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The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdEbTjsAe7o/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;stkn=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">video</a>&nbsp;opens to a young woman stepping into an elevator, head down to her phone. “This is Cory,” an invisible narrator tells us. Cory is a college student who’s been trying to cut down on her screen time. But she’s about to face the ultimate test of resistance: an elevator ride on campus with a stranger. Can she stay strong?&nbsp;



As another student enters, Cory slowly slips her phone into her back pocket. Her eyes go wide as the doors slide closed. “Don’t just stand there in silence, Cory,” the narrator encourages her. “Do hard things!” After a bit more prompting, our heroine finds her nerve and asks her new companion about the matcha tea she’s sipping. Within seconds, the two are bonding over café recommendations and their mutually dwindling caffeine budgets. They’re giggling, as they walk out of the elevator in the same direction. “Wait, are you also in Econ 101?” Cory asks. Meanwhile, the image fades, and text appears: “NYU IRL. Less phone, more friends.”



NYU IRL is the university-wide campaign New York University announced in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-university-administration/organization-directory/office-of-the-president/comms/welcome-to-the-spring-2026-semester.html">January</a>&nbsp;to promote time spent “in real life,” as opposed to online. In addition to masterminding Cory’s skit, which appeared on the university Instagram on September 9, NYU IRL encompasses a range of other educational resources and device-free spaces and programming. The driving concept is that everyone on campus could benefit from some help establishing a healthier relationship with their devices — that we’ve all been Cory in the proverbial (and literal) elevator, itching to look down at our phone rather than engage with the world around us, especially other people.



With the new school year has come announcements of several colleges and universities starting similar initiatives to help students log off and look up.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/03/business/harvard-pouches-students-phone-free/">Harvard</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bu.edu/studentwellbeing/2026/09/11/4402/">Boston University</a>&nbsp;are distributing special pouches in which students can lock their phones away for device-free socializing. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is organizing&nbsp;<a href="https://dailytarheel.com/482498/university/educating-for-the-virtues-of-attention-launches-carolina-unplugged-initiative-to-cultivate-positive-attention-habits-at-unc/">cohorts</a>&nbsp;to implement a screen time-limiting tool and meet regularly throughout the semester to discuss the experience.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/college-experience/2026/09/14/when-are-students-better-offline">Cornell</a>&nbsp;kicked off a weeklong effort to decrease tech use campus-wide.&nbsp;



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We appear to be universally bugged, disturbed, by the sense that our devices became our favorite shield from uncomfortable interaction and, in the process, we’re depriving ourselves of the necessary experiences of life.
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At N.Y.U., the approach has managed to differentiate itself as one of the first and most sprawling. The directive comes from the top, with President Linda Mills and Counselor to the President Kristie Patten, and reaches all three global campuses: New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi. “We realized as the largest private university, with the real global reach, that we could do something very focused and at broad scale,” Patten said. Now six months in, and with programming continuing to pick up, NYU IRL seems primed to lead the charge of colleges eager to find out whether students can indeed feel better, phone-free. 



Doomed to scroll?



The “why” of all this analog enthusiasm may seem obvious. We’re not just seeing it at universities, after all. It’s on display in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.parkslopepulse.com/p/coffee-and-conversation-a-guide-to">cafes</a>&nbsp;with no-laptop policies,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/food-cooking/at-restaurants-phones-are-becoming-the-new-cigarettes-689c6435">restaurants</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/world/no-phones-concert-crowds-harry-styles-spc">concerts</a>&nbsp;asking visitors to check their phones at the door, and state-enforced phone bans at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/education-training-labor/many-states-are-banning-cellphones-schools">schools</a>&nbsp;nationwide. We appear to be universally bugged, disturbed, by the sense that our devices became our favorite shield from uncomfortable interaction and, in the process, we’re depriving ourselves of the necessary experiences of life. We’re so familiar with the doom of the scroll that we rarely talk about the one without the other. It’s just, we can’t seem to stop.



Recent lawsuits and ongoing anti-tech movements give credence to these concerns, particularly for young people. Last month, Meta agreed in a settlement to pay up to $17 billion after a consortium of states alleged the tech giant promoted its apps to children despite knowing the platforms were addictive and potentially harmful. Thousands of other cases accusing social media companies of similar wrongdoing are in progress.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.schoolofattention.org/">Attention activism</a>&nbsp;has emerged as an explicit fight to reclaim humanity from the grips of a trillion-dollar industry profiting off the commodification of our attention.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



One of the most well-known experts to address the social-emotional injury of tech for youth is, not coincidentally, a professor at N.Y.U. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, wrote the 2024 best-seller “The Anxious Generation,” which links the dawn of the smartphone to the rampant mental health issues now affecting young people. Childhood, he contends, has been “rewired” since its shift from being play-based to phone-based. Specifically, it has forced children to confront what he calls the “four foundational harms:” social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.&nbsp;



It’s worth noting that not everyone is convinced by Haidt’s pitch. A common critique of his argument is that it is based on a questionable analysis of the data. Other scientists suggest the dual escalation of smartphone use and mental health problems indicate correlation, but not causation. In fact, a dossier of studies has shown “<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2">no, small, or mixed</a>” results as to how or whether tech and social media impact wellbeing. A combination of other factors may also be at play, among them exposure to violence, discrimination, financial concerns, and social isolation.



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But whether tech is the central culprit in the so-called youth mental health crisis, many young people do seem compelled to distance themselves from their phones, and report relief when they do. At N.Y.U., it was students, some of whom were inspired by a class with Professor Haidt, who reduced their screen time and then approached administrators about finding a way to help others do the same. “They just named numerous benefits to this that they really felt that the greater N.Y.U. community could benefit from,” Kristie Patten, the counselor to the president, said of the students in a focus group she led. 



The initiative that has since become NYU IRL continues to be “led by and for students,” Patten said. And as it came together, the guiding question was how to increase the scope and engage people from every corner of campus. A partnership with the Center for Teaching and Learning developed to create resources and learning communities for faculty on limiting tech in the classroom. A designated device-free space, called the NEST, was built out in the Greenwich Village student center, The Kimmel Center for University Life. Similar spaces emerged in Shanghai and Abu-Dhabi. A calendar of device-free events and programming advertises meditation sessions and crafting of all kinds. 
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On a cold day in April, more than 200 N.Y.U. students turned out for an outdoor dinner event, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/05/06/college-socializing-screen-free-zones/">Around the Longest Table</a>, in which they sat for a phone-free meal around a single, 0.1-mile-long table, stretched down a street in Manhattan. This September, as part of N.Y.U. Welcome week, Patten said around 1,300 first-years attended a student-organized <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdO1XoshXFO/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;stkn=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==">dance party</a> where they were asked to cover their phone screens and cameras with stickers. In less than two weeks, the <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/about/university-initiatives/nyu-irl/phone-breakup-challenge.html">N.Y.U. Phone Breakup Challenge</a> will begin, encouraging students to reset their relationships with their phones over 30 days of assignments and incentives designed by Catherine Price, a colleague of Jonathan Haidt and the author of “How to Break Up with Your Phone.” 



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In the end, for the wellbeing professionals, the goal may be less about the success of specific activities or initiatives and more about whether, over time, healthier tech habits become part of the wider campus culture. 
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Hundreds are showing up to these phone-free events, but there’s reason to believe the NYU IRL marketing team still has their job cut out for them. Students on the street outside the Kimmel Center, where the device-free NEST lives, recently expressed mixed awareness of the IRL campaign. Some said they had heard about it broadly, but not about the NEST, or vice versa. One was familiar with both, and another neither. No one had actually spent time in the NEST, though several were interested. A sophomore commented wistfully on how people used to connect more in person when she was growing up. A recent graduate said she didn’t make friends easily and figured the NEST could have been helpful when she was a new student. Another underclassman was intrigued by the option but felt she had too much else on her plate to reasonably go. 



It is possible that, as with most activities, the already-converted are showing up, while those on the margins remain difficult to reach. Carrie Landa, the executive director of Student Wellbeing at Boston University, said she has heard from students that they are eager for device-free spaces — but they’re conflicted, too. They appreciate how their phones connect them with friends and peers and worry that being too offline may cause them to miss out. Landa is taking these mixed feelings into account as she promotes her own device-free effort, BU Unplugged, using Yondr pouches that students slip their phones into and can only unlock with a specific magnetic key. “Creating messaging for something like this is hard,” she said, “because we want to acknowledge the loss while also acknowledging and reminding students of the gain.”



The task being asked of these students isn’t simple. After all, if it were, Patten said, we’d all have changed our ways by now. Zoe Ragouzeos, N.Y.U.’s vice president for student mental health and wellbeing, said she imagines it will take time and experience for students to begin to truly shift their behaviors. So while N.Y.U. can continue gauging interest in IRL activities based on the number of attendees, tracking the impact on their tech use may be more complicated and drawn out. At this point, the primary measurement tool appears to be pre- and post-surveys on tech habits and attitudes that will bookend the school year and specific IRL activities, like the upcoming Phone Breakup Challenge.



