented, well-rounded rather than a prodigy. I’m a math major while simultaneously being someone whose worst subject was always math. I started teaching myself the piano&nbsp;because&nbsp;I can’t read music for my life. In every group I had belonged to before college, I just needed to be brave enough to take the first step — fall the first time. Then, inevitably, others who were just as eager as I would follow. At Penn, I took that step, embarrassed myself, and ended up alone. People turned the other way. If something already comes naturally, if you’re already praised for it, why try anything that wouldn’t get you the same results?&nbsp;



My closest friends at Penn are a Japanese pop star, a Wharton student who has yet to be rejected from anything, and an influencer. In that friend group, I’m the “well-rounded” one. I’m the only one without a trademark. And you know what? I think well-rounded-ness is underrated. I think failure is underrated.&nbsp;



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At a school of 10,000, people have incredibly diverse experiences and natural aptitudes. This diversity conceals the fact that no one has reached outside of their comfort zone to find something new. 
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I love the University of Pennsylvania, and I am consistently awed to be surrounded by such a diversely talented peer group. But I wish more students loved things that didn’t love them back. Auditioned for a play in college with no theater experience. Sang at an open coffee house for no personal gain other than a fun time. Chose classes based on their interests instead of their future G.P.A. It’s not their fault that these things seem intimidating. As we get older, I believe people tend to mistake talent for adventurousness. At a school of 10,000, people have incredibly diverse experiences and natural aptitudes. This diversity conceals the fact that no one has reached outside of their comfort zone to find something new.&nbsp;



Every year, thousands of students apply to elite institutions, all with their own astonishing applications. From admission onward, students feel a continuous pressure to excel. Trying something new means falling behind. Stepping out of your comfort zone means ostracizing yourself from peers who all have “found their lane.” We are 18 years old when we arrive on campus. Screw the lane.&nbsp;



As I head into my sophomore year, I am proud to say I have learned absolutely nothing. (Kidding, kidding. I learned incredibly valuable lessons.) But I’m not going to change my formula. I will continue to throw myself into things I am generally worthless at and then get better. 



Grace Burke is a rising sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania studying math and sociology. She's originally from Denver, Colorado.

Love Things That Don’t Love You Back

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This spring, Harvard announced its decision to begin limiting the number of A’s faculty can grant in any given class. Starting in 2027, only 20 percent of students in a course, plus four additional ones, will be eligible to receive the top mark.&nbsp;



The move is the result of long-standing concerns about the rise of grade inflation at America’s oldest college. Since the pandemic, Harvard students have been more likely to receive an A than any other grade. In the 2024 to 2025 year, more than 60 percent of grades were A’s, up from around 25 percent in the 2005 to 2006 year.&nbsp;



The upwards trend of A’s is undeniable, and not just in Cambridge. But where there’s less consensus is about what, if anything, to do about it. The debate is complicated because the crux isn’t really how many A’s is too many, but whether the modern grading system as a whole is functioning as it should. And answering that question first requires settling another: What is the purpose of grading?&nbsp;



Jack Schneider, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has a few ideas on this topic. His 2023 book, “Off the Mark,” which he co-authored with Ethan Hutt of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores the various goals of academic assessment, as well as new ways of approaching it.



According to Schneider and Hutt, there are three central purposes of grading: motivation — to incentivize students to complete their work and do their best; communication — to provide feedback on student performance for students and others, like employers; and synchronization&nbsp; — to be able to compare students across programs and institutions.



Each of these functions of grading has importance, Schneider and Hutt suggest. The trouble is, there may not be any one system that can accomplish them all. “We don’t think that trying to assess student learning is the problem,” the pair writes. “We think the problem is that our present technologies are too clumsy for the work we want them to do.”



In other words, landing on a single approach to grading requires some weighing of priorities. Focusing on one function, Schneider said, may well end up undermining others.



This is the problem Schneider imagines Harvard encountering. The cap on A’s elevates a particular purpose — distinguishing between students — but also opens up new vulnerabilities. It could de-motivate students who no longer see the point in striving towards A’s that feel unattainable. It could give students information about their learning relative to their peers, but not necessarily beyond that.



