In their book, “The Real World of College,” Harvard Graduate School of Education researchers Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner discovered something concerning about how today’s students view the world. After interviews with over a thousand students at 10 diverse campuses, they found that students had said the word “I” eleven times as frequently as they said “we.”  The researchers took that to mean that students had a preoccupation with themselves and less of an interest in, well, “us.”  

“As a result of that research, we became very concerned that students were so focused on themselves — their grades, their resumes, their getting that first job — they had little interest or time to think about any campus problems, local challenges, or world-wide issues,” Fischman said.  

While there are many in higher education, indeed in the country, who share that concern, Fischman and Gardner are exploring how college experiences might address it. Their new research initiative is aimed at understanding what it takes to broaden students’ perspective so they might consider how their actions influence those “beyond the self” — from the student down the hall to the wider world.  

All of this work is part of Project Zero, a research center at Harvard dedicated to understanding and nurturing human potentials, such as learning, thinking, ethics, intelligence, and creativity. Characterized as a study of “character education,” this latest research involves rigorous interviews with students and alumni from schools that make character a priority, particularly through efforts that encourage caring for others. These may span strong missions and first-year seminars to service-learning capstones and reflective courses. Fischman and Gardner’s goal is to understand if any are having an impact — both for students over the course of college and for alums beyond college — in moving the needle from “I” to “we.” 

Fischman believes the research fills both a need and a void. “There are a lot of resources and efforts ostensibly focused on character education, but we don’t know what actually works, what endures over time,” she said. “What we are trying to do is to understand what students and alums take away from these messages, initiatives, and missions, so we can begin to understand which are most effective. More importantly, with empirical data, we may be able to show that higher education makes a difference in how individuals think about, act toward, and possibly make a difference in the lives of others.”

Evaluating how well colleges produce good citizens might seems like an “off-trend” effort in a world seemingly obsessed with financial and employment metrics. But given that this easier-to-get hard data has dominated the debate over the value of a college degree, the researchers believe that providing strong evidence of higher education’s more enduring outcomes, including awareness of and empathy for others, is more important than ever.  Without this pursuit, Gardner asks, “What is the point?” 

“If universities and colleges simply have as their goal helping students to get jobs, they will either become vocational institutions or will cede their whole raison d'etre to the private sector, which can train more quickly and less expensively,” Gardner said. “Institutions of higher education should have a broader goal. And especially in the U.S. at the present time, helping others in the community and in the broader society as well as helping oneself would seem highly desirable on all counts.”

Beyond the Self

The Harvard team’s “I” to “we” work is closely aligned with another related finding reported in “The Real World of College.” In their analysis, Fischman and Gardner discerned mental models among students that included a transactional view of college (do what is required to get the degree) and a transformational view of college (question and reflect about one’s own values and beliefs with the possibility and aspiration of being changed, hopefully in constructive ways.)

The researchers identified a measure called HEDCAP (Higher Education Capital), defined as intellectual capacities that students gain as a result of going to college — skills they use to analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate about issues, ideas, and perspectives. For many like Fischman and Gardner, HEDCAP is the ultimate metric on which to gauge the value of a college degree, but currently, it is very difficult to demonstrate. 

"With empirical data, we may be able to show that higher education makes a difference in how individuals think about, act toward, and possibly make a difference in the lives of others."

Shortly after the release of “The Real World of College,” Fischman, Gardner, and their team embarked on a project called “Beyond the Self,” aimed at understanding how a more transformational college experience, involving engagement with community, might move the “I” to “we” student needle. With 150 students on three different college campuses, they piloted the program aimed at “nudging” students to become more sensitive to campus problems and ethical dilemmas, recognizing that their responses, behaviors, and actions meant something. 

The students were asked to keep portfolios of different dilemmas and problems they had heard about, learned about, read about, or observed and to document their thinking about them through writing, illustrations, or news clippings about them. The researchers talked with the students four times a year about their reflections and were pleased with the results they gathered after the first year.

