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

Mental Health

Examining innovations that help young people thrive.

Teaching &amp; Learning

Creating a more just world through higher education.

Access &amp; Inclusion

An end goal for learning and life.

Flourishing

Opinions leading to positive change.

Perspectives

For more than a decade, colleges and universities have been relying on the Healthy Minds Study to help them understand the mental health of their students and those at other schools throughout the country. Indeed, this annual indicator and benchmark has become the bellwether for the state of college student mental health, capturing the dramatic increase in the prevalence of mental health issues among college students beginning around 2014.   



But as important as this survey data continues to be, the Healthy Minds Network’s principal investigators, Drs. Sarah Lipson and Daniel Eisenberg, stress that surveillance is only the start of a larger public health approach to helping every student on campus thrive. This mindset has led to strong partnerships with institutions and non-profits working to understand how mental health data can be interpreted and applied, particularly when it comes to policy changes and institutional investments.  



The latest example of this research-to-practice approach is a new report by the Healthy Minds Network, UNCF (United Negro College Fund), and the Steve Fund on the mental health and wellbeing of students at Historically Black Colleges and Univeristities (HBCUs) and Predominently Black Institutions (PBIs). Released earlier this month, the report, <a href="https://uncficb.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/UNCF_MentalHealthReport_Flourishing_FINAL.pdf">“Flourishing: Bolstering the Mental Health of Students at HBCUs and PBIs,”</a> ties Black students at HBCUs to better mental health outcomes than both Black students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and a national sample of students of all races.&nbsp;



Akilah Patterson, the study’s project manager and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said she was unsurprised by the results. Citing the strong sense of community HBCUs foster as a reason for students’ apparent wellbeing, she said, “nothing can really replace that.”



The concept and funding for the study came from UNCF, a major advocate and donor to HBCUs and their students. It partnered with the Healthy Minds Network to lead data collection and assessment, while the Steve Fund, a nonprofit promoting mental health among young people of color, contributed expertise.



Between spring and fall 2023, more than 2,500 students from 18 different HBCUs responded to a tailored version of the Healthy Minds Study. They answered questions from the standard Healthy Minds Study, along with a “Black College Mental Health Module,” added to provide insight into the Black college student experience.



The results suggest relatively better wellbeing among HBCU students across a number of scales. HBCU students report to be flourishing more (45% compared to 38% of Black students at PWIs and 36% of students nationally) and experiencing more campus belonging (83% compared to 72% of Black students at PWIs and 73% of students nationally).



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The results suggest relatively better wellbeing among HBCU students across a number of scales.
</blockquote>



While loneliness&nbsp;is&nbsp;endemic among students everywhere, significantly fewer students at HBCUs (56%) are experiencing “high loneliness” than Black students at PWIs (58%). Students at HBCUs are also less likely to keep negative feelings to themselves (74%) than Black students at PWIs (86%) or students nationally (83%).



Patterson said the wellbeing of HBCU students is an understudied area. “It's not that it hasn't been studied at all,” she explained, “but it hadn't been studied in this way, on such a large scale, and also using some of the measures we chose to use.”&nbsp;



In addition to&nbsp;insight&nbsp;into&nbsp;how HBCU students are already thriving,&nbsp;Patterson’s study suggests&nbsp;their institutions have room to improve&nbsp;support. Financial anxiety, for example, is the most reported stress factor among students at HBCUs. Twenty-three percent of HBCU students, compared to 18% of students nationally, say their financial situation is “always stressful”—an indicator correlated with greater risk of having one or more mental health problems.



Students’ financial struggles can be difficult for their institutions to tackle, Patterson said. But she hopes&nbsp;research&nbsp;like hers, and other&nbsp;projects&nbsp;going forward, encourage the kind of investment in HBCUs that, in turn, provides relief for the students. Empirically, she added, she believes the research “speaks for itself.”&nbsp;



“We’ve been doing the work. HBCUs have been very committed for decades to the success and excellence of their students, and that's not going to change.”



The Flourishing Factor



The spirit of this latest report from the Health Minds Network reflects an evolution of sorts for the data leader, along with many of its peers in the mental health research community.&nbsp;Their stronger focus on “flourishing” allows for greater examination of the many determinants that comprise mental health, such as financial wellbeing.&nbsp;



In its 2023-2024 report, the Healthy Minds Network made headlines with news of slight improvements in student mental health, which had been trending negatively for several years.&nbsp;Lipson was particularly inspired by the 6% increase in student&nbsp;flourishing for&nbsp;several&nbsp;reasons, including the fact it is an outcome&nbsp;colleges mayhave some level of control over.&nbsp;



“The web of causation for flourishing is much wider and often within an institution’s control,” she said. “When we think about what goes into flourishing—a sense of belonging, decreases in isolation, maximizing our built environment—there are levers here that institutions can pull, maybe not all of them, but more so than depression or anxiety.”



Flourishing has many definitions but is most often associated with healthy growth&nbsp;in a variety of&nbsp;domains.&nbsp;So anyone can flourish, with or without a mental health diagnosis. Additionally, while anxiety and depression are still alarmingly prevalent, not all students will experience either. From a public health perspective, flourishing is an outcome that is relevant to the entire population.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Lipson&nbsp;said&nbsp;what is important about this measure, and indeed all of this research, is&nbsp;it&nbsp;helps administrators understand where to spend time and money based on what the evidence&nbsp;suggests&nbsp;is the best investment. To this end, the Healthy Minds Network has launched the creation of a&nbsp;<a href="https://healthymindsnetwork.org/best-practices-repository/">best practices repository</a>. While still a work in progress, the repository will provide that advice for a number of campus interventions.&nbsp;&nbsp;



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What is important about this research is it helps administrators understand where to spend time and money based on what the evidence suggests is the best investment.&nbsp;
</blockquote>



“What we should be investing in from a population, public health approach is a really difficult question given what little data currently exists,” Lipson said. “With the data repository, you can go to a publicly available resource and consider, ‘What are my options? What does the evidence look like? What schools have implemented this successfully, and who could I talk to there?’”

Purposeful Information  

At noon three days a week, a room overlooking the pond at the University of Virginia falls into quiet meditation while the rest of campus churns with mid-day activity. Some students sit, some lay on the floor. A facilitator leads with guided thoughts and modes of breathing, but you’re welcome to do your own thing. After about 20 minutes, everyone is back on their way to lunch and afternoon classes.



“It’s very accessible to all kinds of people. It’s a nice break in the day, and it’s powerful for the people who have discovered it so far,” says Dearing Fife, a sophomore who organizes the sessions at the Contemplative Commons.



Dearing is a student advisor at the Commons, a new soaring glass and fieldstone building that is home to the Contemplative Sciences Center (CSC). For more than 12 years, the CSC had been operating from UVA’s religion department with multidisciplinary research, experiential learning, and mindfulness initiatives. The construction of the Commons represents more than an impressive new building to house a department and some activities. It is headquarters for the interdisciplinary face of wellbeing on campus—from grounding activities like yoga and meditation to scholarship on the many intersections of contemplation and nature, art, and technology.



The construction of the new Commons makes tangible President Ryan’s desire for UVA to be a top school for holistic student life while pushing boundaries on what higher education can look like in terms of mental health promotion. For many years, UVA had been the administrative backbone of the <a href="https://learningwellmag.org/article/the-flourishing-university">Flourishing Academic Network (FAN)</a>, an inter-institutional collaboration aimed at promoting student flourishing through higher education.



A Contemplative Commons



On the western edge of campus, the new 57,000-square-foot building sits beside the serene 11-acre pond and watershed area known as The Dell. Its U-shape wraps around a Ginkgo tree-lined courtyard, and connects to central campus via a pedestrian bridge over Emmet Street inspired by the High Line in New York, with benches and plantings. It’s hard to imagine a location better suited for a center dedicated to research, teaching, and outreach for contemplative experience.



“Our building is designed around the three themes of nature, art, and technology, and all three combine together to create contemplative opportunities for individuals,” says Kelly Crace, Executive Director of the Contemplative Sciences Center. “It’s intentionally multidisciplinary, creating wonderful spaces where students just love to come and study, whether they want to come into our art galleries, or come into our Conservatorium and experience light and sound in a variety of ways, or connect with nature through our biophilic design.”



The Commons houses, and reflects, work being done at UVA’s Contemplative Sciences Center.&nbsp;The facility’s purpose is to support student flourishing through a host of indoor-outdoor spaces, academic classrooms, immersive learning and events. It will soon include art installations and flexible studios that can be configured as classrooms, research labs, or even yoga studios.



Technology plays an interesting role in both design and practice in the Commons, used both to enhance mindfulness experiences and to create intentional tech-free spaces for deeper reflection. The Conservatory is an immersive room with floor to ceiling windows, sounds and light panels, with state-of-the-art audio to mimic natural soundscapes—think ocean waves, rainforests, waterfalls, wind, and buzzing bees. Other areas at the Commons are tech-free zones, encouraging students to disconnect altogether.



Innovative Classrooms, both labs and studios, are designed as multi-modal spaces that allow instructors to change the room setup based on the session’s needs. Classes can alternate between traditional seating, or more free-form setup using yoga mats or meditation cushions. Some rooms feature sprung floors, ideal for movement-based practices like Tai Chi, or facilities conducive to a Japanese tea ceremony. Others serve as academic classes that faculty members would prefer to hold in something other than a traditional classroom building.



“There's one class that meets in the Commons, for example, on medical Spanish. This professor has her own deep contemplative practice, and she incorporates it into every class that she leads,” says Connie Kresge, chief of staff of the CSC. “She’s not just bringing in somebody who's pre-med to learn a few vocabulary words. She is saying, ‘Okay, you are going to be the front line of working with humans. How do you imbue your practice with understanding of this population and a contemplative, compassionate approach?’ And so they also get the benefit of a setting like the Commons.”



