Author: Mollie Ames

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.  

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.” 

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.   

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. 

As they mapped their different life paths, they seemed freed from the pressure of fulfilling a single destiny and the fear of falling short.

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.” 

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. 

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.”  

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. 

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. 

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 mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

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. 

“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.” 

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.

They named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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, the trust and candor the dream team members built has enabled them to address issues head on. 

“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.” 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

“For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller.”

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 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. 

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.” 

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.” 

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 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. 

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.” 

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.” 

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 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 and 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.” 

“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.” 

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.’” 

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

At the University of Vermont last spring, a business undergraduate student took a hiatus from the classroom and stepped into a full-time job at BETA Technologies, an electric aviation company based near Burlington. The placement was part of the first cohort of a new co-op program at U.V.M.’s Grossman School of Business. At first, the student wasn’t confident, or even sure this was the kind of work he wanted to do. But over several months in financial planning and analysis at BETA, he began leading projects, making presentations, and eventually even training other employees. Now back at U.V.M. for his senior year, the placement was such a success that he continues to work 10 to 20 hours a week for the company.

UVM’s new program is one example of a larger rethinking of where workforce experience meets undergraduate education. Internships and co-ops are not new to higher ed. But today’s A.I.-disrupted workforce gives them new gravity. As employers increasingly look for evidence that applicants are work-ready — and as student families eye R.O.I. — more colleges are expanding internships, co-ops, and apprenticeships to show results with more direct on-ramps into careers. 

Some higher-education thinkers are imagining more fundamental changes, with aspirational models that envision students looping repeatedly between classrooms and the working world, making experiential learning part of the architecture of college rather than one of its offerings. 

Beyond the undergraduate years lies an even bigger question about lifelong learning. Will technological and workforce changes require workers to learn and relearn throughout increasingly long careers? If ongoing retraining is in the cards, should colleges be preparing students to move back and forth between work and ongoing education for life?

Shrinking the Experience Gap

The question of whether new graduates are adequately prepared to join the workforce has become more urgent as the entry-level labor market changes. A.I. can increasingly perform tasks once assigned to junior employees, while employers are asking new hires to arrive with skills — and experience — that previous generations would acquire on the job. 

Dan Hatch is a professor of web design and user experience at Utah Valley University who spent about 25 years in the field before entering academia. Yet for seven summers, he has returned to technology companies as a faculty “extern,” brushing up on industry skills and learning firsthand what his students will need to break into the field. This past summer, he went back with a particular question: How is A.I. changing what students will need to know and removing the entry-level work through which they traditionally gain experience?

Entry-level employees have traditionally gotten their start doing the kinds of basic tasks that allow them to accumulate experience and judgment. Now, Hatch told Inside Higher Ed, “A.I. can eat that stuff for breakfast.” The dilemma he sees is how students break into the business if some junior-level work disappears. 

“What if you could get the skills you needed and then seamlessly re-enter the workforce highway — if you could enter and exit as needed?”

The familiar complaint is that college graduates aren’t prepared for work, but the picture is more nuanced than that. In the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook 2026 survey, 71 percent of employers considered new graduates somewhat well prepared, but only 22 percent considered them very well prepared. Similarly, 42 percent said graduates’ skills were very closely aligned with their hiring needs, while 56 percent called them only partially aligned. Communication, professionalism, and critical thinking remained particular areas for improvement. But in teamwork and technology, students’ experience aligned well with employer expectations.

Ryan Craig, author of “Apprentice Nation,” sees a shift in expectations from the employer side. As managing director of Achieve Partners, he connects young adults with early-career apprenticeships in technology, healthcare, and other industries, and has a front-row seat on the experience gap. “Colleges are doing as good a job as they’ve ever done at equipping students with the cognitive skills and critical thinking skills and communication skills and durable skills,” Craig said. “The problem is that the goalposts have moved.”

Craig calls one of those changes “experience inflation:” Employers increasingly expect applicants for entry-level positions to arrive with relevant work experience. His preferred solution is paid apprenticeships, often as an alternative pathway to traditional higher education, and his firm invests in companies that build such pathways in fields that benefit from a staffing pipeline.

For colleges, that model presents a direct challenge to remain relevant. Could more of that on-the-job experience be built into higher education itself? And what should it look like? 

Putting Work Directly into the Degree

Cooperative education has been doing some version of work-integrated learning for more than a century. The University of Cincinnati pioneered co-op in 1906; Northeastern followed soon afterward, and Drexel and Rochester Institute of Technology developed major programs of their own. 

At established co-op universities, students can move repeatedly between substantial stretches of academic study and professional work, and new programs suggest fresh interest in the structure. U.V.M.’s Grossman School sent its first business co-op students to employers in early 2026. The University at Albany’s Massry School of Business also launched a program this year, built around four-to-five-month paid, full-time placements during an academic semester, after which students return to classes. Rowan University in New Jersey is expanding engineering co-ops that can span six to nine months and earn academic credit. The scale varies dramatically, but the core idea is similar: Give students enough time in a workplace to move beyond observation and begin doing consequential work.