“We were able to demonstrate that this approach made a difference. We were able to move students from just thinking about themselves to also thinking about others,” Fischman said. 

With evidence of their intervention, Fischman, Gardner, and their team were poised to implement the program at other schools, but a number of factors led them to change course. There were already a myriad of character-based programs and messages in schools throughout the country. Adding another, albeit a promising  one, seemed redundant. Instead, the team focused on what was missing: a larger assessment effort that could show the efficacy, or lack thereof, of these efforts.  

“When we began to ask people how they knew their programs and missions were working, we’d be met with blank stares,” Fischman said. “To our knowledge no one was evaluating or assessing the longer-term impact of efforts that focused on helping student think beyond themselves.” 

With continuous support from the Kern Family Foundation, the team’s new research initiative aims to examine character programs that have a specific outward perspective, not just those that develop individual dispositions such as humility, intellectual curiosity, or honesty, though there is a fair amount of overlap. The researchers are now working with about 30 schools — some with a religious orientation, some with strong public service programs, most with a well-defined mission about doing good in the world.  

The launch-pad question is always the same: For those institutions that make character and ethics a priority, what is the value-add? This exploration leads into three follow-up questions: “Does an institution’s mission, programs, and/or courses on character, ethics, and leadership deepen students’ and alums’ understanding of their role as workers and citizens? Do these initiatives shape students' perspectives and development over the course of college — and, if so, how? Can we find evidence that these efforts have a lasting impact on students' and alums’ professional and civic lives?” 

This is not the kind of information one can get from surveys, and it’s certainly more difficult to obtain than economic data like first-year earnings. To meet this challenge, Fischman, Gardner, and their team employ a qualitative method that brings deep, iterative reflection to the analysis, something that has become their signature contribution to the field.   

“We meet with students for 45 minutes to an hour in in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews,” said Sophie Blumert, one of the lead researchers on the project. “We never tell students what we are looking for. We ask them a wide range of open-ended questions, so it feels like having a good conversation with another person but someone who isn’t connected to your school. So students feel more free to open up.”  

Fischman said the approach involves listening carefully to what students say and what they don’t say. “When we ask people about their college experience, what they are getting out of it, and what they want from it, if they don’t mention these efforts, those are data.” 

The third-party nature of research means that they are able to go beyond just “self-reporting” to make sense of what the students are telling them. For example, they ask questions about the news as an unobtrusive way to understand students’ and alums’ interest in others beyond themselves. The prompt might be: “Do you stay informed about current issues in the news?” And then: “If so, how? If not, why not?”

The team also asks about mission with open-ended questions such as: “From your perspective, do you think that your school has any particular goals for its students? How do you think your school makes these goals known?”  

Understanding how well students comprehend their school’s mission is a reflection of an existing theory on the negative effects of what Fischman and Gardner coined “mission mishmash.” 

“Schools have so many priorities and so many aspirations for students that mission becomes all over the map,” she said. “And in the wake of that, students are forced to make assumptions about what is most important themselves. When all they hear about is jobs and resume building, then that’s what they focus on.” 

The inclusion of alumni in this work is particularly important. Interviewing graduates who are one year out, five years out, and ten years out about how their experiences in college influenced who they are as people can show whether these programs have any effect on the older adults who once participated in them as students.  

If Fischman knows the answer, she won’t yet reveal it, as the team is in the midst of taking on new schools, continuing to collect information, and analyze the data. She did, however, mention that in analyzing HEDCAP relative to mental models, she’s seen that students with transactional views of their college experience are more likely to have a lower score of HEDCAP, whereas students with a transformational mental model are more likely to have higher HEDCAP.  

Fischman said findings like this give her hope, and perseverance. 

“We can develop higher education capital. We can move students from a transactional mindset to a transformational one. We can get students to go beyond themselves, but we need to show that higher education can do this with empirical data, and, currently, that doesn’t exist.” 

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