Research and Practice



In a world increasingly defined by speed, competition, and information overload, the CSC represents a shift in higher education. Housed within UVA’s Provost’s Office, CSC benefits from strong institutional support, ensuring its programs are not peripheral but central to the university’s academic mission. As Michael Sheehy, CSC’s Director of Research, points out, UVA’s investment in contemplative education is unique among public universities, positioning it as a leader..



With its three-pronged mission, CSC is reshaping how students, faculty, and the broader academic community engage with education, wellbeing, and leadership. Work and programming at the Contemplative Sciences Center is organized around three pillars: Research, focus on advancing contemplative studies through scholarship; University Life, integrating mindfulness into students’ days; and Systems Change, expanding contemplative education globally through leadership and K-12 initiatives.



At the heart of CSC’s work is a research lab known as CIRCL, which stands for Contemplative Innovation, Research, and Collaboration Lab. There, scholars study many aspects of the ways meditation, nature, and technology shape our well-being from a collaborative, cross-disciplinary perspective.



One of the current projects examines how different environments impact contemplative experiences, explains Sheehy. As part of the methodology, participants will be studied meditating in five different settings, and researchers then track brain activity, heart rate, and emotional responses. “If you meditate in a garden, does it feel different than if you meditate in a featureless white room?” he &nbsp;asks. “What happens in your brain and body when you practice mindfulness in nature?” Sheehy is also editor of the Journal of Contemplative Studies and also Contemplative Currents, which &nbsp;are uniquely poised to cover both peer-reviewed academic studies and open public scholarship.



Research, academics, and collaborations go well beyond the study of nature and meditation. CSC is diving into diverse studies such as virtual reality experiences, lucid dreaming research, and exploration of leadership and public policy.



“We're having professors coming in from our Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy to talk about policy and leadership from a contemplative perspective, professors from religion to come talk about Buddhism, and we're exploring collaborative work of how we can do things with the school of data science,” says Crace. “What's really cool is getting a sense of the breadth and diversity that’s possible. People might initially think, Oh, so this is where you do yoga, or this is where you do mindfulness, that type of thing. Yes, and we're so much more than that. Being able to bring in that diversity of collaboration, I think, is really important.”



University life&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



But the CSC isn’t just about research—it’s about making curiosity and mindfulness part of daily student routines to support an overall culture of thriving. The CSC hosts monthly salons, where students and faculty can discuss contemplative topics with leading interdisciplinary scholars.  A Citizen Leaders Fellowship offers students a year-long leadership opportunity to gain skills needed to flourish during their time at UVA and after graduation.



Beyond the lab and classroom, the CSC and Commons are uniquely poised to support student flourishing with a wide range of campus programming—beginning with a celebratory weekend of concerts, food and activities in April to mark the grand opening of the Commons. Going forward, a weekly calendar of programming and well-being initiatives include regular yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, reflective writing, and spaces to cultivate mindfulness and resilience.



It’s a bold push against what Crace calls the “stress-glorification culture” of modern academia.



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People ask, Why would a university have a building for contemplation? They don’t ask, Why do you have a building for the arts, and a building for sports?
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&nbsp;“’I stayed up two nights. Well, I stayed up three.’ It's this constant one upping, where we're trying to find distinction through how hard I'm working,” he says. “It’s not only how hard I'm working, but it's important for you to know how hard I'm working, and it just creates a very toxic culture that really disrupts flourishing. We want to be a disruption to that stress culture.”



Systems Change



Flourishing is a key word in the overall picture of contemplative sciences and its place in a larger ecosystem of institutions helping young adults maturing in a way that best supports their wellness and full potential. Appropriately enough, the <a href="https://learningwellmag.org/article/the-flourishing-university">Flourishing Academic Network (FAN)</a> grew out of key individuals at UVA committed to flourishing, including David Germano, a religious historian at the University of Virginia and Crace’s predecessor as former director of CSC, and alumni Jeffrey Walker, a finance executive, philanthropist, and member of the board.



“What we're trying to do with FAN is taking a system orientation and looking at how we can prepare students for the real world, and allow them to succeed in higher ed,” says Walker. “It means giving them tools when they arrive, and educating them about what kind of tools there are out there, working on things like social emotional learning models, meditation, yoga, body movement, breath practices, peer to peer support, and also managing ego and collaborative models, and looking at leadership models.”



For real systemic change, the third pillar of the CSC reaches beyond the campus into the wider scope of academia with FAN, and reaching K-12 classrooms and international leadership programs.



 “The systems change work can be thought of as expanding what we do reaching outward,” says Kresge. One major initiative is the Compassionate Schools Project, a groundbreaking K-12 mindfulness curriculum leading new practices in Louisville, Kentucky. Another is the Dalai Lama Fellows Program, which trains young leaders around the world in mindfulness-based social change. In 2024, CSC took 17 Fellows to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama.



CSC is also working on a national initiative to integrate contemplative education into higher education policy. By partnering with education policymakers and university administrators, CSC hopes to make contemplative practices a core part of the American educational experience—and something both more easily understood and more widely undertaken.



“People ask, Why would a university have a building for contemplation? They don’t ask, Why do you have a building for the arts, and a building for sports? No one stops and says, what do you mean by arts?” says Kresge.. “We don’t have that barrier in our colloquial understand of the words arts and sports, but we do in our conversation of what contemplation is.”



Leaders like Kresge hope there would be a greater understanding of mindfulness and meditation as an ongoing tool and practice—like exercise—and not a one-time thing that can be taught in a seminar and crossed off a list.



Sheehy learned meditation from his grandmother when he was about 10 years old, and it made a lasting impression. “I’ve had the chance to live most of my life with access to knowledge about contemplative practices, because I’ve had experiential access to as a constant reference point,” he says. “That’s why I think the research we do is important, because we’re showing people how these practices wok, how powerful and empowering they can be, and give them agency over transforming their lives.”



Dearing Fife also had access to these practices at an early age, and the addition of the Contemplative Commons at UVA cements her belief she could not have found a better place for herself to attend school. A self-described “anxious kid,” she discovered meditation in middle school, and it’s been a core part of her life ever since. “Like brushing my teeth,” she says. “A non-negotiable.” She grew up knowing that learning to handle it was just going to be her thing.



“Everyone manages something in their life, and I have to manage my anxiety,” she says. She meditates once or twice a day, and believes it’s a tool many more college students would benefit from. She is aware of a first-year student who shows up to the noon meditations regularly, and likes to envision that it’s making a difference in her life—and that in a small way, as organizer of the sessions, Dearing contributes to that.



“It’s a big school, and I’m in Greek life, and that’s been great,” she says. “But I also wanted an academic realm where it’s like, This is my place, and this is where I’m going to impact the university,” she says. “And this, working at the Commons and CSC, is it.”

The University of Virginia Builds a Headquarters for Wellbeing

New research out of Vassar College links institutional efforts to address student mental health with higher graduation rates.&nbsp;



The article, “‘Woven in’: Mental Health and College Graduation Rates,” published in The Journal of College Student Retention, pinpoints four mental health interventions common among colleges with “higher-than-expected” graduation rates—that is, rates higher than predicted based on factors like endowment per student, instructional expenses per student, and more.



For other schools interested in improving retention, the authors, who include Vassar President Elizabeth Bradley, suggest implementing these practices may be a step in the right direction.



Retention at four-year colleges is an ongoing concern, as less than half of students are graduating within six years of matriculating. Still, the number of students applying to these programs has risen, along with the price tag to attend.



Previous research shows mental health issues, along with a range of financial, social, and academic factors, can stand in the way of students’ graduating on time or at all. What mental health strategies colleges should use to curb these negative outcomes, however, has been less clear.&nbsp;



The researchers behind “‘Woven in’” set out to determine these strategies by conducting case studies of five colleges with model graduation rates. The schools selected remain anonymous throughout the paper but reflect diversity in terms of student body size, geography, and “ownership type” (public, nonprofit, or for-profit).



Each case study involved a site visit and interviews with between 28 and 41 people, including administrators, faculty, and students. The interviewees answered general questions about school culture and experience, as well as more targeted ones about retention-related programs.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Together, the responses highlight four practices, shared among the colleges, for tackling student mental health on campus:&nbsp;



1. “Recognition of the breadth and depth of mental health needs”&nbsp;



At each of the five schools, researchers found a proclivity to name student mental health as an increasing problem on campus. Both staff and students recognized the issue and proposed possible reasons for it. An Associate Vice Chancellor suggested mental health concerns were more often responsible for educational leaves of absence, which can delay graduation, than academic reasons.



2. “Proactive Approaches: Early Detection and Outreach”



Another commonality between the schools was a proactive approach to mental health. Each had measures in place to reach struggling students before their problems became serious. Some ran formal programs to report concerns about students and assigned a point person to intervene. Others cultivated a strong culture of faculty referrals.&nbsp;



Regarding retention strategies, one Vice Provost mentioned the value of mid-semester reports, which faculty at his school complete on behalf of their students and turn into the dean’s offices. “Sometimes we pick up care issues where a student will say, ‘You’re right. I’m not doing well.’”