In the end, for the wellbeing professionals, the goal may be less about the success of specific activities or initiatives and more about whether, over time, healthier tech habits become part of the wider campus culture. Ragouzeos said her intention when students angst over screen time or social media comparisons is to help them think about other (offline) activities they could do instead. Could they take a walk, meditate, exercise, eat, or sleep — find some other way to pass the time or de-stress that doesn’t involve their phone? To her, hearing an N.Y.U. student simply took a break from the library by getting fresh air rather than getting on the phone would be a triumph.&nbsp;



Ragouzeos doesn’t need students to be able to pinpoint the exact moment or IRL experience that taught them a new skill or lesson, she said. “But that instinct to take a break in ways that don't include checking out with the phone, to me, is going to be how we measure our success.”



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

Analog U 

In recent years, the prevailing story where college substance use is concerned has been students’ declining alcohol consumption. This trend is, for all intents and purposes, a public health victory. And yet <a href="https://time.com/7203140/gen-z-drinking-less-alcohol/">some have wondered</a> if it’s not another sign, like their decreasing in-person socialization, of an overly anxious generation.



The question of cannabis often takes a back seat in this conversation. How, indeed, has the use of college students’ second-favorite drug changed amid a potential swing <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/college-loneliness-socializing/688307/">away from partying</a>? In this case, there’s the legalization of recreational marijuana in 24 states to consider, as well. Is greater accessibility ratcheting up activity, and to what end for wellbeing? The answers may surprise you, as the saying goes, and not least of all because cannabis use is historically misunderstood.



Jason Kilmer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington, is one of the country's leading experts on substance abuse among young adults, including high school and college students. When we met on Zoom to discuss the latest trends in his field, his preferred longitudinal study on the topic had just released <a href="https://monitoringthefuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mtfpanel2026.pdf">its 2025 results</a>. Every year for almost 50 years, <a href="https://monitoringthefuture.org/results/annual-reports/">Monitoring the Future</a>, led by researchers at the University of Michigan, has been collecting self-reported data about the drug-use habits of U.S. adults aged 19 to 65. 



The latest Monitoring the Future findings on college student cannabis use are notable because, in many ways, they’ve stayed constant — compared to last year, five years ago, even ten years ago. The data show that, despite what may be common perception, most college students are not using cannabis, nor are they using it significantly more than their modern-day predecessors. But just because the majority aren’t users doesn’t mean schools should unsound the alarms, Kilmer says. Also contrary to what some believe, researchers are only becoming more confident in the harm the drug can cause, particularly to developing brains.



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Most college students are not using cannabis, nor are they using it significantly more than their modern-day predecessors.
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One of the reasons Monitoring the Future is particularly helpful for higher education student affairs practitioners is that it breaks down data by not only age but college students versus non-college students (both one to four years out of high school). In 2025, the percentage of college students who reported using cannabis in the last 30 days was 25.2 percent. For non-college students, that rate was 30.9 percent — and tends to be higher across the board. Monitoring the Future then calculates whether these results differ significantly compared to one, five, and ten years ago. In this case, there were no significant changes in use for either college or non-college students within any time frame.



That lack of significant change also holds true for college and non-college students who reported daily cannabis use (using 20 or more times in the last 30 days). For college students in 2025, the latest daily rate was 5.3 percent. For non-college students, it was more than double: 12.6 percent.&nbsp;



For Kilmer, the point worth driving home time and again is that, despite what many might think, far from all college students are using cannabis. It was in fact research on misperceived norms related to cannabis that first drew him into this line of study. In 2000, a colleague found that college students who used cannabis most were also <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12324276_Students'_estimates_of_the_prevalence_of_drug_use_Evidence_for_a_false_consensus_effect">more likely to overestimate</a> use among their peers. Frequent users, likely surrounded by friends with similar habits, may struggle to believe that they’re in the minority.



One of the reasons recognizing the tendency to overinflate campus cannabis use is important is because that understanding could inform prevention tactics. An incoming student who incorrectly believes most of her peers use cannabis may be more likely to end up using it herself in an attempt to fit in, Kilmer said. But research suggests by righting the misperceived norm, some people’s real behavior can be changed — that is, in this case, they may reduce their use.



And it is best, medically speaking, for people, and especially young people, to reduce cannabis use. Notions to the contrary, Kilmer imagines, stem from another sneaky, and false, rumor: that cannabis can't be harmful. Weed may be naturally occurring in theory, he said, but that doesn’t make it safe. Since the 70s and 80s, the concentration of T.H.C., the high-inducing component, has soared from around 2 or 3 percent to as high as 30 percent or more. “Science shows it stopped being natural a long time ago,” Kilmer said.&nbsp;



As for the idea that you can’t overdose on weed, that you can’t become addicted, that you can’t experience withdrawal — none of that is true either, Kilmer emphasized. “It's never been a question to researchers. We're always struck by the fact: How did that message even get out there?” he said of the confusion. When he worked in student life, he remembered an undergraduate coming in and admitting he was worried he was addicted to weed. He wanted to know “if that's even a thing” because “my roommates keep telling me it's not."&nbsp;



The risks of cannabis use to young minds include links to mood disorders, attentional issues, and psychosis. Scientists are typically cautious about using the word “causal” to describe the relationship between any two variables. “This is a topic where we get to use the word causal,” Kilmer said. “High-potency cannabis causes psychosis.” Some people end up in an unfortunate cycle, where they think cannabis is helping them with issues like poor sleep, appetite, or anxiety, but in reality those are just the symptoms of cannabis withdrawal. So when they use more, the symptoms go away. Confidently diagnosing cannabis users with A.D.H.D. has become almost impossible, Kilmer added, because the drug’s effects can so closely mimic the disorder.



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“This is a topic where we get to use the word causal. High-potency cannabis causes psychosis.”
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As the executive director of Student Wellbeing at Boston University, Carrie Landa, a psychologist, is attentive to the ways larger social trends among college students may be affecting substance use habits. The fact that the rate of alcohol use is down, and weed use is stable, could be promising, she said. But she warns against focusing on how much they’re using at the risk of looking past the why of it all. In years past, she’s perceived people getting high in social settings, among friends. But now, she said, “with the current generation who is really facing struggles related to interpersonal connection without technology,” she worries use is often a mode of “self-medicating.” Young people may be using weed to target sleep or anxiety issues — ones that may or may not be connected to cannabis use in the first place.&nbsp;



So perhaps social anxiety is at play in influencing student usage trends for cannabis and alcohol, even if the former is stable while the latter has gone down significantly (from 63.5 percent in 2015 to 52 percent in 2025). But it’s hard to say for sure. Kilmer said new research on the relationship between cannabis and alcohol use on campus could help clarify some of these "why" questions. In the early 2000s, he said, it was generally accepted that smokers also drank but drinkers didn’t necessarily smoke. Today, he awaits more updated information breaking down the “venn diagram” between different substances among college students. What if, for example, the smokers today don’t also drink?



What is clear to Kilmer is that alcohol and cannabis prevention efforts in colleges should remain a priority. Alcohol is still the most prevalent drug, and the effects of cannabis seem increasingly worrisome. Cannabis users may see the fallout in the classroom, too. In <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4586361/">one study</a>, the frequency of marijuana use among students was associated with skipping more classes, lower first-semester G.P.A., and taking longer to graduate. “Now that research has caught up, it really has told a very consistent story,” Kilmer said. “This is a substance worth taking seriously. It's a substance that has very clear implications for mental health and wellbeing, student success.”



The continuing challenge, Kilmer added, is how to influence student behavior. Motivational interviewing has been a successful tactic in one-on-one treatment scenarios, he said. He also encourages university counseling departments to screen for cannabis use disorder. Perpetually, Kilmer is asking himself: “How do we get that science off the page of journals and out there in a way that actually has an impact?”



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

What We Get Wrong About College Cannabis Use

Ahead of the new academic year, a panel of undergraduates convened last Tuesday on Zoom to offer an audience of educators and administrators insight into some of the influences most affecting college student wellbeing today.



As the title suggests, “The State of Student Wellbeing: Navigating Pressure, Belonging, and A.I. on Campus” covered the young panelists’ views on a wide range of both academic and personal concerns, as well as ideas for how higher education leadership can help address them.&nbsp;



The hourlong event was the second of its kind produced together by the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (UERU), a national consortium of leaders from research universities, and the Coalition for Student Wellbeing (C4SW), a student-led college mental health advocacy group.&nbsp;



This time, the LearningWell Coalition, which promotes best practices in college student wellbeing, was also an organizing partner. The LearningWell Coalition is the publisher of LearningWell magazine.



After words of welcome from UERU Executive Director Steven Dandaneau, Angela Lindner, the executive director of the LearningWell Coalition, opened the session with an overview of trends in college student wellbeing, as well as ways forward. Recent measures of flourishing and purpose are troubling, she said, but evidence shows experiential educational experiences, like mentorship, internships, and research, can set students for long-term success.