That distinction matters to Stephanie Meunier, director of the Grossman Co-op. U.V.M.’s optional placements run four to six months, rather than the eight or ten weeks typical of many summer internships. In that time, she said, students can get through onboarding, become independent, and take ownership of projects.

Yet U.V.M. also demonstrates how awkwardly substantial work experiences can fit inside a degree still structured primarily around semesters spent in classrooms. Grossman students currently receive a notation on their transcript but no academic credit for the co-op, despite stepping away from classes for the placement. Staying on a four-year path may require students to arrive with A.P. or dual-enrollment credits, carry heavier course loads, or take summer classes. Meunier wants that to change. Her longer-term goal is to integrate co-op into the curriculum and eventually make it a requirement of the business degree.

That raises a strategic question: If students are learning important things while working, how should colleges recognize that learning?

Connie Yowell, the executive director of Northeastern’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Work, has spent much of her career examining that recognition. In earlier work on digital credentials and the learning network LRNG, she challenged a system in which, as she explained in a 2017 Education Week interview, “the only learning that counts is what happens in school.” Education, she said, instead needs to “allow learning to happen in a variety of places, and for it to count.”

Her work on digital badges — a proposed way to document skills learned outside traditional coursework — grew partly from that problem. If learning occurs at an employer or somewhere else outside a classroom, learners need ways to make what they know visible and portable. Imagine the scouting mindset for careers, minus the sash: This student has achieved this skill through this experience. It could also mean redesigning the relationship between education and work, rather than simply adding a better internship program to a conventional degree.

The Cloverleaf University

Michelle Weise, author of “Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet,” has spent much of her career studying the intersection of postsecondary education and work. Her fundamental question is how an education system built largely around learning first and working afterward can serve people facing repeated job and career transitions over much longer working lives. 

“When I wrote the book, I was struck by the idea of needing to learn for changing jobs going on indefinitely. Early boomers were having 12 job changes by the time they retired. So with all of these technological advancements, we could easily imagine having to do 20 or 30,” Weise said. “How in the world are we going to somehow keep up with this many transitions over a lifetime? We need the university to adjust to this with a new approach. What if you could get the skills you needed and then seamlessly re-enter the workforce highway — if you could enter and exit as needed?”

She has developed those ideas into a model she calls the Cloverleaf University. A learner leaves the workforce on an exit ramp into education, gains knowledge or skills, and then takes an on-ramp back into work. Later, the learner may exit again. Repeated over time, those looping ramps begin to resemble a highway cloverleaf, or a series of them. 

For undergraduates, the concept could mean multiple loops between school and work rather than one transition at graduation or one summer internship near the end of college. Students might study, spend substantial time working, and then return to school with a better understanding of what they know and don’t know, and go out again.

Weise’s Cloverleaf idea is broader than an expanded co-op program. It combines several strands of her thinking: work-based experiences; interdisciplinary learning, organized around complex real-world problems; and a university capable of serving learners not only at 18 or 22 but repeatedly across their working lives.

One reason work experiences matter, she argues, is that they develop something difficult to acquire from instruction alone: practical judgment. With A.I. increasingly capable of performing some technical and entry-level tasks, Weise worries about what happens if young workers lose opportunities to develop judgment by doing the kinds of work beginners have traditionally done. She invokes the Aristotelian concept of phronesis: practical wisdom, or the ability to weigh competing considerations and decide what to do when a problem doesn’t have a tidy answer. That involves technical knowledge but also what are sometimes called soft skills — what Weise prefers to call human skills — developed in the real world and given expansive context by looping in and out of a liberal education. 

“It’s not simply about the technical skills,” Weise said. Students confronting a real problem have to weigh different kinds of information and consider the second-, third- and fourth-order consequences of their decisions. “All of that is the liberal arts. It’s just that it’s in context of a real problem to be solved.”

Opening the Loop

More than a decade ago, designers at Stanford University asked a question that Weise found inspiring: Why should a university education be consumed all at once in sequential classes on campus? In 2013 and 2014, amid the growth of online learning as a disrupter of residential-based education, a Stanford d.school team spent a year imagining possible futures for the university, called Stanford 2025. 

Kelly Schmutte, now the director of undergraduate studies in design at Stanford’s d.school, worked on Stanford 2025 and said the resulting project was intentionally speculative, creating models designed to be thought-provoking — not literally implemented. 

“The project suggested that it would be much more effective to have these periods of learning on campus interspersed with loops of learning that happens out in the world, whether doing research or apprenticing or working,” Schmutte said. “Those perspectives and experiences inform how you approach your education and make you more intentional.”