3. “Diversity of Mental Health Resources and Quality Improvement”



Every school also offered a wide range of services, recognizing the diversity of needs and importance of adapting to meet new ones. “I think the myriad of mental health resources that [the college] has contributed to why people stay at [the college] and why our graduation rates are high,” a student said. “Because if you are struggling, you will get the help that you need.”&nbsp;



Services included not only traditional counseling but education, recovery, and maintenance programming. They also addressed “identity-related needs,” specifically around race and ethnicity.&nbsp;



4. “Embedding Mental Health in the Larger Social System”



Finally, all five schools integrated mental health services into “the larger social support and academic structures,” the authors wrote. Administrators and faculty alike expressed commitment to student wellbeing and working together to address it. By confronting these problems across offices and departments, they could foster a culture that normalized talking about mental health and asking for help.&nbsp;



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“Whether in the classroom or beyond, '[Mental health] is always kind of woven in.'”
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As one administrator said, whether in the classroom or beyond, “[Mental health] is always kind of woven in.”&nbsp;

“Woven In”

Sometimes There’s a Wolf

Innovation and Financial Well-Being at CUNY

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



“We'll see.”

BC’s Messina College

On April 8, 2025, the Trump Administration announced the end to $4 million in funding for research programs at Princeton University exploring the risks associated with climate change. At the time, it was the latest instance in an ongoing wave of federal cuts to environmental initiatives. But this case sparked interest for another reason: According to the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/04/ending-cooperative-agreements-funding-princeton-university">press release</a>, at least one of the programs was eliminated because it was allegedly “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”&nbsp;



Environmental experts were quick to denounce the idea that the solution to anxiety about climate change would come from avoiding research on the topic. But it's not the first time the phrase “climate anxiety” has been summoned for political gain, on either side of the aisle. The truth is the term gets used to describe all variations of distress over the state of the Earth. Parsing out the possible interpretations is now an important exercise for educators, practitioners, and students themselves. 



A <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2542-5196%2824%2900229-8">2024 study</a> of “climate emotions” in 16- to 25-year-olds found that up to 85 percent are “worried” about climate change and its potential impact; and for around 38 percent, these worries negatively affect daily life. Concern over climate change has become so widespread among young people that it's affecting how they vote, whom they choose to work for, what products they buy, even their decision to have children. But are young people’s responses to climate change a clinical issue to be treated? Or do they fall in line with those to most social problems, just with a catchier, more damning name?



The framing of “climate anxiety” presents something disordered in need of a cure, but from a clinical perspective, there is a distinction between an anxiety disorder and experiencing some sense of anxiety. After all, the vast majority of young people may feel worried about climate change; the majority don’t have an anxiety disorder.



“Anxiety or worry on its own isn’t necessarily a problem or something to be treated,” said Kaitlin Gallo, a Boston-based psychologist whose practice focuses on young adults and college students. She said she’s encountered a spectrum of concerns when it comes to climate change. Even among her patients who tend to have clinical-grade issues, their climate concerns do not necessarily map onto an anxiety disorder. “Oftentimes, the worry is occurring outside of the context of an anxiety disorder, and it’s just what I might call sort of a normal or understandable worry given the state of the world,” she said.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“Anxiety or worry on its own isn’t necessarily a problem or something to be treated.” 
</blockquote>



It’s when the worry becomes “hard to control or to move on from” that it could begin to signal a deeper anxiety disorder demanding a more clinical response, Gallo said. Even then, the end goal may not be to try to get rid of the concerns.



“I think sometimes when worries are realistic, then there’s just a different way to deal with them,” she said. “Sometimes it might not be reasonable or helpful to change the thought, but rather to think about how you want to live your life in the face of that concern.”



People who experience an anxiety disorder are certainly susceptible to dark fears about a fiery end. For others, particularly young people who have more time on the earth, climate distress, even fear, may be an unavoidable part of living.&nbsp;



Olivia Ferraro, a 25-year-old living in New York, said dismissals of climate change are what really makes her crazy.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“To watch business as usual go on around you with very little recognition of how distressing the state of the planet is can be really confusing. Because you’re like, ‘Am I insane?’” she said. “This feels like a problem that we should be moving to solve with World War II urgency. Everything needs to be mobilized to prevent catastrophe.”



When she first started experiencing more acute distress about the state of the climate and its future, Ferraro was surprised at the lack of sympathy she met from family and friends, especially those she expected to understand. If anyone had asked them, she knew they would say they cared about the environment.



Realizing her regular network might not be able to give her support she needed, she started exploring other options. She was especially interested in talking to people her age, given climate change, she said, “is a threat felt uniquely the younger that you are.”



“I wanted to be with people who could share that experience of, ‘I’m freaked out because I don't know if I'm going to have a child anymore,’ or ‘I will be my parents’ age when a lot of these predicted catastrophic shocks happen. How can I think about my life when I'm 50 where I can't get water from the tap?’” Ferraro said.



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“I wanted to be with people who could share that experience of, ‘I will be my parents’ age when a lot of these predicted catastrophic shocks happen.'"
</blockquote>



The support group she ended up finding was one she had to help create. Eager for an in-person space in New York, she started hosting “climate cafes,” or listening circles that bring together people with environmental concerns to share how they’re feeling.&nbsp;



A grassroots initiative, climate cafes have popped up with chapters nation-wide. Ferraro said they can offer relief from advocacy-related burnout or help someone who doesn’t even identify as an “environmentalist” learn about new ways to contribute to the cause. On the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.climatecafe.eco/">website</a>&nbsp;for Climate Cafe NYC, the branch refers to itself as “the social home of NYC climate action.”



“A lot of it is holding hands with people as they kind of walk into that unknown, knowing that you’re doing it together and that there are other people who are experiencing this,” Ferraro said.&nbsp;



Part of the purpose is helping each other avoid hopelessness. “We can be sad, but to be despaired is a totally other feeling. That’s when you’ve given up,” Ferraro said. “We want to help people avoid despair and avoid nihilism and really, even though it’s very hard work, stay openhearted and willing to connect with people and understand how we can work together.”&nbsp;



The need for these kinds of outlets is evident in the many students who are bringing their climate-related concerns to school with them. Professor Sarah Jaquette Ray said the emergence of this distress in her classes pushed her down a path towards a new expertise: emotions and the environment. Now she’s chair of the environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt.



As recently as a decade ago, Ray said environmentalists were trying to ramp up concerns about climate change, with what she calls the “scare-to-care” approach. Opening young people’s eyes to the devastation that could come, the thinking went, would inspire them to act, before it was too late.



The strategy may have worked, but too well. Ray said she saw students becoming more enthusiastic about climate-related issues, but they also seemed more despairing. “I was noticing my students were not coping very well with the material,” she said. “I didn’t think my teaching was changing, but something was changing about the students.”



Up to that point, Ray had felt like her students were taking the issues in stride, embracing problem solving. With time, she said, “It felt more like an existential crisis for them.” She decided part of the problem was that students were learning a lot about what was going wrong and a lot less about how to manage their own response to the problems. “They weren’t learning all that stuff alongside coping skills or emotional intelligence or any kind of cultural frame as to why these things might be getting worse,” she said.



She set out to fill the gap. Research into the spiritual and therapeutic tools activists have used in other social movements became the basis of an understanding about how to deal with climate concerns. This mental health-forward approach to environmental issues also appears in her book “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.”



Still, Ray continues to wait for the day when higher education institutions have integrated trauma-informed instruction and emotional intelligence into environmental education. That component “is just beginning to percolate on the edges of the tipping point,” she said.&nbsp;



William Throop, professor emeritus and former provost at Green Mountain College, is also interested in activating a more personal dimension of environmental studies. For the philosopher-by-training, with a background teaching environmental ethics, it’s important to not only present possible climate change solutions to students but equip them with the life skills to enact them. This is an approach he views as part of “character education,” which he said prioritizes “the student as a person, not just as a collector of information.”



By learning what he calls “skillful habits,” Throop said, students stand to become “better critical thinkers, better ethical thinkers and actors.” In his book, “Flourishing in the Age of Climate Change,” he discusses a set of “hope skills” particularly helpful for confronting climate issues.



“Hope communication,” for example, is a skill Throop suggests could be particularly pertinent for tackling climate change. “How do you describe in a clear way the facts of a situation which are problematic and yet don't turn people off?” he said. “How do you motivate people who address those facts in the way you communicate about them?”



Teaching hope, Throop said, might sound “like something a psychologist ought to do.” He thinks otherwise. “It's something that should be embedded in curricula addressing these issues.”



As some faculty become more in tune with how students react to learning about climate change, students continue to turn towards each other to process the emotions they are experiencing.&nbsp;



Eva Salmon, a rising junior at Barnard College, said she doesn’t usually struggle with anxiety in other facets of life; yet concerns about the climate are a constantly “simmering undertone” in the back of her mind. “In general, seeing everything happening in the world, it feels like my heart is constantly breaking, and I'm constantly experiencing a sense of betrayal.”



“Anytime it's relevant, I can feel the grief. I can feel the anxiety. It really is there,” she said.



Compounding these emotions for students is the sense that their institutions are leaving them to lead the way alone. That’s the consensus among many members of Sunrise Columbia, the Columbia University branch of the Sunrise Movement, a national youth climate activism effort.&nbsp;



Because it’s independent from the university, Sunrise Columbia can hold the administration’s feet to the fire in ways a club receiving school funding can’t. The student-run group conducts its own investigations into the university’s use of funds from fossil fuel companies to fund climate research.&nbsp;



<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/18Bpe6KIpzGmQ2y54vgx99KHV9B15zzEA/view">“Complicit Columbia”</a> is the 53-page report the students published on their findings that the university accepted at least $43.7 million from fossil fuel companies between 2005 to 2024. More than a third of the funds benefitted the university’s research hub, the Center on Global Energy Policy.



Salmon, one of the student authors of the paper, said she takes issue with the fact that students, rather than university personnel, were the ones to take on this initiative. “The university needs to be more attuned and aware and doing its own research into these things. But for now, this is what we have,” she said.