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“Not even 50 percent of a class should achieve extraordinary distinction, if those words are to have meaning.”
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Harvard would contend there’s more to gain from distinctions than to lose. By raising the standard for excellence, refined distinctions send students stronger messages about what they're truly good at or, more often, when there’s room to grow.



“Not every student can achieve extraordinary distinction,” said Alisha Holland, a government professor at Harvard who served on the subcommittee that helped craft the new grading policy. “Probably not even 50 percent of a class should achieve extraordinary distinction, if those words are to have meaning.”



Others struggle to see the point in these distinctions at all. For Peter Felten, the executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University, the most important part of grading is communicating quality feedback to students. Comparing or ranking students, by contrast, doesn’t signify much.



In an ideal world, Felten said he could even let go of traditional grading altogether. “Personally, I think grades are not particularly effective means of feedback. They're too blunt. They're not formative enough. And they tend to be a single mark in time.”



In many ways, people’s stances on grading tend to come down to whether they think it’s possible to motivate learning intrinsically, or just extrinsically. Can students be inspired without the promise of outside recognition, like grades? What would it take for them to be driven more by a personal desire for knowledge and growth?&nbsp;



In the age of A.I., the prospect of intrinsic learning takes on additional weight. After all, students who don’t see the value of working for the sake of broadening their minds seem more apt to offload their burdens to a robot helper.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The truth is, of course, that students are extrinsically motivated, as well as quite clear-eyed about that fact. The most energizing reason to perform well in a class, many students agree, is to earn the type of grade that will look good on their transcript.&nbsp;



One rising Harvard junior offered her thoughts on the recent grading policy change on the condition of anonymity. Generally more than any other concern, she said, her peers are worried about the way the cap on A’s will affect their future.&nbsp;



“At the end of the day, that’s, I think, why people care so much about their grades,” she said. “It's not necessarily about how confident it makes them feel or things like that or how validated they feel because they got an A versus an A minus. I think it’s, ‘How is this going to set me up for success?’”



Arbaaz Karim, who graduated from Harvard this spring, affirmed that grades were always most important to him in so far as they informed his competitiveness for an uncompromising job market. Since May, he’s relocated to San Francisco to work at Mercor, the startup helping major AI labs train their models and currently looking at a $20 billion valuation.



“In a perfect world, of course we would want learning to be the main priority,” Karim said. “But unfortunately the way that the real world is going to work is that jobs and employers or even grad schools are going to be looking at your academic history and how well you did.”



Peter Felten is perhaps daunted but not defeated by what he recognizes to be students’ more extrinsically-minded goals. He said his role, however herculean, is to help cultivate the sense that the learning process is as meaningful as any results.&nbsp;



“I wouldn’t say, ‘This class is hard, and not very many of you are going to get an A,’” Felten said. “I’m going to say, ‘This class is hard. You’re going to learn things. You’re going to think. You’re going to develop skills and capacities that you didn’t have before.’”



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"The best courses I've ever taught, students earned A’s because they cared, not because they were going to get an A."
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Felten is willing to lower the emphasis on grades in favor of lifting up the importance of the course content itself. He still wants students to strive at the highest level, but he wants them to do it for the right reasons. He knows this shift isn’t impossible, nor futile, because he’s seen it happen and felt the impact in real time.



“The best courses I've ever taught, students earned A’s in that course because they were working so hard and they cared so much and they did such good work — because they cared, not because they were going to get an A,” Felten said.



The work of intrinsic motivation is notably more difficult for both faculty and students. Teachers need to think through the kind of materials and assignments that will immerse students deeply and challenge them thoroughly. Students won’t find shortcuts or workarounds for engagement.



Jack Schneider maintains it’s never going to be a single, standardized grading rule or system that places the ultimate emphasis on learning while motivating students at the same time. That’s why he’s reluctant to call grading a problem, as opposed to a dilemma.&nbsp;



“Problems have solutions,” he said. “But dilemmas can only be managed.”&nbsp;



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

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