“To fully support lifelong wellbeing, we must liberate our students and our own universities from the burden of the notion that the only purpose of college is to punch a ticket toward a job, and we must provide access to and participate in these relationship-rich, lifelong giving experiences available to all students, not just for a portion of our population,” Lindner said.



The remaining time was devoted to the student panel, which was moderated by Carson Domey, the founder of C4SW and a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He was joined by three of his members: Mayeesha Alvi, a rising sophomore at Yale University; Leyli Balaghi, a rising sophomore at Arizona State University; and Aneesh Chintala, an incoming first-year at the Georgia Institute of Technology.



Time and again, the panelists highlighted how intertwined their academic experience is with their lives and struggles outside the classroom.&nbsp;



Several of the stressors students identified might seem purely academic at first. Chintala spoke to his concerns about entering a university whose reputation for educational rigor he may not be able to keep up with. Alvi pointed out how a prevalent “hustle culture” on her campus perpetuates the idea that “you’re always supposed to be doing more.”



But at a certain point, each of these academic anxieties became almost impossible to isolate from others, like financial or career-centered ones.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In the nearly same breath that Chintala expressed his worry about maintaining an intense workload and top grades, he mentioned the coinciding urgency around “making sure that we have the internships, the experiences, and all of these different things needed in order to essentially get these jobs that we want.”



Alvi, too, marked these entangled academic and professional pressures and how they can be exacerbated by financial need. “For students who are helping support not only themselves, but their families, it becomes even harder to slow down because success is tied to: How am I going to support my family in the future?” she said. 



According to Balaghi, financial concerns have the potential to influence just about every decision students make. Work hours could limit their class choices or ability to engage on campus in general. Earning requirements, not genuine interest, could dictate their major, extracurricular activities, or career path.&nbsp;



There are also non-academic issues with potentially academic implications that are more personal or situational, the panelists revealed.



Balaghi opened up about the challenges of focusing on classes while grieving a close family member and far away from her support system at home. Alvi said public and government scrutiny of her university, as well as general uncertainty about the future of higher education, has been distracting.



“There's this underlying feeling that the landscape is constantly shifting,” Alvi said. “As a student, that can feel very exhausting and confusing.”



Even the prevalence of A.I. in classrooms these days, the panelists noted, may have its roots in wellbeing issues. If young people were less afraid of failure, they might be more willing to trust themselves, instead of A.I.



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If young people were less afraid of failure, they might be more willing to trust themselves, instead of A.I.
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“I think it speaks a lot to the very kind of changing landscape of education that so many students are just so scared of making mistakes and so scared of not being perfect that they're turning to tools like ChatGPT, like Gemini, countless others, because they know that it will usually output a correct answer,” Alvi said.



To mitigate this reliance on A.I., Alvi suggested “bringing it back to encouraging mistakes and encouraging the organic kind of thinking things through.” She mentioned a friend who was put at ease by a math professor who graded assignments based on proof of process, rather than the accuracy of final answers. 



A.I. chatbots are one tool the students all agreed should not be considered a mental health solution.&nbsp;



Chintala recognized why young people, especially young men, might gravitate towards A.I. to work through emotional concerns. Its accessibility makes it a convenient option, he said, and a non-human sounding board could appeal to those hesitant to be vulnerable with others about their feelings.&nbsp;



Still, Balaghi said, A.I. isn’t an appropriate replacement for professional, in-person mental health support. Institutions should educate students on its limitations, as well as provide the human resources they really need.&nbsp;



“University leaders, I believe, should not simply tell students to stop using A.I. Instead, I believe that they should ask what A.I. is providing that [the] current support system at their institution is not,” Balaghi said.



All of the panelists agreed that one of the best buffers against college pressures have been the people and spaces that make them feel secure. A sense of genuine belonging, whether to cultural groups or living-learning communities, has helped each make second homes of their campus. Accessible and culturally responsive mental health resources on campus, they added, can reinforce that safety, too.



“Community has made all of the difference for me,” Alvi said. “I think universities do a really great job when they create spaces where students can find people who share some part of their identity.” 



Often, the message the panelists seemed most keen to get across was that they are eager to be involved in determining and improving the decisions about how to address their own health and wellness.&nbsp;



“One thing I hope university leaders remember is that today’s students are incredibly invested in their campuses. I mean, they serve as our second home for a large majority of the year,” Alvi said in a closing statement. 



“We don't want to just receive decisions. We actually want to help shape them.”



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

Students Share Wellbeing Concerns Ahead of New Year

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Not for Everybody



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



An opportunity for experiential learning&nbsp;



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

"College-in-3"

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On this episode of LearningWell Radio, Jean Rhodes, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, joins us for conversation about her expertise—mentorship in college—and its future in the age of AI. Is it possible, we ask her, for the technology to boost, rather than erode, the impact of mentoring and, critically, student trust?



As the director at the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring, Rhodes has developed an AI-integration strategy for mentorship that she says keeps the “human at the helm.” Today the approach is being rolled out in a large scale, randomized control trail across all four campuses in the UMass system.



Listen now on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1gEcxbyrr8kxvduPaHXEfH?si=07015e27d4374929">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mentorship-meets-ai-with-jean-rhodes-university/id1732284927?i=1000798372248">Apple Podcasts</a>.



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

Mentorship Meets AI with Jean Rhodes

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Ellise LaMotte oversees Tufts’ weeklong spring break program, JUMP-IN, which allows first-year students to try on a career before committing to it. The goal is clarity: students feeling “this isn’t for me” counts as a win just as much as students saying, “this is it.” On this episode of Invented Here, LaMotte shares how JUMP-IN came to be, how the program’s success is measured, and how the work can be adapted to other campuses.



This episode is a part of Invented Here, a podcast series from LearningWell Magazine and the LearningWell Coalition featuring stories of innovation in learner-centered education that fosters life-long wellbeing.



Listen now on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/5WuGMtSy6RDnAaxz4eTVzU?si=ekPra3y5Si2g8XoTeK0QXA">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/invented-here-jumping-into-careers-with-ellise-lamotte/id1732284927?i=1000796332302">Apple Podcasts</a>.



You can reach Jack Tucker,&nbsp;LearningWell's strategic communications manager, at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:jack@learningwell.org">jack@learningwell.org</a>&nbsp;with questions, comments, and other ideas.

Invented Here | Jumping into Careers with Ellise LaMotte, Tufts University

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On this month's episode of LearningWell Radio, Michele Murray, the new president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, discusses the benefits of its long-standing approach to education and where it is headed during a time of significant change in higher education.



Listen now on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/2JPeJjw6u5quSleJU9j3LP?si=xvFI5Fy8SX-KQVpiXDozUQ">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/transformative-education-with-michel-murray/id1732284927?i=1000791112914">Apple Podcasts</a>.



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

Transformative Education with Michele Murray

In his remarks at the launch of the National Student Success Project, American Council on Education (ACE) President Ted Mitchell told the crowd, “Despite what people said we couldn’t do, today marks a day when higher education has truly come together as a sector.”



Mitchell’s words speak volumes about higher education’s efforts to reclaim the national narrative about the value of college at a time of declining public trust. The National Student Success Project, kicked off last week in Washington D.C., centers around a pledge from over 50 colleges and universities to focus their missions and resources on helping students reach their true potential before and after graduation.&nbsp;



From its student-centered theme to its carefully crafted commitments, the initiative may indeed unite a sector that has been underprepared in responding to the public’s disappointment in higher education on many levels.&nbsp;



The participating schools have signed on to take action on five key commitments that reflect some of the major expectations of students and families: return on investment, affordability, academic excellence, career preparedness, and constructive dialogue. In making students the center of the campaign, higher education leaders may also be reminding the public, and themselves, they have not forgotten their core mission.&nbsp;



“This is about reminding America who we are, what we do well, and who we do it for,” said Garry Jenkins, the president of Bates College, one of the schools participating in the project. 



The Meaning of Success



This initiative is not the first time higher education has organized around a response to questions about its worth or direction, but it is perhaps the most broad-based. The project is a collaboration among five education associations: ACE, the American Association of Community Colleges, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. This selective group of organizations collectively covers all sectors of higher education: community colleges, flagship and regional state colleges, elite liberal arts schools, R1 institutions, and HBCUs. 



Leaders are eager to expand the ranks of participants, hoping to move from contract to coalition to movement. While targeting the frequently cited problems within higher education, the project is also an opportunity to move from defense to offense by including aspirational elements within the commitments, often having to do with thriving after graduation. And while leaders defer to participating schools to define student success, the project opens the door to a wider interpretation.