The group of friends Salmon collaborates with has been key to keeping her motivated despite her frustrations. In general, she said she believes “a lot of the bad that's happening in the world” is the result of “not prioritizing community” and disconnect among people. It’s a problem she feels grateful not to have.&nbsp;



“To have found community and the space in the way that I have really has brought me a lot of peace and joy,” she said. The sense of support pushes her activism to the next level. “I think I would've done it regardless, but I don't think I would've felt quite as empowered and impassioned.”



“At the end of the day, even if all this is happening around us, we have each other. And that feels like a very powerful, powerful thing,” she added.



Salmon’s overriding objective is to stay positive, to concentrate on the friends that are supporting her and the work they do together that bring her relief. “I really try and focus on recognizing the beauty in every step I take or recognizing things I like around me and just expressing gratitude for that,” she said.&nbsp;



Olivia Ferraro, the climate cafe host, has adopted a similar outlook. While “climate anxiety” may be more apparent in her life than it was a few years ago, that discomfort has fed a deeper appreciation for the time she has left and a desire to make the most of it. It’s a guiding force that has changed her approach to relationships and decision-making.



“It’s been really freeing, honestly,” she said. “I like my life a lot more now than I ever did before,” she said.

Deconstructing 'Climate Anxiety'

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Character’s Comeback



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Character in Action



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

Colleges with Character

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

Global Connections

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Seeing the System from Both Sides



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



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



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



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



Not Grit, But Grace



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



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



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



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



Designing Belonging



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



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



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Real equity requires shifting from celebrating those who overcome broken systems to designing ecosystems that recognize all students’ needs. 
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One promising approach scales the relational infrastructure found in effective mentoring programs. My research shows information travels best through trust. Students act on guidance from people who understand their context. Systems embedding personalized support within human connection democratize opportunity.



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



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



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



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



Inside the System I Once Observed



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



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



For Those Still Searching



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



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







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

Without a Map

Imagine holding a backpack full of bricks. Each brick is something you’re told you should care about. “Speak up about racism.” “Be an entrepreneur.” “Get an internship.” “Fight for the planet.” “Be strong for your family.” “Post the right thing.” “Don’t mess up.” “Make a difference.”



No one tells you how to carry the backpack. No one teaches you how to take breaks. Or how to breathe. Or how to say, “I’m not okay.”



This is the silent story of so many students. We look fine on the outside, but inside we’re overwhelmed. We scroll on Instagram and see everyone achieving. We try to keep up. But no one posts their fears, their breakdowns, or their quiet days of doubt.



When I was a student, I often felt like I needed to be perfect. Get perfect grades. Land the dream job. Be kind, confident, smart, and calm — every single day. I felt like I had to fix things that were broken in the world. Climate change. Mental health. Inequality. And I wasn’t alone.



Over the last couple of years, I’ve had honest conversations with more than 200 students. What I heard wasn’t just stress. It was a quiet cry for help.



They said things like:



“I care about so many things, but I don’t know where to start.”



“I’m tired of pretending I’m okay when I’m falling behind.”



“I feel like I have to change the world, but no one showed me how to take care of me.”



We tell young people to lead movements, fix broken systems, and speak up for justice. But we forget to give them the tools to handle that pressure. We forget they’re still learning who they will be as people. And we rarely say, “You’re good and strong just as you are.” This isn’t just a college problem. It’s a people problem. It’s what happens when expectations grow louder than support.



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This isn’t just a college problem. It’s a people problem. It’s what happens when expectations grow louder than support.
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Let’s be clear: Stress isn’t always bad. Some stress is actually good for us. It pushes us to show up, to prepare, to grow. I have worked at startups, as well as big consulting firms like Deloitte and EY, and yes, everything you’ve heard is true. There’s pressure, deadlines, new problems every day. But I also saw something else. I saw how stress, when supported with teamwork, trust, and celebrating small wins, can make you stronger.



Some of my most demanding managers became my greatest teachers. I learned how to think fast, stay calm, and keep going because I wasn’t alone. I had people to guide me, challenge me, and remind me that growth doesn’t happen in silence. It happens when we reflect, learn, and lean on others.



That’s the difference between healthy stress and harmful stress. It’s about not just how much you carry but whether you feel supported during that time. When we never pause, when we never reflect or ask for help, stress turns into burnout. And burnout turns into breakdowns.



Action feels better than overthinking.



An important lesson I learned from my mentors and coaches who supported me in my journey is that purpose is what wakes you up. Not the buzz. Not the likes. Not the trends.&nbsp;Don’t wait for motivation. Build discipline.



It’s not about how strong you feel one day.



It’s about showing up, even when you don’t feel like it.



It’s about what you do&nbsp;again and again.



We don’t become leaders by talking. We grow by doing. And if young people are taught how to take small steps, one at a time, they build confidence. They take action. They shine.



I wish someone had told me sooner, so I’m amplifying these lessons here:&nbsp;



Your journey doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s.



You can be both kind and bold.



Asking for help is a strength.



You don’t have to save the world alone.



We need to give youth these messages with tools and mentors that can back them up. We need to remind them that they matter as people, not just as achievers. We can create systems that support their growth, not just their performance. We can move from saying, “Take care of your mental health,” to actually showing them how.&nbsp;



We tell them it’s not about being perfect. It’s about being present.



We don’t need a generation of burnt-out heroes. We need a generation of strong, kind, purpose-driven humans. That’s how we build a better world. And that’s how we shine.&nbsp;







Deepanshi Bansal is a Babson College M.B.A. graduate (class of 2024) and founder of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.shinequo.com/for-educational-institutions">ShineQuo</a>,&nbsp;a student-centered space combining action-oriented life coaching, peer support, and executive functioning support to build essential life skills for college and beyond.

The Weight of the World

Like today's future workforce, Dr. Michelle R. Weise is bound to hold numerous roles in her already accomplished career. The former college professor turned ed tech executive worked at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation before becoming the chief innovation officer of Strada Education Network's Institute for the Future of Work.



Weise is also the author of&nbsp;Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don't Even Exist Yet. In it, she argues for reimagining how we train learners and earners for the prolonged careers that come with longevity, though not necessarily in ways one might think. In this interview for LearningWell, Weise talks about what little structure exists for us to gain the knowledge we will continuously need. She advocates for changes within post-secondary education and the workforce that will help align one's inner and outer lives and lead us to recognize our shared humanity in an increasingly isolated world.



LW:&nbsp;Your book suggests there are numerous jobs we might have in our lives. What has your own work life been like in that regard?



Weise:&nbsp;When I look back, I can see the stepping stones, but I didn't really plan any of this out. It was a lot of pivoting, learning new skills, and then taking that newly acquired knowledge and launching to the next thing. My first job was as a tenure-track English professor. That was supposed to be my job for life, but I realized early on that it didn't feel like the right calling for me. My first job outside of academia was for an ed tech startup that was helping service members transition out of the military into civilian careers. We were creating tools and services to help them translate their skills into the language of the labor market. Even though I didn't know it back then, that focus on learners' translation of their own skill sets has been a resonant theme throughout all of my work.



I ended up building out the higher education practice of Clayton Christensen's think tank on disruptive innovation. That was, as you can imagine, incredibly formative for my thinking, research, and exposure to every burgeoning innovation in ed tech and workforce tech. I've since built out various innovation labs for universities and have also worked with a wide range of stakeholders in the learn-and-work ecosystem and even created the Strada Institute for the Future of Work for Strada Education Network. All of these innovation and thought leadership roles have been focused on connecting post-secondary education more closely to the workforce.



LW:&nbsp;Could you define "long life learning" and what you think the implications of that are for the workforce?



Weise:&nbsp;Our lifespans are extending, and our work lives are getting longer. People are staying in the workforce at historically high rates, well into their sixties and seventies. There's been this conception that folks who are currently retiring only had a couple of jobs or maybe one job throughout their careers—the "gold watch generation"—but the data shows that's not true. Even our early baby boomers are retiring with an average of 12 job changes under their belts. So for the rest of us, we can expect many more job changes and pivots to come. For younger generations, that may mean maybe 20 or 30 job changes over a lifetime. For me, the simple mental model of a longer life and longer work life brings into sharp relief that we have no architecture, no infrastructure, no systems really set up to help us keep up with a rapidly evolving future of work.



So, the book is really my attempt to put the decades-old concept of lifelong learning into action by laying out how we can begin to invest in the on- and off-ramps we'll all need to move more seamlessly in and out of learning and work. How might we get just what we need and then keep moving along on the workforce highway without always having to make a tradeoff and forgo our wages in order to advance our education? What are the ways in which we can do this much more fluidly and in the flow of work?



LW:&nbsp;How can we begin to solve for that from both a preparation lens and a workforce lens?



Weise:&nbsp;I'll start from a curricular perspective. In an ideal world, we'd like to hire talented people whom we could trust in highly ambiguous circumstances. We'd like to trust that they'd take in various kinds of information, signals, and analyses, make sense of all that, and then use good ethical judgment to inform their decision-making process. It's a mix of both human and technical skills. We need people to be able to dance across disciplines, take ideas from another domain and use them in new ways. But it's very hard to train someone to do this unless we teach them how to really deal with ambiguity.



In order to do that, we can't keep teaching in silos. In our industrial learning complex, we silo everything we teach. We don't illuminate the ways in which disciplines interact and overlap. For me, the future of teaching and learning will center on purpose learning—orienting learners around solving a problem they care about like poverty, hunger, or climate change, and in the process of struggling with that larger challenge, they learn why certain principles and disciplinary knowledge are necessary. They also learn how to transfer and apply knowledge from one domain to another.



The refrain in higher ed is that we teach people how to fish, but we don't actually do this well. We teach people very specific content and problems&nbsp;within&nbsp;a discipline. We don't help our learners understand the coherence across a vast array of courses as a body of understanding.