One proposal was called Open Loop University. Instead of four consecutive undergraduate years followed by graduation, Open Loop imagined students receiving six years of access to Stanford residential learning that could be distributed over a much longer period. Students might study, leave for work or research, return, leave again — and potentially reserve some of that university experience for much later in life.

Schmutte still sees value in that movement. There is value, she said, in “getting off the track and out of your bubble and comfort zone.” Being in a different environment, among different people and ways of working, can “wake up” students, she said, helping them bring better questions back to their education. A loop can focus a student more sharply on an existing interest — or send that student somewhere unexpected.

Another part of Open Loop seems more relevant than ever: lifelong learning. When the concept was developed, its designers could not have anticipated today’s generative A.I. boom. Now, Schmutte said, she can imagine the value of saving a year or two of one’s educational allotment for one’s 50s or 60s, when the technology — and what a worker needs to know — could look dramatically different. Being able to dip back into one’s educational pool would be especially useful at critical junctures of personal flux and industry change. 

Who Builds the Ramps, and When Do You Hang the Degree?

It is easy to draw loops on a diagram. It is considerably harder and more disruptive to redesign a university around them. U.V.M.’s modest new co-op program already encounters questions involving credits, housing, scheduling, and degree completion. A Cloverleaf or Open Loop model would challenge assumptions embedded much more deeply in accreditation, financial aid, university finances, and academic departments, not to mention the question of when, exactly, one’s “education” is considered “earned.”

Existing apprenticeships offer opportunities from diverse arrangements, including many well outside of university degree programs. The number of registered apprenticeships grew by 65 percent between 2014 and 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, to nearly 680,000, but expanding them requires infrastructure that can be expensive and labor-intensive. Employers must provide training and supervision; learners may need advising and other support; and intermediaries are often needed to connect employers, programs, and students. 

Then there is a surprisingly basic problem: What happens if a loop works too well? If a student leaves college for a work experience, fits in effectively, and is offered a good job, what draws that student back to campus to finish the degree? A desirable job on the table now is quite a bird in the hand. At Roger Williams University, for example, the well-connected degree program in Construction Management proves so effective at linking students with workforce experiences that the school boasts a nearly 100 percent graduate employment track record. One administrator at the school jokes that their challenge is luring students back on campus and completion after a lucrative junior summer spent in the field.

For Stanford’s Schmutte, the onus is on colleges to make what happens on campus compelling enough to merit the return. Universities need to help students recognize that they are acquiring more than “discrete pockets of knowledge,” she said. They are acquiring broader capacities and ways of thinking that can transfer across many kinds of work.

Weise responds to the question a bit differently. Perhaps students don’t always need to return immediately. “Why do we need them to get it all on the front end of their work lives?” she asked. A young person might leave, work for several years, and discover both what they like and the ceiling imposed by what they don’t yet know. That moment — recognizing the gap between what you can do and what you want to do — could itself become the reason to return to education. But that only works if returning is worth it.

“The only incentive for someone to come back is to really believe that that learning experience has the signal power that an employer wants,” Weise said. Universities cannot design these systems alone. Employers have to walk the talk that they value the additional learning and allow people to learn without sacrificing income and stature. “There also has to be an implicit promise on the part of employers that if you leave and get ‘trained up,’ they’re going to value that and be open to hiring people who’ve been out of the workforce to pursue that.”

The complexity helps explain why century-old co-op programs aren’t ubiquitous. They also put today’s smaller experiments in perspective. What they demonstrate is that repeated crossing of the boundary between academic and professional life can become part of the structure of a degree. But it requires sophisticated, savvy planning, employer buy-in, and university willingness to step away from the traditional, established way of doing things. 

When it works, it can be revolutionary. “A higher education institution might have a separate arm that is functioning as an intermediary with the employer, saying, ‘What is the unmet need in your company? Let’s backward map from there to what you need, and I’m going to build you that talent pipeline to be able to do your work,’” Weise said. “This has been going on for a long time. It’s just not been very nimble and requires a different way of thinking about partnering with employers, and employers have to have skin in the game.”

Mirroring the Real World

What these models share is an increasing open-mindedness to seeking work experiences early and often, a resourcefulness of where to turn for ongoing learning, and resilience to pivot when things don’t go as planned. This is perhaps a key part of the experiential learning that can be foundational in higher education. U.V.M.’s Meunier believes a meaningful co-op doesn’t have to end with a career commitment to be successful. “One of the biggest learning outcomes could be finding out what you don’t want to do, and what a great way to do it within your academic setting,” she said. “You have the safety of returning to your degree and then trying out something else.” 

In the big picture, a successful work experience is one that allows a student to communicate professionally, exercise judgment, solve problems, and demonstrate how they have used those abilities in the field under the tutelage of a real-world employer. 

For undergraduates like U.V.M.’s student at BETA Technologies, that has already happened on a small scale. When he graduates, he won’t have to convince a prospective employer that he might be able to do that kind of work. To some extent, he already has.