“I do think the view of student success has to be more than just first-year earnings or retention,” Jenkins said. “As important as these are, we need to include personal growth and support, thriving and flourishing, belonging and connectedness. That is what leads to successful outcomes in life and work.”&nbsp;



For the first commitment, return on investment, leaders identify “value” in terms beyond just the assurance of a post-graduation job. “Delivering a strong value for the investment students make means they finish their academic programs and flourish afterwards, equipped with knowledge and skills that can lead to meaningful employment and a life of purpose,” the project’s materials state.&nbsp;



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"Delivering a strong value for the investment students make means they finish their academic programs and flourish afterwards, equipped with knowledge and skills that can lead to meaningful employment and a life of purpose."
</blockquote>



The career pathways commitment includes “igniting ambitions through real-world experiences and robust guidance.” Here, the language expresses support for experiential learning opportunities, educational best practices that are known to improved wellbeing in life and career.&nbsp;



The commitment to academic excellence calls out the quality of the educational experience, including faculty dedication to student learning. For some, this is a welcome acknowledgement that higher education is first and foremost about educating students. “Anything that put the student first in the educational experience is a major step forward for all of us,” said Angela Lindner, the executive director of the LearningWell Coalition, which publishes LearningWell magazine.&nbsp;



In responding to the news of the project, Lindner said, “We are&nbsp;excited about this initiative because student life-long flourishing in career and life is embedded in each of the five core commitments. This initiative promises to realign higher education with shared goals of student flourishing and public good.”



The National Student Success Project is, for now, a website that includes a description of the commitment categories with examples of existing initiatives that reflect their intent. These include: a first-year research program at James Madison University where new students work with faculty mentors on paid research projects; Western Carolina University’s Catamounts for Civility that brings students together through a series of events where they practice listening, empathy, and respectful discussions; and Bunker Hill Community College, which connects students to faculty and a success team that sends kudos, alerts, or tutoring referrals.&nbsp;



The website can’t tell us what will happen next, but it does state that signing onto the project is more than just an endorsement. Those who are participating are demonstrating their commitment through policies, programs, and initiatives that support student success. For many institutions, it is a call to action. For others, it is an opportunity to&nbsp;give greater voice to what they have long upheld.



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

Making the Case 

At a time of fear and uncertainty in higher education, what good leadership demands may be as simple as being an excellent human being. Meet Father “Call Me Jack” Butler, the new president of Boston College.&nbsp;The Jesuit priest was&nbsp;a prison minister, administrator, counselor, and spiritual director before&nbsp;becoming the institution’s first new president in 30 years. The week of his much-anticipated inauguration, he was remarkably relaxed, and characteristically modest, saying, “A job doesn’t change who you are.”&nbsp;



Father Jack, as he is known, may well be the college president of our times. He is discerning, relatable, and refreshingly unafraid of the existential crisis higher education appears to be facing at this moment. For over 15 years, he was the Haub Vice President for University Mission and Ministry, a division of Boston College that invites faculty and students to embrace the school’s formative education mission through retreats and reflection. Grounded in Jesuit educational tradition, BC retains an intentional focus on teaching to the whole person with an emphasis on how to live a good life in many dimensions.&nbsp;



As a Catholic priest on a multi-faith campus, Father Butler is at once unapologetic about his devotion to his religion and welcoming of all forms of spirituality. He acknowledges the realities of encouraging the practice of personal formation within a highly selective research institution. At the same time, he believes that understanding our roles as humans is more important than ever. In this interview with&nbsp;LearningWell, Father Jack and Winston Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley talk about why they are doubling down on BC’s mission in a rapidly changing world.



It's been 30 years since BC has had a new president, and here you are. How does it feel?



JB: The most important thing in all of this is continuing to be who you are. You might have more responsibility, but if you have people like this&nbsp;[gestures to colleagues], the responsibility isn't all that different. The one thing I can genuinely say is the love and support and affection that I've received since the naming and the first day on the job has been hard to process. It's been overwhelming. It’s been wonderful. The rest of it, it's just getting up in the morning and doing what I can do to be the best I can be for myself and for others.&nbsp;



Do you think your becoming president says something about the direction of Boston College and the importance of formative education at this point in time?



JB: I think that formative education is something that people like David and the deans and the faculty at Boston College all believe in. It is who we are. But formative education didn't come out of a vacuum. The Jesuit, Catholic education that's been going on for 500 years has always been formative. It's always been about the liberal arts: helping us learn how to live life and to become integrated people, the idea that an education isn't just about a job; it's about how to maximize your potential and enjoy the gift of creation itself.&nbsp;



And it's because we want to be known as a Jesuit, Catholic-faith-based, values-laden school that specializes in formative education that they were looking for a Jesuit to be in this role. I think that's probably the default on why it's me, to be honest. It doesn’t hurt that I love human beings, I love the relational aspect of education, and I believe in formative education.&nbsp;



What do you think, David? What does Father Jack’s presidency say about where BC is right now?&nbsp;



DQ: If you talk to the board of trustees, there was an absolute focus that having Jesuit leadership has served us well in the past and is really critical at this moment in time. The biggest change over these almost 30 years, and especially over the last 15, is the way in which the language of formation and formative education has taken hold in really powerful ways with faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, friends, alumni, and trustees. There’s a richness in that conversation and the ways in which it's allowed us to think about how we make investments, how we develop new programs, how we think about hiring, how we think about accompanying our students in light of that kind of broader set of values that Father Jack and his colleagues have created in so many ways.&nbsp;



I don't think there's any place in the country that has done more interesting work than what Father Jack and his colleagues have done [in University Mission and Ministry] for faculty formation, for staff formation, for expanding undergraduate student formation. Here, we have been intentional and creative in thinking about: How do we meet faculty where they are, with a clear sense of&nbsp;who&nbsp;they are in the eyes of younger people, who are coming into universities and are looking for meaning, a sense of community, a sense of a larger purpose?&nbsp;



You mentioned the importance of faculty in formative education. This is tricky because isn’t there an unwritten rule in higher ed that faculty and administrators sort of mind their own business? Is it a different story here?&nbsp;



JB: Boston College is a Jesuit, Catholic university, and I'm proud to say that. And I'm a proud Jesuit. But we're not a church. We're not about the faith development of everybody here. The primary purpose of a Jesuit,&nbsp;Catholic university is in fact the education. But because we're Jesuit,&nbsp;Catholic, we have a different reason for doing the education we do,&nbsp;which we welcome the faculty to buy into. What faculty formation really means is getting them to remember why they wanted to be a teacher: the things that got them excited about their particular discipline, the things that gave them purpose and meaning in life, the things that help organize how they negotiate the world. It’s the same things we're trying to do for the students.&nbsp;



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For us, instead of responding out of fear, we say, “Let's step back. Why do we do what we do? Has that changed?”
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Faculty are the primary formulators. If we can help them help our students become fully alive—to enjoy the richness in life, to be able to live out of joy but also have the capacity and the adaptability to deal with sadness, frustration, and disappointment or failure—that's what education is really about. We lost our way in higher ed when we made education seemingly only about getting a job



The stakes are a whole lot higher and more important than getting a job. And if you remind faculty that we want our students to be fully alive human beings, to have the capacity to engage life and explore life in all its tremendous magnanimity, very few will find that strange or unappealing. And if you get them to think about why they became faculty, it's usually because they had somebody like a David Quigley in their life who inspired them. So they are not just&nbsp;teaching math or history or psychology or literature. We're getting them to understand who they are, integrating themselves, and getting them excited about that.&nbsp;



Is the goal for faculty to really see the students in more ways than just a receptable for knowledge in a particular specialty?&nbsp;



JB: I don't want education to just be a transmission of a subject, of a discipline. We want cognitive development, but we want that to be integrated into their volitional drives, into finding out who they are as they embrace the liberal arts. Like a pinball machine, we want them to bounce off of history and English and psychology and math to find out what they are really interested in. Because some of them come here already hardwired for a career. I think we win if they change their desires because they are doing so based on what they really want to do with their lives. At Boston College, we ask all of our students to consider three questions: What brings you joy? What are you good at? And who does the world need you to be? To us, these three questions are at the heart of formative education.&nbsp;



DQ: Father Jack was a key ally and driving force when we renewed the undergraduate core curriculum a decade or so ago. One of the key developments there was that many faculty who were most engaged in helping lead the process came to it with a sense that we needed to up our game because the generation of young people who are coming to our classrooms had different needs and different experiences.&nbsp;



We can talk about all the overdetermined ways in which social media and the various crises of our time are weighing on these young people. But I thought that there was a wonderful openness in that core process to think about, as a Jesuit institution, what kind of a liberal arts core do we need, but also to imagine it involving a lot of creativity about reflection experiences across many of these courses. This is what the retreat work that BC’s Division of Mission and Ministry took on under Father Jack is all about. It is about getting faculty more attuned to what brought us into this work in the first place—that joy of scholarship—which helps&nbsp;our students come alive.&nbsp;



Let’s talk about the students. David mentioned seeing a different kind of student arriving on campus about a decade ago. That’s when we were just learning the extent of the college student mental health problem and some of the other struggles like loneliness and fatalism. Do you think about that in terms of everything that you've designed here, from your work in ministry through to your leadership now?