At the same time, in order for our learners to thrive in an increasingly uncertain future, especially now in an age of AI, they're going to need to hone their human skills to complement the work of machines. The term "human skills" might make us think, "Oh, I'm human, I have these innate skills." Yes, but they require deep practice. And for older adults in the workforce, where do they go to practice skills like emotional intelligence, communication, and systems thinking? The lack of these human skills make themselves known in the workplace when there's friction, when there's an inability to build strong and collaborative teams. We also need to be thinking about how we build the right kinds of learning experiences for working learners to actually deepen their human expertise and their character skills.



LW:&nbsp;What role does the workplace play?



Weise:&nbsp;If you think about a T-shaped learner, it's having both those human broad-based skills and some technical or technological expertise. And if we return to the concept of a longer work life, we're not only going to have to deepen our human skills over time. We're also going to have to gain different kinds of expertise over time and get skilled up. Sometimes we're going to need that new knowledge in a very shallow way—just enough to be dangerous. Other times, it will require deeper engagement. We need to do this in an affordable way, within the flow of work.



In my book, I lay out five principles needed for a healthier learning ecosystem, and the fourth is this idea of integrated earning and learning. Right now, when someone's in the workplace and wants to skill up, we say, "Here's some tuition reimbursement money. Go do it on your own time on top of this full-time job or multiple part-time jobs and on top of your caregiving activities. Be self-disciplined." But we need to bring the onus for training back onto employers. It's not just on post-secondary education to solve this problem.



In 1979, we used to offer workers something like two and a half weeks worth of training for new skills. According to Peter Capelli, by 1995, that went down to less than 10 hours per year. But those 10 hours weren't even about building new skills for the future. It was for things like compliance training, risk mitigation, sexual harassment training, or discrimination training. When I was writing the book, Accenture had data that around 44% of employers had zero upskilling opportunities for their existing workforce. We have to begin to reimagine on-the-job training. Skilling people up has to be a shared responsibility about building skills for the future.



LW:&nbsp;You use the phrase "living a life worth working." How would you interpret that?



Weise:&nbsp;My work has been oriented around issues like career navigation, skills gaps, skills building, precision education, and automation and AI's impact on our careers. And at a certain point, I realized that something was missing. I call it "the soul of work," but it's this question of how do we align our inner lives with what it is that we do when we're making some sort of contribution in the world? This incredibly human element has been missing from all the trending discussions about the future of work.



One of the things that has been helpful for me as I've been studying the loneliness epidemic more is this understanding of the ways in which we're clearly searching for something more. I found this interesting data that in the US alone, the consumer wellness market has reached $480 billion a year. Globally, it's close to $1.8 trillion. People are paying for detox cleanses, intermittent fasting, and even bone broths. We're clearly in search of something, and this is happening along with the deterioration of our communities, family structures, and faith-based organizations. In the wake of all that, we're feeling like something is missing. There's some hole or aching need we need to fill.



And so when I talk about a 'life worth working,' it's not that we all have to suddenly drop what we're doing and pursue our passions. It's about how we actually find moments of real authentic encounters, even in what can sometimes feel like mundane work or even in some things that are not necessarily compensated as paid work. How do we find the small moments of encounter that give us that feeling of purpose and meaning in our lives?



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"When I talk about a 'life worth working,' it's not that we all have to suddenly drop what we're doing and pursue our passions. It's about how we actually find moments of real authentic encounters, even in what can sometimes feel like mundane work."
</blockquote>



And that is really tough because studies are showing that we're becoming more narcissistic and less empathetic. We are becoming so cloistered in ourselves that even small interactions are hard for us.&nbsp;



I was thinking about how there have been all these return-to-work mandates recently, and I think in the minds of management, they're thinking, "My people aren't being as productive as they should be, so I need to bring them back in-person, so I can watch them and make sure they'll be efficient and productive." Those water-cooler moments and those serendipitous moments of connecting are being hailed as a way to get to greater productivity and deeper collaboration. But what I think we're missing is that we need those moments of serendipity to actually build more of those small and authentic encounters because we have become so consumed with ourselves.



LW:&nbsp;Is this something we can teach or learn?



Weise:&nbsp;How to move towards this kind of service orientation and thinking about others rather than ourselves? I think it's really hard. Our entire system is set up to build super individual high achievers, and then suddenly learners graduate from college, and we expect them to be great team players. I've always been impressed by how [Olin College] grads go through 20 to 30 different team-based projects connected to the real world by the time they leave. Why aren't more schools doing this? It's a way for us to help learners deepen their human skills and practice teaming and collaboration. In addition, by focusing on larger problems, learners must engage in design thinking. And the first step is empathy to understand the challenge they're trying to solve for a company or an organization. They get to immerse themselves in acts of caring that are pointed away from themselves.



LW:&nbsp;You talk about human skills being an important part of mastering machines versus the other way around. What are your thoughts on the use of AI in higher education?



Wiese:&nbsp;People are getting really fearful about the use of AI, but instead of thinking about how it can replace humans, we should be leveraging this technology to fix a super unsexy problem: stitching together incredible amounts of data across our higher ed and workforce systems. We have so much data in various silos and legacy systems, and we don't know how to tap into it all. GenAI gives us a way forward.



Think about how retail companies have built virtuous loops of information about us as consumers. Amazon's doing randomized control trials on us every few seconds. In higher ed, we need to get smarter about our own people, our own prospective learners, to be able to offer them something that really taps into a pain point in their work lives.



This is where I see real potential for AI in higher education.

"Living a Life Worth Working"

Higher education has long debated its role in character development. Religious schools, secure in their subjectivity, have made producing people of good character part of their core mission. But for public universities serving diverse populations, the entire concept can be fraught, starting with the language itself. How are we defining character? And should values and principles be part of a student’s education?&nbsp;



Arizona State University appears to have threaded the needle on character education with an initiative called&nbsp;<a href="https://pi.education.asu.edu/">“Principled Innovation”</a>&nbsp;– a framework for ethical decision-making that can be used by individuals or in community settings. It is based on “pro-social” values that lead to defendable outcomes like “what’s good for humanity” without being overly prescriptive.&nbsp;Under the leadership of President Michael Crow, ASU has added Principled Innovation to the list of design aspirations that drive the university, calling it “the ability to create change guided by values and ethical understanding.”



Ted Cross is ASU’s Executive Director of University Affairs and Crow’s point person for the roll-out of Principled Innovation.&nbsp;He says character education is best understood as a reflective process that enables students to flourish – in a way that is flexible and individualized.



“We want people to improve themselves,” said Cross. “Positive psychology has a take on that; philosophy has its own angle. We packaged all of that into an inter-disciplinary approach that helps faculty, staff, and students ground decisions and actions in values and character.”



Informed by the Jubilee Centre’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/character-education-/the-jubilee-centre-framework-for-character-education-in-schools/">Framework for Character Education in Schools</a>&nbsp;at the University of Birmingham, Principled Innovation includes four domains of practice – Moral, Civic, Performance, and Intellectual – each of which encompass certain character “assets” or virtues meant to guide one’s ability to&nbsp;create positive change in the world. ASU’s institutional commitment is expressed through Principled Innovation as a guiding principle, while the practice of Principled Innovation is supported through a pedagogical approach, engaging tools and resources, communities of practice, and curricular and co-curricular activities.&nbsp;



Building the Framework



The design lab for Principled Innovation was ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. In 2017, the dean of the college, Carol Basile, was&nbsp;concerned&nbsp;by the&nbsp;state&nbsp;of K-12 education systems and decided to change things from the inside out&nbsp;–&nbsp;through addressing the education workforce and teacher and leader preparation. She came to the conclusion that to do so, character education needed to be included. To understand how, she enlisted Cristy Guleserian, a colleague at the college who is now its Executive Director of Principled Innovation.&nbsp;



“We asked ourselves, ‘What could it mean for a college of education at a public university to integrate a character education framework into the systems of teacher and leader preparation?’ said Guleserian. “In having these conversations, we realized it couldn’t just be integrated into a curriculum to teach future educators about character. It had to be our approach to everything we do and something that we embraced as a college community.”&nbsp;



With this as their north star, Guleserian and her team worked intentionally with faculty, staff, students, and community partners and eventually incorporated the practices and assets of what would become Principled Innovation into everything they did, from fostering culture and environments to teaching, advising, and student services. But getting to an agreed-upon understanding of what all this would look like involved cultivating authentic relationships through a series of one-on-one discussions and all-college design sessions – a process Guleserian described as equal parts invigorating and challenging.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“There was a lot of skepticism at first&nbsp;–&nbsp;a lot of questions about whose character, whose values, and whose virtues we were talking about. I remember spending about an hour going back and forth about one word,” she said.



In one of the sessions, a participant offered what would be a break-through in the log jam. “We need to ‘ASU-ize’ this,” he said. The&nbsp;group understood him to mean “co-create” a concept that more explicitly reflected ASU’s diverse community and well-publicized mission.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“We recognized that innovation is at the core of what we do here at ASU and our charter holds us responsible for being inclusive for the well-being of the communities we serve. So the framing of Principled Innovation was born from that shared purpose,” said Guleserian.



The framework is intentionally flexible. In an essay for the book&nbsp;The Necessity of Character, ASU President Michael Crow and Ted Cross write, “By refusing to adhere to a&nbsp;single&nbsp;philosophical or religious worldview, ASU has made room for students to draw on their different backgrounds as they engage with our character education initiatives.&nbsp;Only by remaining flexible in this way have we been able to secure ‘buy-in’ across the university.”



At a research university known for outside the box thinking, Crow has made innovation part of ASU’s nomenclature. But the decision to include it in the title was more than just good branding. Principled Innovation proposes the notion&nbsp;that “just because you can innovate, doesn’t mean you should,” reflecting a growing national movement to infuse character into the critical actions of scientists and others in the innovation community.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



When asked if there could be “Unprincipled Innovation,” Cross said “definitely.”&nbsp;



“It’s not enough to be innovative if you don’t innovate with purpose and principle. It’s not enough to help people learn how to make a good living if we’re not helping them learn how to live good lives, whatever that means to them,” he said.&nbsp;



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“It’s not enough to be innovative if you don’t innovate with purpose and principle. It’s not enough to help people learn how to make a good living if we’re not helping them learn how to live good lives.”
</blockquote>



Principled Innovation in Practice



Building on the work of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (now called College for Teaching and Learning Innovation), Principled Innovation is currently practiced in ten colleges at ASU, including the W. P. Carey School of Business and the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, as well as the Office of the Provost and Educational Outreach and Student&nbsp;Services. All of this work uses the framework&nbsp;and assets for reflective practices and community practice that lead to positive change.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“The framework asks, ‘What are some of the possible intended or unintended outcomes of the decisions we make and how can we mitigate some of the possible negative consequences before we take action?’” said Guleserian.



A good indication of how the framework may influence ASU’s pedagogy is the launch of the Principled Innovation Academy, which is housed in University College. The curricular program&nbsp;involving human-centered problem-solving methods and team pitch competitions has already engaged with 750 students.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Cross calls the program “shark tank meets design thinking meets character education,” where students create and pitch ideas using the Principled Innovation framework. Last year’s winner was a career recommendation engine for students that works by asking them questions like, “What are your work values? What are your personal values? And how would that map to your career?”&nbsp;



It is clear that the careful work that went into developing Principled Innovation at ASU helped propel it from a concept within one school to a major design principle for the entire university. But for advocates like Cross and Guleserian, the buy-in it has received at the country’s largest public university says something about the times we are in.&nbsp;



“The U.S. is so deeply divided that we are talking past each other,” said Cross. “There’s a lot of anger and aggression and mistrust. But if we can engage multiple perspectives in the way we design and create things, the way we teach and collaborate, it helps us to develop environments of trust and belonging.”

Principled Innovation 

Sukhwant Jhaj, Vice Provost for Academic Innovation and Student Achievement at Arizona State University, spoke with Dana Humphrey, co-host of Invented Here, about ASU’s Work+ program, a bold and transformative initiative redefining how we think about student employment. Sukhwant shares how Work+ evolved, its impact, and the lessons he’s learned in bringing the initiative to where it is today. Learn more about the Work+ Collective here: <a href="https://theworkpluscollective.asu.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://theworkpluscollective.asu.edu/</a>.



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Invented Here

Maggie Messina graduated from the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in 2022. She works in Private Client Business Development at Cambridge Associates in Boston. Here is her response to the question: “What experience or person in college most influenced your development as a human being?”



College is a formative experience for all. It’s a time when you leave the safety of your hometown, the friends you’ve known forever, and all that is familiar to you. Amidst the unfamiliar faces and places, you begin to search for belonging. For me, during my first two years of college, an unexpected yet incredibly meaningful place of connection was the dining hall.&nbsp;



At the heart of my dining hall experience was Derek, the welcoming presence at the swipe station. Derek wasn’t just the person who checked my student ID as I walked in—he became a constant source of positivity and encouragement during my transition to college life. As a freshman finding my footing, Derek always greeted me with an enthusiastic high five and hello. During the whirlwind of sorority rush week, he congratulated me when I got into my top-choice sorority, Tri Delta, even throwing his hands into a triangle to represent it everytime I walked through the doors wearing all my new merch.&nbsp;



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Derek wasn’t just the person who checked my student ID —he became a constant source of positivity and encouragement during my transition to college life.&nbsp;
</blockquote>



But it wasn’t just the celebratory moments that made Derek special—it was the way he showed up for me during the tough times. When I felt homesick or defeated by a bad grade, Derek was there with encouraging words and a hug that always made the day seem a little brighter.&nbsp;



What I learned most from Derek is that kindness matters. Small gestures—like smiling and waving at someone as they pass, holding the door open for a stranger, or offering a pencil to your classmate when they forget—can have a ripple effect far beyond what we can see. Today, as a young professional, I strive to embody that same sense of kindness. It’s one of my current firm’s values, and I take pride in representing it every day.&nbsp;

Influencers for Life

There is finally some better news about student mental health: this year’s <a href="https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/HMS_national_report_090924.pdf">Healthy Minds Study</a> shows for the second year in a row a drop in depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation among college students. While the overall rates remain alarmingly high–more than a third of students say they struggle with mental health issues–this two-year decline suggests that increased pre- and post-Pandemic <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/executive-leadership/2023/04/11/survey-college-presidents-upbeat-despite">attention and support</a> may be making a difference.



More robust services alone, however, will not solve the student mental health crisis. I’ve witnessed it up close, as a faculty member and administrator at Bennington College, and at a remove, as a higher education program officer at Endeavor Foundation. It is very real. A college is not a treatment center, nor can it reasonably provide everything that students and their families require as they grapple with a tangle of issues.



Colleges and universities must simultaneously reinvest in the most powerful educational contributions that college can make to fortify student mental health: helping students discover their purpose and see beyond themselves.



Finding purpose–once understood as a primary aim of college–has been steadily squeezed out by the gradual and insistent equating of education and career preparation. Intense pressure for return on an ever more <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/cost-us-universities-wildly-expensive-education-tuition-fees-america-2024-3">costly investment </a>has changed the face of U.S. higher education. The liberal arts, in particular, which emphasize discovery of self and the world, continue to strain under perceived lack of relevance to careers, despite<a href="https://stradaeducation.org/report/the-real-long-term-outcomes-of-liberal-arts-graduates/#:~:text=Liberal%20arts%20graduates%20have%20high,than%20workers%20with%20less%20education."> plentiful evidence </a>to the contrary. Unsurprisingly, the study of the humanities, the lifeblood of the liberal arts, is in precipitous<a href="https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-the-number-of-college-graduates-in-the-humanities-drops-for-the-eighth-consecutive-year/"> </a><a href="https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-the-number-of-college-graduates-in-the-humanities-drops-for-the-eighth-consecutive-year/">decline</a>.



Further, we are compelling youth to determine ever earlier what they will study. Uncertainty has become a proxy for the waste of time and money. But many teenagers do not know what they want to do and–crucially–have not had enough exposure to the possibilities to make such determinations. College is meant to foster this developmental process through exploration and the ignition of interests and passions. This discovery has long been advanced by the liberal arts as essential to well-being, in service of both the student and civic and social good.



A recent <a href="https://8ce82b94a8c4fdc3ea6d-b1d233e3bc3cb10858bea65ff05e18f2.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/6a/c6/dd4610d942e58053e781c106654d/walton-gallup-gen-z-happiness-report-032724.pdf">Gallup survey</a> found that the happiness and satisfaction of Generation Z is directly linked to the belief that their life has significance. Yet, today, more and more students are making the choice of a major based on the salary that related jobs command, rather than freely choosing the fields they are most drawn to making their own. Across higher education, the number of bachelor’s degrees in computer and information sciences, engineering, health, and business has more than <a href="https://ktvz.com/stacker-money/2024/07/30/stem-is-the-new-liberal-arts-the-changing-trends-of-college-majors/">doubled over the past ten years</a>.



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the&nbsp;content&nbsp;of higher education is shrinking, and with it a primary pathway to finding well-being through fulfillment.
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Declines in arts and humanities majors are leading, on a macro level, to <a href="https://stradaeducation.org/report/the-real-long-term-outcomes-of-liberal-arts-graduates/#:~:text=Liberal%20arts%20graduates%20have%20high,than%20workers%20with%20less%20education.">consolidations and cuts of disciplines</a> at all but the best resourced institutions. Concurrently, liberal arts-focused colleges are <a href="https://www.highereddive.com/news/how-many-colleges-and-universities-have-closed-since-2016/539379/">disappearing</a> at a steady clip. Both dramatically and quietly, the content of higher education is shrinking, and with it a primary pathway to finding well-being through fulfillment.



The contraction of the liberal arts and humanities is also robbing students of opportunities to understand what it means to be human. While there is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&amp;referringSource=articleShare">debate</a> as to whether the youth mental health crisis can be directly attributed to social media addiction and technology use, there is also widespread acceptance that both have radically changed how young people know, experience, and respond to the world. A stunning portion of teen’s social interactions are mediated by tech companies, their time displaced in the repeating reels of Tiktok and Instagram. The development of broad perspective, something at the heart of the liberal arts and humanities, is critical to releasing them from this algorithm.



Students need the span of knowledge, breadth of understanding, and portals to past human experience that a liberal arts orientation offers, whether at a small college or a large university, both for themselves and for society. Such far-reaching intellectual anchoring nurtures the ability to wrestle with the large, open questions that frame our existence and situate ourselves within them, individually and collectively.



Disciplines such as literature, history, and the arts are sourced from the human condition itself and particularly suited to opening the mind to new ways of understanding it. At the same time, to combat social isolation, students need common curricular experiences and co-curricular opportunities for engagement, debate, and dialogue. They need to be able to locate their very different individual selves as part of something larger, together.



But general education, the vehicle for delivering common content, has lost its vitality over time, weakened, in part, by demands for greater career preparation. Even at liberal arts institutions, core curricula—rendered fraught by decades-long political and ideological debates about their makeup—now largely privilege individual choice over shared, common experiences. As a result, students have fewer bridges to each other through common historical and societal knowledge, when what they need are more and stronger ones. Recognizing the opportunity to rebuild their educational frameworks around understanding of our shared humanity is one of the most significant steps that colleges and universities can take to strengthen student mental health.