JB: Answering your question honestly, I'd say—is that the guiding principle behind everything I'm thinking about? No. Is it a large portion of what I'm thinking about? Absolutely. Jesuits have been famous for being countercultural, which most people think of&nbsp;as&nbsp;social justice. But the countercultural is precisely what you're talking about. And if you have a sense, as I do, that the human organism itself is self-correcting, then you believe that it's going to be fine. It will move out of loneliness. It will seek relationships. It will have a sense of joy. And I don't mean this from a religious sense but rather understanding what it is to be human so that they can live their lives to the fullest.&nbsp;



Take loneliness for example. Why are people so lonely? In part because they haven't realized they can have a relationship with themselves or they're afraid to have a relationship with themselves. So we need to get them to be quiet—to reflect. You get the organism to function correctly with the cognitive development. You're giving them resources, you're giving them insight, but you're moving from intellectual growth to wisdom. Wisdom is the way to incorporate this into a life. The intellectual growth is just how to do something. So somebody who's fatalistic falls in love. Love has a way of getting you out of fatalism. You start bringing that together, and the organism starts to function better.&nbsp;



What about the pressure students put on themselves to pursue certain majors, constantly striving towards their goals? David, do you talk about that with the deans or the faculty at all? Because that can lead to some mental health issues, as well.



DQ: BC is certainly not immune to this. Historically, across the 20th century up until the 2008 financial crisis, across higher education, there was a counter-cyclical relationship between the economics major and the business cycle. In bad times, people rushed to the economics major. As the economy improved, people went to philosophy or history or fine arts. Since 2008, and this goes for BC but it goes for just about all elite schools around the US, that relationship has been changed, and the push towards the economics major has just continued. So there is a desire on the part of students, families who are committing to support their students, to find their way into particular majors.&nbsp;



As Father Jack said, they've got a certain mindset coming in here. I think why it's so important to have such an extensive liberal arts core is that we really believe that the kind of flourishing that we're after for our young people across their lives will be best developed by encountering great works of literature, reading about the greatest approaches to the big theological questions across those areas. Another element—and it's been part of Jesuit Catholic education especially inventively done here at BC since the late '60s—is a real institution-wide commitment to service learning, to getting our students out into the city of Boston, into neighboring communities, and encouraging them to think about their obligation, what they owe their fellow men and women and the communities around them.&nbsp;



JB: I’ll jump in here. I'm not the historian; David's the historian. But if you really traced it back, before higher education became overly focused on job placement—that's when we started to lose what I think is the true impact and the essence of what education's all about. When your kids were young, they were asking you, "Mom, Dad, why?" Everything was why, why, why.&nbsp;



But we sent them into an educational system, and too often it took the why out of them. And then it became, “How many pages do I have to write? What courses do I have to take that will lead to a job?” Don’t get me wrong, BC is an elite university, and 96 percent of our graduating seniors have a job, are attending graduate school, or are engaged in a meaningful volunteer experience like the Peace Corp. But what distinguishes us as a university is that we consider everyone here an educator, and we're trying to get our students back into the wonderment of the why.



And the last piece I’ll say is we need to teach them that it is okay to fail. I want them to fail while they're here because that’s a part of what formative education is about. Because if we don't let them fail, they won’t take risks. And so part of formation is how do we get them to take risks, to teach them that failure isn't really failure—it's the beginning of success.



There is a lot about higher education that needs to be addressed, including affordability. What do you worry about most?&nbsp;



JB: Sure, we worry about access and affordability. Boston College invested $100 million to establish Messina College, a two-year residential program for low-income, first-generation students on our Brookline campus. It allows people who didn't have access or couldn't have access to a school like BC to come here, in many cases, free of charge and transfer into Boston College after two years of study if they maintain a 3.4 cumulative average or better. I would love for BC to try to join universities like Harvard and MIT that offer free undergraduate tuition for families with annual incomes of less than $200,000, but we are not there, yet. We allocate a tremendous amount to need-based undergraduate financial aid, but we have to do more for middle class families. That is something we are all paying attention to.



Do I think that what's going on at the federal level is hurting us? Absolutely. Do I worry about the distrust of institutions in general and whether or not people believe that a college education really is worth it given the price? Absolutely. Do I think that college athletics—something that I love and is big here—do I think it's gone astray and that it is putting a strain on BC and other Division 1 universities? Yes.&nbsp;



There are lots of challenges out there, but if we're really about formative education, then my line is, “Where there's love, there can be no fear.” For us, instead of responding out of fear, we say, “Let's step back. Why do we do what we do? Has that changed?” We will continue to be honest about who we are and not try to change&nbsp;our core values for&nbsp;the circumstances of the time.&nbsp;



We're a Jesuit,&nbsp;Catholic university—that's who we are. This is the kind of education we&nbsp;offer, and this is why we do it. This is the time to double down. This is the time to say, “What we do is really important because we're actually trying to address the issues of the world.” It's a very challenging time in one way, to be in higher education. But if you look at it the way that I think people like us look at it, this is the best time to be in education because now the stakes really count. I think we are well positioned to prepare students who can make a difference in the world.



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

“This Is What We Do” 

During orientation week my first year at Dartmouth College, I found myself with over 100 freshmen at a s’mores social event. The night sky was dotted with fairy lights, and a warm glow encircled us, as a tide of excitement rippled around the firepits. While I moved with the current, flowing from one person to the next, the fleeting conversations remained stagnant. Each exchange followed the same routine of strained small talk. For an event with no instruction nor rules, I felt confined by some arbitrary social boundaries that kept me on the surface of every interaction. I was at an event made for getting to know people, and here I was, at least 20 people later, none the wiser to anyone around me.&nbsp;



As I headed back to my dorm, I bumped into another freshman on the sidewalk. Our conversation started about the cobblestone streets of Bruges, Belgium, and the next thing I know, three hours later, he is standing in the middle of my room reciting an entire passage from Macbeth. We moved from one conversation to another unable to contain our excitement. His laughter, full, uninhibited, and authentic, was contagious, and I felt a freedom to be candid in a way that feels so difficult in this day and age. Since then, our friendship has only grown, and today he is my best friend. It's hard to describe our friendship in any other way but limitless. We find joy in everything, from rolling pumpkins down a long driveway outside the library to running through the sprinklers outside the science building.&nbsp;



Ironically, finding my best friend so early in college has made me more attuned to the wider challenge of connection. In my experience, this obstacle stems from societal systems that encourage us to conform to narrow ideals of success, from how we present ourselves to where we find connection. These prescribed norms can inhibit authenticity and make genuine connection more difficult. However, attaining such a meaningful relationship not at the gathering by the campfires but serendipitously on my way home showed me that connection exists outside the system.&nbsp;



Pressure to Fit the Mold&nbsp;



Despite the interconnectedness of our modern society, it feels we are progressively becoming less connected. While social media has brought many positives, it has also propagated unrealistic expectations of success. Platforms like LinkedIn display every academic and professional milestone someone has achieved since adolescence, while Instagram serves as a constant reminder of all the friends, places, and experiences that we have had no time to pursue. As a result, it leads us to slowly construct an impenetrable barrier between our real selves and our cultivated personas. As we relinquish so much of our life online, the feeling of being constantly perceived leads to a looming pressure to perform, even offline.&nbsp;



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If one believes meaningful relationships can only be found in a select few places, it creates unrealistic expectations and can leave one feeling further disconnected in a society where connection is already difficult. 
</blockquote>



Recently, during a conversation free of pretense, a friend asked me if I was happy with how I was spending my time in college. I told her yes. But when I asked the same question back, she shook her head. Despite her time being filled leading extracurricular organizations on campus, getting the ideal internships, going on spontaneous adventures every weekend, and still finding time to excel academically, she felt discouraged as this did not bring her fulfillment. “So what if I do all these things?” she said. “I can’t even tell you what I truthfully like anymore.”&nbsp;



The internet has become our judge, jury, and executioner. When scrutiny feels omnipresent and comparison is all encompassing, it's natural to want to fit a perfect mold. However, this culture of constant visibility and judgment inhibits vulnerability. If we can’t truly be ourselves, how are we supposed to create authentic connections? Our inability to be fully honest with one another not only prevents connection but continues this cycle of silent struggling as we feel more and more isolated in our own worlds. I don’t think Dartmouth is an inherently competitive nor cutthroat place. It's quite the opposite. Time and time again, I feel the support of my peers and professors and a general sense of community. The issue is that we are more similar than we think. Many of us face the same struggles and challenges; yet our apprehension to express them leaves us isolated in our journey.&nbsp;



The pressure to fit the mold not only makes students feel like they must always appear successful, but also dictates where meaningful connections can and should be found. Too often I have heard “you need to be a part of this club if you want to make new friends” or “if you don’t join a sorority you will have difficulty making friends.” I am not saying that true connection can’t be found in these structured and defined places. Of course it can. Rather, if one believes meaningful relationships can only be found in a select few places, it creates unrealistic expectations and can leave one feeling further disconnected in a society where connection is already difficult.&nbsp;



Beyond the System&nbsp;



Societal systems pose arbitrary rules that can limit connection. However, we have a choice to determine how we let the system affect us. By looking beyond these artificial boundaries, we can find connection in places and with people we least expect. During my freshman year, I was standing in the chilly autumn breeze at a Diwali celebration, when a girl, walking back from the gym, paused to ask what was going on. Both of us spent our time engaging in very different activities, and our paths rarely crossed in the hectic rhythm of college life. However, this spontaneous moment permitted a close friendship to grow with someone I would have likely never met.&nbsp;



I believe that as college students we have more agency than we think in defining what connection means to us. Some of my favorite memories include formally emailing 12 friends to go sledding the day after a blizzard and, in what is now a term tradition, spending the whole day with two friends cooking an extravagant dinner for a large group. In my experience, by being authentically myself and seeking intentional moments with friends, I have been able to defy the constraints of the system and find what true connection means to me.&nbsp;



Sophia Sahni is a junior at Dartmouth College.

In Pursuit of Connection, Stray from the Social Networks

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Sometimes it’s the little things that get us through the day.  In this story, Olin student Owen Dray waxes rhapsodic about those little miracles in the yellow box: Cheerios.  But far from simply serving as part of a well-balanced breakfast, for Owen, Cheerios have been his anchor, holding him steady while the seas of his life around him have shifted.  As so many students struggle with anxiety, it’s important to remember the reliable, unchanging parts of our lives, however small.



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

Storytelling | "O No," Owen Dray

The University of Dayton and Sinclair Community College are just two miles away from one another, but in many ways, they are worlds apart. UD is a private Catholic university providing a four-year undergraduate experience. Sinclair, a public community college, offers the most affordable associate’s degree in the state of Ohio. And yet, when a group of educators from both institutions held a retreat to explore a partnership around character education, an infectious energy emerged.&nbsp;



“It was like we fell in love with each other over three days,” said Nancy McHugh, the executive director of the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community at UD. “We went in as two separate groups and came out as one.”&nbsp;



At the end of the retreat, they named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck. This eclectic group of educators are now the driving force behind an unusual partnership in higher education based on what unites them, not what sets them apart. Funded by the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) out of Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character, UD and Sinclair will now embed character instruction into curricular and co-curricular initiatives at both schools, with a particular focus on community-engaged learning. At the heart of the initiative is the UD-Sinclair Academy (UDSA), one of the country’s most promising examples of a two-year/four-year transfer collaboration.



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They named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck.
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Using character as the bridge, the team believes the work will produce a number of positive outcomes, including expanding the work of personal formation to all students, infusing belonging into the transfer pathway between the schools, and deepening each institution’s commitment to the community. In this sense, the UD/Sinclair character education initiative promises to be a national model for how institutions of different profiles and student populations can create beneficial relationships while deepening their respective missions.&nbsp;



Breaking New Ground



The initial retreat that brought the team together was part of an ECI capacity building grant meant to help institutions do the groundwork for their character education aspirations. Oftentimes, these planning stages bring into focus existing assets, and in some cases barriers, that can be addressed through a larger effort. Always, it is the people behind the initiatives who ultimately shape how the work takes root.



The UD/Sinclair partnership is led by two academics who, their colleagues say, represent the best of each institution: UD’s Nancy McHugh and Sinclair’s Myra Bozeman. McHugh is a philosopher by training, though she calls herself a “weird one,” spending as much time outside the classroom working with students in the community as she does inside it. The Fitz Center, where she is director, is one of several centers at UD that focuses on community-engaged learning — a form of experiential education in which students apply what they are learning in class to the needs of the community. 



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“I’ve always tried to help students understand that the work we do internal to higher ed travels out into the world,” she said. “The skills we are learning in the humanities, in the liberal arts, have this strong external-facing component that helps us understand how to live better in the world and also develop our personal and professional lives in ways that are really important.”&nbsp;



Myra Bozeman, the dean of liberal arts, communication and social sciences at Sinclair, was born and raised in Dayton. “I have a deep connection to Sinclair,” she said. “I was the first child in their day care because my mother was a student here. I have a real love for the students, and moreover, the community.”&nbsp;
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Bozeman said that while most faculty at four-year colleges have an expectation about research, the expectation at Sinclair is to be out doing work in the community. This mirrored UD’s Catholic Marianist mission, advanced by its current president, Eric Spina, who in 2017 declared UD the “university of the common good.”



A year earlier, Spina worked closely with Sinclair’s president Steven Johnson to create the UDSA, an affordable pathway for transfer students from Sinclair to UD. USDA students are representative of Sinclair’s population: Most are Pell-eligible, first generation, and/or students of color. For their first two years, USDA students pay Sinclair tuition (around $5,500 annually) rather than UD tuition (around $50,000), while gaining full access to UD’s campus experience and student organizations, as well as co-curricular opportunities at both institutions. When Sinclair students transfer to UD after receiving their associate’s degree, they get a deep discount on tuition.&nbsp;



Realizing the program’s full potential involves educators from both schools continuing to learn about each other and reflecting on the perceptions they bring to the work. Fortunately,&nbsp;the trust and candor the dream team members built has enabled them to address issues head on.&nbsp;



“UD is a fantastic institution, but they haven’t, in the past, been the most welcoming platform for students of color,” Bozeman said. “Many Blacks just didn’t feel like they belonged on that campus. I personally believed UD has wanted to welcome our students, but perhaps they didn’t understand how to do it. And now we can help figure that out.”&nbsp;



UD’s 2024 Culturally Engaging Campus Environments survey revealed that UDSA students experience lower community connection and sense of belonging compared to traditional four-year UD students. However, UDSA students do experience strong educator support at UD and find they have abundant opportunities for positive regional contribution. The dream team sees this as an opportunity for growth and collaboration across institutions, with character-education tied to community-engaged learning as a vehicle to increase the sense of belonging for students in both their curricular and co-curricular lives.&nbsp;



For McHugh, the belonging gap for the UDSA students sparked an “aha moment” that would lead to a larger inter-institutional effort funded by an ECI institutional impact grant of a little under a million dollars. She told the team, “Let’s use community-engaged learning as a vehicle for character education and then use that to create a common language for character for both institutions to drive forward this sense of belonging for all students.”&nbsp;



Understanding and communicating what that looks like is an ongoing conversation, both within regular meetings of the dream team and at brainstorming sessions called “charettes.” The project materials describe character as a set of dispositions, or virtuous habits, that shape how we think, feel, and act. The overlay of community-engaged learning means that these habits are shaped by community participation and geared toward the benefit of the community.&nbsp;



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"For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller."
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While the benefits of experiential learning are well established, leaders advocate that when implemented with intentional attention to character education, these benefits compound, as student gain not just knowledge and skills but the moral and epistemic dispositions to use them wisely in service to others. In creating a common language and commitment to these principles, the project is guided by nine virtues: joyfulness, curiosity, resilience, hope, integrity, mindfulness, empathy, justice, and community belonging.&nbsp;



While the foundation of the initiative is rather philosophical, the proposed plan is a tangible list of specific initiatives with deliverables, including work within the community-facing centers and in co-curricular activities for students on both campuses. Much of the energy and resources are pointed inside the classroom. Among the project’s goals are to strengthen cross-institutional collaboration and to empower educators at both institutions to implement character education into their courses. This is happening on many levels, starting with faculty who now teach or guest lecture on both campuses, with many planning to infuse character into their coursework.&nbsp;



A newly launched faculty fellows program will train 10 new faculty a year from both institutions to use a character pedagogical framework, resulting in a cohort of 70 or so over time. These will include senior character fellows who will act as mentors to other faculty members.&nbsp;



To improve the UDSA experience for students, “all of Sinclair and all of UD would need to be involved,” McHugh said. “We need to know that when a UDSA student goes into a class in engineering, they will feel a sense of belonging because those educators will have the same sort of language.”&nbsp;Many Sinclair professors, who were unaware of even having UDSA students in their classrooms, are learning how to use a character framework to get to know them.