At Endeavor Foundation, we are supporting<a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/endeavor-foundation-launches-national-collaborative-to-address-mental-health-crisis-on-college-campuses-302068166.html"> a project </a>at eleven small liberal arts colleges to do exactly that through collaborative efforts. Together, these colleges are infusing the personal and intellectual discovery they catalyze with new forms of support and inquiry. They are introducing initiatives to help students metabolize stress and build resilience, as well as bolster their real-time connection to others and draw out purpose through their studies. And they are helping students identify, prepare for, and secure future <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/07/17/teach-students-find-meaning-their-work-lives-opinion">work</a> born of what matters to them.



There is no doubt that policy makers and educational leaders must address the skyrocketing cost of higher education. Students, most especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, can no longer be left with crippling debt or, worse, excluded from the very social mobility that college promises and–ultimately–delivers. At the same time, we must reset the narrative that career preparation is college’s main function and re-value students’ future mental health as an equally vital outcome.







Isabel Roche is the Executive Director for Special Programs in Higher Education for the Endeavor Foundation.

A Way Forward

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In a season filled with political one-uppmanship, the word "weird" has become a catch phrase for all things suspicious or “dodgie,” effectively putting a spotlight on views outside the mainstream. The highly politicized attacks on higher education might well fit into this same category, considering the fact that the many criticisms against colleges and universities are, indeed, bizarre and unsupported by the majority.



While the most aggressive denunciations of higher ed are catnip for the media and burrow into the public consciousness, many of these criticisms come from a vocal minority. Even some of the most politically charged topics, where one might suspect the arguments to have persuaded a larger share of the public, aren’t producing these outcomes. Consider the aggressive anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) stance that has gripped the attention of the media and the public: despite the buzz, banning programs that help students feel they belong on campus is incredibly unpopular. Only 27% of Americans, and less than half of Republicans, oppose DEI initiatives in colleges, according to a 2023 <a href="https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/45414-how-americans-feel-regulation-public-universities">YouGov poll</a>. The same goes for controlling what subjects students can learn in college, another pervasive yet unpopular battle cry. Only 33% support government regulation of public college professors' classroom speech, according to a separate <a href="https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/44070-americans-oppose-laws-regulate-professor-speech">YouGov poll</a>.



The reality is that most of our friends and neighbors still want their kids to go to college, where they hope they’ll grow personally and intellectually, finding a sense of identity, agency and purpose that sets them up to flourish throughout their lives. It's time to embrace the fact that, despite its flaws and the genuine need for improvement (particularly in affordability), college remains a positive force for young people and society at large.



Also, in the realm of the “weird” is the notion that college exists solely for skills training and job placement, an idea that doesn’t align with the wants of students, their families, or employers. According to <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/5-the-value-of-a-college-education/">Pew Research Center</a>, 73% of college graduates with two- or four-year degrees found their degree very or somewhat useful for both personal and intellectual growth. Additionally, 90% of employed adults emphasized the importance of interpersonal skills such as patience, compassion and getting along with people to their work – attributes cultivated by a well-rounded college experience that includes mentorships, teamwork, and applying what is learned in the classroom to real world problems. <a href="https://hiring.monster.com/resources/blog/future-of-work-2021-summary/">Monster’s Future of Work</a> report highlights that employers value dependability, teamwork, flexibility, and problem-solving – skills often honed through a well-rounded education.



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To&nbsp;reassert the value of the college experience and restore public trust, we must provide the type of higher education experience that people want.
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Just as the idea that higher education should simply deliver skills is out of step with the American public, so too is the belief that college is no longer worth it. <a href="https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/varying-degrees-2024/">Polling</a> shows that 75% of people believe there is a good return on investment in a college degree, and nearly 70% say a close family member needs at least an associate’s degree for financial security. In a 2024 <a href="https://www.gallup.com/analytics/644939/state-of-higher-education.aspx">Gallup-Lumina pol</a>l, 94% of adults said at least one type of postsecondary credential is “extremely valuable ” or “very valuable.” Moreover, <a href="https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-determinants-health/literature-summaries/enrollment-higher-education">research</a> shows that higher education is linked to improved health and wellbeing, including reduced risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, and depression. College graduates exercise more, drink less, and are more likely to seek preventive healthcare. They report higher levels of self-esteem and job satisfaction than high school graduates who do not go on to earn higher education degrees.



But just as the data show we cannot believe all of the anti-higher education rhetoric, we must not ignore that people are upset with the sector, and for valid reasons. We must address the affordability issue, a major driver of the anger and frustration directed at colleges and universities. And we must work harder to make a stronger case for the value of higher education on human development, workforce development, and society overall that can be embraced by Americans of all viewpoints. Forty-five percent of Americans believe colleges and universities have an <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/01/colleges-and-universities-k-12-public-schools/">overall negative impact on the country </a>– this in spite of the data showing that college graduates are more likely to vote, volunteer, donate to charities, join community organizations, and participate in educational activities with their children than non-degree holders.



Rather, to reassert the value of the college experience and restore public trust, we must provide the type of higher education experience that people want: one that fosters personal and intellectual growth, offers a transformational experience, and lays the foundation for a lifetime of flourishing.



Dana Humphrey is the Associate Director of the Coalition for Transformational Education. The Coalition for Transformational Education is a group of leaders in higher education dedicated to evidence-based, learner-centered education that lays the foundation for wellbeing and work engagement throughout life. Through assessment, collaboration, and best practice-sharing with our member institutions, we strive to inspire the academy to prioritize lifelong wellbeing.

The “weird” attack on higher education

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Around 2021, administrators at the University of Utah discovered an unsettling pattern while reviewing student data: In an effort to satisfy requirements and pass some mandatory courses, some students had needed to retake a class five, ten times, or more. In one example, administrators found that a student had spent over $50,000 taking a single math course. These repeated attempts went unflagged because academic advising and course tracking systems were siloed instead of fully integrated across departments. In effect, when it came to the university body, one hand didn’t know what the other was doing—and neither one was reaching out to the student struggling with the path toward graduation.



The revelation brought into focus the number of students struggling with key courses without sufficient support or intervention. But more broadly, it illuminated a systemic disconnect: a lack of coordination between advising, academic support, and course scheduling, which was likely contributing to Utah’s unsatisfactory retention and graduation rates. The path towards a solution was paved with integrated technology and data transparency.



“University policy hadn't been updated in over 30 years and was kind of adrift, just stacking additional credits on top of requirements. No one had made the case about how that impacts degree completion, how that impacts debt, and tying those things together in a really simple, clear way,” says Chase Hagood, vice provost for student success, who was hired in 2021 to be part of the new initiative’s leadership. “But not everyone was behind the open sharing of data. What does it take for a whole university to come together to say, ‘We believe in the exceptional educational experience. What is it going to take to get us there?’ We joined the Innovation Alliance, and the Coalition for Transformational Education, and getting in those peer groups helped elevate the work we do.”&nbsp;



University leaders recognized the need for a more integrated, proactive approach, beginning with more democratized data. Within two years—and the addition of a new president and provost—this recognition had become forged into a commitment, leveraging EAB’s Navigate360 as the CRM platform to connect the campus. This became the tech muscle behind Navigate U, a 2024 university-wide initiative aimed at improving metrics of student success, including retention and graduation rates. Utah is banking on software and data analysis to follow individual student performance, flag potential issues, and introduce&nbsp;&nbsp;interventions—and on the horizon, even track behavior trends.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Eight Pillars and Key Features



University leadership recognized that existing approaches had "topped out" their effectiveness at steering 32,700 students toward their graduation goals. A new comprehensive strategy was needed, one that put the data capabilities to work under pillars of priorities, each with key features of innovation. The pillars of Navigate U were designed to bring together student support services, streamline policies, and integrate data systems to provide real-time insights into student progress through a structured, coordinated, more supportive approach.



“This whole Navigate U method is about looking at the institution and figuring out how we can prepare as clear a pathway as possible to help the student through here in four to six years,” says&nbsp;Brandon Johnson, senior associate dean of student success and transformative experiences. “By asking those questions, we stop blaming the students. We stop blaming high school for lack of preparedness. If we admit a student into the university, we should do everything possible to make sure that they are as successful as they want to be.”



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"If we admit a student into the university, we should do everything possible to make sure that they are as successful as they want to be."
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One key feature of Navigate U is its proactive advising system.&nbsp;Previously, students often had difficulty knowing where to go for guidance, as advising structures varied across colleges. Some students had clear academic roadmaps, while others struggled with course selection and degree planning. Navigate U introduced a centralized approach, ensuring that all students are assigned an advisor with clear, standardized expectations for advising practices. Advisors now have access to real-time student data, allowing them to identify students at risk of falling behind and intervene earlier.&nbsp;



Another feature is the data integration and early alert system.&nbsp;In the past, crucial information about students—such as course performance, attendance patterns, and engagement with support services—was scattered across different departments. Navigate U centralizes this data through the EAB Navigate platform, enabling faculty and advisors to monitor student progress more effectively. This system can flag students who may need extra support, whether due to failing grades, repeated course withdrawals, or financial concerns. It connects students to resources like tutoring, coaching, and peer mentoring programs. It also promotes student engagement, recognizing that a strong sense of belonging is critical for success. First-year transition programs, on-campus housing opportunities, and community-building efforts have been expanded to support this goal.