Dair Arnold, a professor of English at Sinclair, is now running a character pilot in her first-year composition course. While keeping with her standard syllabus, she now adds a character lens to each of her units. In the introduction to writing section, the theme is “know yourself.” Instead of one week of introductory work before the first assignment, Arnold took two weeks where she talked about what character means for students.&nbsp;



The character “cheat sheet” she gives her students defines it as “who you are becoming and how we choose to act — especially when situations are difficult, uncertain or require us to think beyond ourselves.”&nbsp;



Arnold said the students are embracing the revised format and feel excited to be a part of something intentional and different. “For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller, and giving them the skills so they can make informed choices that are good for them, as well as large groups of people.”&nbsp;



Helping Sinclair students explore their personal growth through character education is a big part of the effort to increase belonging. “I think this project is going to enable the two-year students, and their faculty, to have opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise,” said&nbsp;Katherine Rowell, a retired full faculty member at Sinclair who has moved her office down the street to UD and is now heading up faculty development and assessment on the character education initiative.&nbsp;



Rowell believes the character education will help counterbalance the national narrative about the purpose of community college which has been skewed almost exclusively towards workforce development. “We need both. You can’t do workforce development without also talking about integrity and ethics and resilience,” she said. “Community college students need the opportunity to work on these things, not just students at elite liberal arts colleges.”&nbsp;



The commitment UD has made to partner with Sinclair on formative education has Rowell hopeful and excited about the work ahead. “I think just the conversations — the faculty from both institutions talking about these things and making sure students are cared for — it is good to be a part of. In all my time working in community college settings, I have never had a four-year institution reach out or make any overture until now.”&nbsp;



Another dream team member, Danielle Boone, reiterates the importance of character education to the regional workforce missions of both schools, particularly Sinclair. Boone is a&nbsp;UD staff member who runs a program called Professional and Applied Learning (PAL) that supports UDSA students. She is also an adjunct faculty member at UD&nbsp;and&nbsp;Sinclair in psychology and is building character education into these courses.



Much of her work is aimed at preparing students for jobs in the community — one of the goals within the community-engaged learning framework of the initiative. Of the UDSA graduates from 2023 to 2024, 80 percent of those who are employed, have jobs in the Dayton region. Boone sees a through line from the UD/Sinclair character initiative and the needs of the regional workforce. She calls the work “employer-informed character.”&nbsp;



“This is about making sure our students show up at work as whole people and have the skills they need to persist through adversity and be successful,” she said. “That to me is character. And if we are going to argue about the relevancy of higher education than this is what we’ve got to do.”&nbsp;



Given UD and Sinclair’s shared commitment to personal growth and community, the dream team’s character initiative may well come full circle, reinforcing what the two institutions had always had in common, yet might not have known. Bozeman recalled an epiphany she had early on in the first dream team retreat: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is going to change our community. This is going to change it all.’”&nbsp;



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

Community Partners 

Playing for Keeps 

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In some ways, this year’s opening days at the College of Charleston might have resembled those of the last 20—or even the last 200. At the 13th oldest college in the country, this fall's convocation drew the perennial throng of new students who mingled with nervous excitement under the willowy live oak trees on the historic Cistern Yard.&nbsp;&nbsp;



But this time, there was a notable addition. All around, students held, or waved, rally towels of different colors, printed with one of five encouragements: “Be Curious,” “Radically Collaborate,” “Take Action,” “Reframe,” and “Be Mindful.”&nbsp;



These weren’t just typical words of wisdom for launching the year, or a college career. They are the core mindsets of Life Design, a life coaching model that CofC has decided to implement university-wide with a focus on first-year students. Over the last six years, Life Design’s expanding influence on campus has highlighted its potential to fortify students’ self-efficacy and optimism and, ideally, better position them for personal and professional success. Now leadership is on a mission to center these concepts in the student experience, introducing them early and often.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Life Design, in essence, offers students a framework to plot multiple alternate futures for themselves and then encourages them to explore those options. The approach originated with two Stanford engineers who decided to apply their field’s design principles to regular life planning. For students, they asked, what would it look like to consider not one but three different majors, or extracurricular focuses, or career paths? Where would they take you, and would you be satisfied with each?



Kristen McMullen, the executive director of student success at CofC’s School of Business Student Success Center, was among the university’s first to embrace the practice. Her journey began in 2019 when, along with two colleagues, she flew out to Stanford for a Life Design training program. Over four days, they were immersed in the methodology and prepared to implement the work on their campus. Come the new academic year, they launched a one-credit Life Design course that drew about two dozen underclassmen in the fall and a similar cohort of upperclassmen in the spring. 



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As they mapped their different life paths, they seemed freed from the pressure of fulfilling a single destiny and the fear of falling short.
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An assessment of this first Life Design experiment affirmed McMullen’s budding faith in the practice. Compared to control groups, students in both her classes demonstrated an improved sense of hope for the future, greater self-efficacy, and reduced career anxiety. Anecdotally, McMullen said, she could sense the change in her students. As they mapped their different life paths, they seemed freed from the pressure of fulfilling a single destiny and the fear of falling short. “They were actually starting to believe that they could take control of their lives,” she said. “They could make decisions, it was in their hands, and they just felt better about themselves.”&nbsp;



Over subsequent years, McMullen extended Life Design to new corners of campus, and others took notice. There were coaching sessions for individuals and then small groups of students, and the number of other staff trained to be coaches and classes featuring the content grew. Then, around two years ago, CoC President Andrew Hsu issued a directive for all students to receive some kind of life coaching. The provost approached McMullen about whether Life Design might be the way to go about it. “Do you think we could do this college-wide?" she remembered being asked. "That's my dream,” she replied.&nbsp;



Today McMullen finds herself updating a document she’s titled “My Ecosystem,” which charts all the different people and areas on campus where Life Design has made its way so far. The goal, she said, is to reach “every single department, office—everywhere we can.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Design Your Charleston



It was still fairly early in McMullen’s Life Design efforts when she started teaching an elective first-year seminar pulling in some of the key concepts. She was particularly impressed by just how far these very young students were able to progress in a short amount of time.



“I get goosebumps,” she said, describing how their final presentations would reflect their transformation into organized, forward-thinking, open-minded college students. They seemed to mature so quickly and fully, she added, that she would find herself thinking of them as graduating seniors, rather than rising sophomores.&nbsp;



When she got the presidential green light to expand Life Design, McMullen set her sights on the First Year Experience program. As of this fall, she and Jessica Zuber, the senior director of student success and engaged learning, have launched what is perhaps the school’s most prominent Life Design effort yet: FYSS 101 Design Your Charleston, a weekly, required course for first-years combining an introduction to student life and resources with Life Design content. There are currently more than 100 sections of the class in progress, reaching a total of around 2,700 students, nearly the entire grade.



Every week, the students in Design Your Charleston receive information and complete exercises pertaining to different facets of college life. Week two on “Design Your Support System,” for example, provided an overview of various support offerings and tasked students with mapping out which they “would actually use,” according to the syllabus. Other weeks have homed in on “Design Your Community” or “Design Your Academic Path,” requiring more detailed plotting of events to attend, organizations to try out, fields of study that seem interesting, or advising questions to ask. Those five mindsets from the convocation towels —“Be Curious,” “Radically Collaborate,” etc.— are integrated continuously to give students a common language for navigating the first year, and beyond.



Another central element of Design Your Charleston is that it’s peer-facilitated. While McMullen and Zuber create the course lesson plans and PowerPoint slides for each week, older students bring the content to life in the classroom. “Not only are we growing professionals for the workforce past graduation, but also the students that they're working with are receiving information from a peer,” Zuber said. “We find that students generally receive that information better than they do from adults just telling them what to do all the time.”



McMullen believes this information really can transform the student experience. “Design Your Charleston is to intentionally design the years—whether it's three, four, five—that you're at the college so that you're getting every little thing out of the experience that you possibly can,” she said. She likes to think about the course as building a parachute for students made up of all the experiences and knowledge gained along the way. So by the time they’re jumping out of the college plane, dropping down into the real world feels like floating, rather than crashing. “This is great. I can see the view,” she hopes they are able to say. “I know where I want to go.”



A New Generation



Christopher Korey, the associate provost for student success at CofC, doesn’t subscribe to generational stereotyping. When he looks at his own children, for one, he doesn’t find the supposed Gen Z mold, which seems almost synonymous these days with some combination of fearfulness and fragility.



But Korey is willing to note that today’s college students, like many of all ages, appear to struggle with the task of taking the first step—putting themselves out there, trying something new, and risking failure in the process.



It was this recognition, in part, that Korey said inspired the request for universal student coaching in the first place. The high-level strategic vision, which Life Design helps deliver on, is for CofC to provide a truly holistic style of education: advising that goes beyond academics to help students grow as human beings, career preparation that goes beyond landing students jobs to developing their understanding of what they want to do and the skills they already have to help them succeed.



The CofC administration is currently eyeing an advancement campaign, of which one priority is boosting the university’s national prominence. Striving to become a leader in the student support and development space seems like a promising approach. “We'll learn things that we can bring to a national audience about [how this work fits] into thinking more broadly about supporting students and this generation of students,” Korey said.&nbsp;



Should its steady course of Life Design expansion continue, CofC just might become as famous for its work on student wellbeing as it is for its centuries-old oaks.



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

The College of Charleston Goes All in on Life Design

Working and Learning 

As a first-year student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Lamont Johnson decided to take a chance on a class called The Art and Science of Human Flourishing. He thought the elective might be an interesting, if not particularly relevant, addition to his coursework in the Wisconsin School of Business. Now in his senior year, Johnson credits the class with providing the scaffolding he needed to make it through college.&nbsp;



“I was an 18-year-old kid who had just arrived on a campus of 50,000 students,” he said. “The skills I gained in that class helped me navigate every aspect of college life over these past years including creating and fostering relationships with my peers, my professors, even the co-workers at my internship.”&nbsp;



The Art and Science of Human Flourishing (A.S.H.F) is an&nbsp;interdisciplinary, credit-bearing course&nbsp;that combines science, philosophy, contemplative practices, and experiential learning to teach students how to flourish. It was developed at U.W.’s Center for Healthy Minds, a neuroscience research center that is world-renowned for its examination of wellbeing. The course grew out of the work of the center’s founder, Richard Davidson, and&nbsp;John Dunne, along with&nbsp;colleagues David Germano of the University of Virginia and&nbsp;Robert Roeser&nbsp;and Mark Greenberg, who were at the&nbsp;University of Pennsylvania.&nbsp;(Roeser is now at Emory University.)



The scientists and scholars developed the course in the mid-2010s in response to the rising rates of mental health issues students were reporting and colleges and universities were struggling to treat. The theory was that by bringing evidence and practices on the concept of flourishing directly to the students, all would benefit, including those that had either preventable or typical problems.&nbsp;



What began as an antidote to a national mental health problem has become somewhat of a phenomenon in teaching and learning. The course at U.W. was launched as a pilot in 2017 with around 50 students and has grown into a lecture-style class with a cap of 300. But it’s not just the students who are clamoring to participate. Faculty from throughout the university, and throughout the country, have consistently reached out to the center hoping to learn how to teach it.&nbsp;



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What began as an antidote to a national mental health problem has become somewhat of a phenomenon in teaching and learning.
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After four years of hosting in-person “train-the-trainer” workshops, the Center for Healthy Minds has recently made the course available on edX, an online learning platform that provides university-level courses and programs. The 14-week course called&nbsp;<a href="https://www.edx.org/learn/education-teacher-training/the-university-of-wisconsin-madison-the-art-and-science-of-human-flourishing-essentials-for-educators">The Art and Science of Human Flourishing: Essentials for Educators&nbsp;</a>mirrors the student-facing curriculum in an effort to give educators anywhere a digital front-row seat to how transformative the program can be. The course’s growth from laboratory to universal learning platform reflects the fact that when high demand meets good science, anything is possible.&nbsp;



“What they were doing in Madison was really quite extraordinary,” said&nbsp;Kate Mondloch, a professor of art history at the University of Oregon.&nbsp;



Scaling flourishing



The A.S.H.F. course at U.W. may have remained limited to a small, curious cohort had it not been for Susan Huber. In 2019, Huber was hired by the Center for Healthy Minds to be the program manager for what was then the pilot version. Her job was to bring the course through the campus process that would allow it to become permanent. By 2020, it was offered by design to first-year students as a credit-bearing elective.&nbsp;



Huber said the A.S.H.F. course’s enduring appeal is the science and evidence-based practices within — what its architects call the psychological wellbeing framework. The acronym is A.C.I.P. — awareness, connection, insight and purpose — reflecting the four, core dimensions of human flourishing the center determined can be cultivated.&nbsp;



“It’s really an academic approach to supporting student mental health so students can understand the science behind their own wellbeing,” Huber said.&nbsp;



The course itself is a combination of didactic and procedural learning — both listening to lectures and participating in experiential exercises. These include meditative and contemplative practices, journal writing, and activities like “the values exercise,” where students narrow down a list of 100 or so values until they choose the one or ones that most resonate for them.&nbsp;



In participating in the activity, Nicholas Shashko, now a senior at U.W., chose integrity. “I learned something about myself in that 10-minute exercise,” he said. “When I figured out my value, it changed how I acted the rest of that first year — who I made friends with, the clubs I wanted to join. It shaped my whole college experience, and I don’t think I can say that about a lot of courses.”&nbsp;



Shashko, and Lamont Johnson, are student ambassadors at the Center for Healthy Minds and work with Huber and others in promoting the course on campus and beyond. Anecdotes directly from students on how they were impacted by the course may be the best qualitative evidence the center can provide. Student testimonial videos are included in the new edX course, not so much to pitch the program but to illustrate the different ways it influences students’ development.&nbsp;



Both Shashko and Johnson said they appreciated the fact that instructors established early on that flourishing would mean something different for every student who participated. “It is not like they say, ‘Here’s what flourishing is — go do this,’” Shashko said. “It is more of a guide for you to find your own definition, to find your own place on campus. They give you the tools and the skills to discover your own community.”&nbsp;



Johnson recalled how during one lesson on resilience, the instructor introduced a new term, “transilience,” which means a state of becoming or moving forward. “He told us we need to recognize that not everyone comes from a background of flourishing and that many people have significant roadblocks. I was struck by that because it showed me they were looking at this from an equity perspective.”&nbsp;



Johnson, who is African American, had come to&nbsp;U.W. from a high school with fewer resources and less rigorous curricula, adding a layer of both emotional and academic challenges. “There were times when I felt as though I didn’t belong here,” he said. “The course really helped me navigate all of that, and here I am a senior. I never thought I would make it.”&nbsp;



Asked whether he thinks of A.S.H.F. as a mental health course, Shashko said, “I generally don’t use the word mental health in describing it because it’s meant to be about flourishing, which is more about finding yourself. But when you go through that process, you gain a lot of skills that might prevent mental health problems.”&nbsp;



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"That research report showed that you could teach this course at three different institutions with different instructors, and the results were consistent. After that, things really started to explode."
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While the students might not identify the program as a mental health intervention, research conducted on the course provides evidence of its efficacy in that realm. A 2022 multi-university&nbsp;<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-022-01952-1">study</a>&nbsp;published in Mindfulness showed that&nbsp;A.S.H.F. participants reported improved mental health, flourishing, attention, social-emotional skills, and pro-social attitudes compared to the control group.&nbsp;



“That research report showed that you could teach this course at three different institutions with different instructors, and the results were consistent,” Huber said. “After that, things really started to explode.”&nbsp;



By 2023, Huber and her team were bombarded with requests from schools throughout the country hoping to bring the course to their campuses. They decided early on not to make an online version of the student-facing course so as not to restrict its community-building element. Instead, they chose to scale the faculty training — first by opening it up to anyone who could come to U.W.–Madison to take the faculty workshop, and then, this year, by making it available on edX.&nbsp;



After four years of experimentation at U.W. and other schools, Huber and her team are confident the course is universally adaptable. Faculty can either teach A.S.H.F. as is or incorporate its elements into existing courses, as many faculty have done. Katie Pavek, a professor of nursing at U.W., took the faculty workshop to learn how to help her students adjust to the stressors of the profession —&nbsp;something she, as a nurse, had been challenged with.&nbsp;



“Because it is based on science and had been developed at the Center for Healthy Minds, I was immediately sold,” she said. “They gave us tangible tools and resources&nbsp;to take back to our classrooms and adapt to our own disciplines.” Pavek took the building blocks — the modules, units and concepts — and developed a course called U-Flourish designed specifically for health sciences students.&nbsp;



Like Pavek, University of Oregon’s&nbsp;Kate Mondloch&nbsp;participated in the faculty workshop to understand how to support her students who she observed to be increasingly despondent, particularly after the pandemic.&nbsp;Mondloch&nbsp;then decided to teach A.S.H.F. as a first-year elective satisfying the Introduction to the Liberal Arts requirement. Where A.S.H.F. is held in a large lecture hall at U.W.,&nbsp;Mondloch&nbsp;teaches it as a small seminar of 20 or so students.&nbsp;



“I really know my students well,” she said. “They are really hungry to talk about issues that matter, like how to be human in today’s world.”



Huber sees The Art and Science of Human Flourishing: Essentials for Educators edX course as a critical juncture in the center’s effort to help students anywhere thrive in an increasingly complex world. But the choice to offer it online, and the year-long effort it took to develop that option, did not come easily, particularly for advocates of human interaction and community connection.&nbsp;



Huber’s response was to make the course as true to the actual experience of students and faculty as possible. “We have seven or eight modules, and we essentially mirror the student-facing course with topics like what does it mean to be part of a community — giving them examples, live events with experts, and lots of opportunity to talk with instructors and each other.”&nbsp;



Elizabeth Morse,&nbsp;the director of interprofessional flourishing and an associate professor of nursing at Belmont University in Nashville, has just finished the course’s first offering. She said she was struck by how interpersonal and authentic it felt.&nbsp;



“It was like we got back-stage passes to everything they had done, including what worked well and what didn't," she said. “We got to experience the content through multiple different faculty and student perspectives and were repeatedly encouraged to infuse our own voice, perspective, and experience to the students in our unique contexts — to keep it authentic and impactful for students. This was empowering."



In explaining what she liked most about the course, Morse identified a benefit even its original designers may not have anticipated. "The community that emerged through this course was unexpectedly impactful. Engaging with creative and dedicated educators from across the country reminded me why I entered academic healthcare in the first place. The experience brought fresh energy, inspiration, and purpose to my work in healthcare education ”



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

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