Course availability has also been a major focus of Navigate U. Many students faced delays in graduation because required courses were either full or not offered frequently enough. The initiative introduced a strategic course scheduling system, using data to predict demand and ensure essential classes are available when students need them. Additionally, the university implemented new guidelines for course enrollment thresholds to spur the scheduling of courses based on historical data and anticipated demand, and identify courses with high demand to consider opening additional sections.



“One of the things with no institutional policy was monitoring thresholds,” says Hagood. “You might be running a class with six students over here, but in another college—or even within the same college—maybe a department head says,&nbsp;‘No, you have to have at least 15.’&nbsp;We had no across-the-board guidelines to help deans make the best use of resources and kind of press them to think about it. It wasn’t good for faculty, and it wasn’t good for students.”



The pillars also target academic wellness, engagement, transitions, and financial structures.



Goals and Metrics&nbsp;



Graduation rates are a particular area targeted for improvement. At present, the six-year rate is around 66% (a previous peak of 70% declined during the COVID-19 pandemic). By addressing obstacles such as course bottlenecks and repetition, outdated policies, and inconsistent advising, the initiative aims to see 80% of students completing their degrees in six years&nbsp;by 2030.&nbsp;



In tandem with this is the goal to increase the rate of retention. Currently, about 85% of first-year students return for their second year. With enhanced advising, course availability, and academic support, the university aims to raise this to 90% or higher, aligning with top public research institutions.&nbsp;



The goals extend beyond graduation. With an improved focus on career readiness and job placement, Utah seeks to ensure that 90% or more of graduates secure employment or enroll in graduate school within six months of completing their degree. This effort includes strengthening connections between academic programs and career services, expanding internship opportunities, and incorporating career development into students’ academic experiences.



In tracking these key metrics and continuously refining its strategies, Navigate U&nbsp;intends&nbsp;to create a more efficient, supportive, and results-driven approach to student success. And with a new kind of tracking under development, the school hopes to gain a clearer picture of each student’s academic journey in order to provide targeted assistance before small setbacks become major obstacles.



The enhanced tracking aims to put more points of data into profiles to build a more comprehensive picture of the student life cycle: where they’re going, and where they’re not.&nbsp;



“The next phase is working out how we incorporate swipe data from student affairs and event attendance, and then we can start to see this really interesting profile of the student. Are they using the library? Did they go to a coaching appointment? Did they meet with their advisor? Do they attend sporting events?” says Johnson. “If we start to see some gaps, we can launch some outreach to a student because we’re seeing them not only&nbsp;notengaged in some of these academic support resources, but they’re not engaging in campus life and wellness and belonging-fostering activities and events.”&nbsp;



If a student had been missing class, for example, administrators could use their swipe history in the residence halls, dining halls, and gyms to get a picture of where they’re spending their time. And if they see the student is spending a lot of time swiping into the Student Union, they can send a coach, advisor, or mentor to informally reach out to them there.&nbsp;



“The more we know about our students and how best to support them, the better it is for the student,” says Johnson. “I would love a day when we can create a spider web profile like you see on some of those career and personality assessments with different indicators and quadrants. You can see if it’s low or heavy in one area, then we can act on the areas that need to be filled in.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Johnson believes one of the greatest behind-the-scenes benefits of the Navigate U work might be the introspective thinking it encourages in faculty and administrators. It’s hard to look at a longstanding practice with fresh eyes if it isn’t considered broken. But that, he says, is where the work happens.&nbsp;



“With some honest conversation, sometimes we come to see that something probably isn’t in the best interest of students after all. Instead of asking,&nbsp;‘Why are we doing this?’—because there’s usually some answer for why—we try asking,&nbsp;‘Do we really need to keep doing this? Is it something that’s benefitting us or the students?’” says Johnson. “Those questions are happening more often. And I think we’re fixing a lot of things.”

Navigate U

Life Lessons with John Bravman

At a Boston College retreat, sophomores are asked three questions: What are you good at? What brings you joy? Who does the world need you to be? The exercise is part of a program called “Half-time” meant to help students begin a lifelong process of vocational discernment. For Jesuit universities such as BC, this type of formative education, defined as “educating whole persons for lives of meaning and purpose,” is part of the fabric. It is now the focus of a new academic department at BC called the Department of Formative Education (DFE).&nbsp;



The department extends BC’s leadership in formative education, expanding the focus from the practice of undergraduate education to research on “life-wide and lifelong” formative education. Housed within the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, DFE features an undergraduate major (Transformative Educational Studies), a master’s program (Learning, Design, and Technology), and the first ever Ph.D. program in Formative Education.



“Our programs tackle big formative issues,” said Chris Higgins, the Department’s founding chair. “How can we nurture vision and values?&nbsp;What are the dispositions that sustain democracy?&nbsp;How do we co-evolve with technological tools? How can we cultivate a sustainable relationship to the earth? What does it mean to flourish as a human being?”&nbsp;



Such questions, Higgins explained, demand an interdisciplinarity approach, spanning&nbsp;anthropology, design thinking, history, the learning sciences, philosophy, and the psychological humanities.



Stanton Wortham is the inaugural Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School. An anthropologist by training, Wortham spent several years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with scholars of varying disciplines within the liberal arts on how their expertise applied to education. When he arrived at BC, he was able to continue this work of integrating the liberal arts into scholarly inquiry on education, with the blessing of BC President Father Leahy. In creating the new department within the Lynch school at BC, Wortham was inspired by the Jesuit reverence for the liberal arts and its emphasis on formative education.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“Most of our education ignores the multi-dimensional nature of how people learn,” he said. “Formative education is this notion that people have several different types of development—social, emotional, ethical, spiritual—and all of those things are going on in a young person’s life at the same time.”  



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“Most of our education ignores the multi-dimensional nature of how people learn.”
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Wortham believes the optimum form of human development is when all these dimensions are aligned—a state he refers to as “wholeness.” The other two pillars of formative education are purpose, which helps young people explore what will bring them both meaning and a living; and community, the recognition that this discernment about life’s purpose happens together with others. Character and ethics are naturally woven in.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“Too often at an institution, we tell young people that if they just learn a lot of stuff and get a good job, then everything is going to be fine. And it’s just not true if you’re not connected to something that has bigger meaning,” said Wortham. “We can’t tell students what to believe, but it is our job to help them ask questions about what is ultimately important to them.”



Wortham envisioned a department known both for its research and its teaching. He wanted to convene a group of liberal arts faculty that would bring diverse disciplinary perspectives to the study of formative experience, practice, and aims. This research on holistic development then enriches courses aiming to inspire students to think about education in this formative way.&nbsp;&nbsp;



To lead the department, Wortham recruited Higgins, a philosopher, who had been leading the Transformative Education Studies program (TES). Now part of the Department of Formative Education, TES is growing with 95 majors to date. “‘Transformative education’ names both what we study and how we study,” Higgins explained.



“Our courses explore questions about personal and social transformation. Questions such as, what does it mean to be an educated person? And what kind of schools do we need in a democratic society? At the same time, we want these classes themselves to be transformative experiences, spaces where our students can reflect on their own efforts to form themselves into somebody who can lead a flourishing life.” 



Higgins shares Wortham’s perspective that education has grown too narrow and instrumental. His recent book,&nbsp;Undeclared, calls out the contemporary university, with its “credentialing mindset,” for paying only lip service to the idea of general education. Far from being encouraged to explore, students get the message that they had better “pick a lane and step on the gas!” Instead, he offers a vision for an educational renaissance in which “soulcraft,” described as “the quest to understand, cultivate, and enact ourselves in lives worth living,” is the primary focus.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Higgins’ creative energy is reflected in the department itself, down to its name which he said is intentionally ambiguous. “Formative education is open for interpretation,” he said. “I don’t want to determine the kinds of questions that my colleagues want to explore.”&nbsp;



Those questions are wide-ranging and include topics one might not immediately think of. Professor Marina Bers studies how children can develop ethically and interpersonally through engagement with coding and robotics. Caity Bolton, a cultural anthropologist, is studying what holistic human and social development looks like through Islamic education in East Africa and the Arab World. DFE affiliate faculty member Belle Liang has developed a “purpose app” for college students.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Just in its second year, the DFE doctoral program is already producing notable research. For example, Ph.D. student Harrison Mullen has received a grant from the N.C.A.A. to study the experience of athletes forced to retire from the sport that has been so central to them. Framing the issue in formative terms, Mullen considers how practices such as sports help us make sense of what it means to lead a worthwhile life. In interviews with retired athletes, he explores the deep sense of loss that accompanies this life transition.



At the Department of Formative Education, as at BC overall, personal reflection is fundamental. “It’s the Jesuit thing,” said Higgins. “We are devoted to careful study of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’—but we also never forget the ‘why’ and the ‘who.’&nbsp;Why&nbsp;does this matter? And how does this help you understand&nbsp;who&nbsp;you are and what you stand for?&nbsp;



Higgins offered examples of TES courses and their activities. “In ‘The Educational Conversation,’&nbsp;we invite students&nbsp;to reflect on their key formative influences through an educational autobiography.&nbsp;In ‘Spiritual Exercises,’ we introduce students to a range of spiritual practices, starting with the exercises devised by the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola.”



For Wortham and Higgins, the time is ripe to reconsider the hyperfocus on academic achievement. They believe educators in a variety of settings are looking for a richer, formative language to describe their practices and aims. To this end, the Lynch School is launching the Transformative Education Lab, which will share research and best practices around whole-person education. Wortham and Higgins hope that the lab will extend Boston College’s leadership in formative education to new audiences, helping to recenter questions of meaning and value in educational debates.&nbsp;



“Academic achievement is critical. Subject matter knowledge is critical,” said Wortham. “But these students we are teaching and testing are people. We need to consider their mental health, how they will build relationships with others—all the things that make them thrive as human beings.”

Deconstructing ‘Climate Anxiety’