Gone are the days when state-of-the-art dining and fitness facilities alone could sweep prospective college students off their feet. When it comes to campus life, Gen Z has a new priority: mental health care.
The Princeton Review is taking note. For the last two years, the company best known for its college admissions services, including test preparation books and tutoring, has been evaluating schools based on support for student wellbeing.
On Wednesday, The Review, in partnership with the Ruderman Family Foundation, published the results of its second Campus Mental Health Survey, along with a Mental Health Services Honor Roll, which highlights colleges and universities with model commitment to student mental health and wellbeing.
This year’s survey found broad gains in mental health services compared to last year, indicating a shift towards more comprehensive, preventative models of care. The 2026 Honor Roll also lists 30 institutions, up from the previous 16.
“I’m really pleased with the results of the survey,” said Mark Reed, the director of the health service at Dartmouth College, a new addition to the Honor Roll. “It reflects the investment that people are making nationally to support the mental health and wellness of our college students.”
Between fall 2024 and spring 2025, two separately polled groups participated in the survey: administrators who reported on the state of mental health policies and programs on their campuses, and students who reported on their sense of the availability of services and awareness of how and where to find them.
The administrators represented 540 different colleges and universities, more than twice as many as in the 2024 survey. Their responses reveal growth since the previous year in the portion of schools with a variety of mental health services.
This year’s survey found broad gains in mental health services compared to last year, indicating a shift towards more comprehensive, preventative models of care.
The percentage of schools with return-from-leave support programs increased by 18 points, for example; and the percentage of those with counseling centers with accreditation or following accrediting guidelines increased by 15 points.
Other notable areas of growth include the incorporation of wellness in residential life (now at 93 percent of schools), the adoption of for-credit or non-credit wellness education (70 percent), and the existence of a website consolidating information about campus mental health offerings (96 percent).
More than 31,000 students also responded to questions about their perceptions of mental health programming on campus. The percentage of students who agreed mental health services are readily available on their campus went up by five points; the percentage that agreed their institutions prioritize student mental health went up by another five.
79 percent of students said they know where to access resources on campus, although that figure reflects only a one-point increase from last year.
Eric Wood, the director of counseling and mental health at Texas Christian University, another school named to the Honor Roll this year, believes the growing investment in mental health services reflects an understanding that these concerns impact not only where students choose to go to school but whether they persist to graduation.
“Protecting student retention is also one of the hallmarks of college mental health, so these findings are consistent with the notion that one way to address enrollment concerns is to invest in campus mental health services,” Wood wrote in an email.
At Dartmouth, Mark Reed said the broad implications for student success are one reason the president, Sian Beilock, has made campus wellbeing her “number one priority.”
“She’s made that sort of a key component to the academic success of Dartmouth — that if we don’t have the health and wellness of our community, then we really can’t be at our best,” Reed said.
The Honor Roll schools, like Dartmouth and T.C.U., stood apart for their compliance with three main criteria: an administration that supports mental health through policies and programs; students who enjoy a quality of life that is healthy and “attentive to wellbeing;” and initiatives that empower students to address their own mental health (e.g. peer-to-peer offerings).
College ranking systems — most famously that of U.S. News & World Report — have been subject to controversy in recent years due to suspicions that narrow guidelines can end up neglecting otherwise quality schools deserving of recognition.
Wood views the Honor Roll as breaking the mold. He wrote it was “refreshing to see information based on details provided by schools as opposed to arbitrary national rankings that position schools against each other and don’t provide information about the survey samples.”
Wood hopes that schools — both named to the Honor Roll and not — will use the resource to connect and collaborate.
“College mental health is not a competitive world, and counseling center directors often share and borrow programs and ideas,” he wrote.
You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.
On this month’s episode of LearningWell Radio, sociologist and professor Richard Arum from the University of California Irvine discusses the challenges facing student-centered learning and how a new framework for intellectual virtues can help address them.
In 1965, students at the newly established University of California, Irvine, chose, as their mascot, the anteater. The unusual selection was an attempt to distinguish the university from others within the state system, leading to a campus identity that remains unique.
Today, U.C. Irvine has embraced a university-wide approach to teaching and learning that once again reflects its independence. Anteaters Virtues is a pedagogical and research initiative that promotes a set of intellectual character traits meant to underpin a student’s educational journey. If this sounds like something critics of higher education might call indoctrination, Anteater Virtues is, in fact, the opposite.
“We don’t just train people to be doctors or engineers or business leaders; we train people to think for themselves, and that is profoundly liberating,” said Duncan Pritchard, a distinguished professor of philosophy at U.C. Irvine and the creator of Anteater Virtues.
The virtues — curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual tenacity — are first introduced to students at orientation. Students work on them, in different forms, as they advance to their degrees. The hope is that these intellectual building blocks will help students develop a greater capacity to learn and to succeed in a rapidly changing world.
Launched as a pilot in 2017, Anteaters Virtues is hitting its stride. The initiative has recently received a $400,000 grant from the Lilly Endowment as part of the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, supporting schools dedicated to making character education central to their academic mission.
The grant will fund, in part, a major push to bring Anteater Virtues to other institutions attracted to the method’s commitment to freedom of ideas and the development of durable skills. Indeed, the initiative’s leaders believe that a return to intellectual virtues may be what’s needed to address many of the problems facing higher education today.
Anteater Origins
Duncan Pritchard is an epistemologist from the U.K. who had a keen interest in the intellectual side of character education when he arrived at U.C. Irvine in 2017 from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. As a knowledge scholar, Pritchard sought to understand how intellectual virtues could be embedded into an educational setting.
“A lot of people are focused on moral or civic virtue in terms of character education, but my interest is in intellectual character: How can we get students to understand that what they are doing is actually cultivating intellectual virtues that will stay with them for life?” he said.
Pritchard explored the idea of identifying and explaining a digestible set of intellectual virtues that would be taught throughout a student’s trajectory. The vision included faculty training to infuse these virtues into the classroom.
Pritchard admits that attempting to transform curriculum at an Research-1 university seemed like “absolute madness,” but he was surprised and encouraged when he received the full support of U.C. Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman and Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning Michael Dennin.
“When Duncan came to me with this idea of creating intellectual virtues that would be a framework for teaching and learning, I thought, ‘Yes, this is what anteaters are all about,’ and so that’s what we called it,” Dennin said.
While Dennin was excited about the potential of Anteater Virtues, he said he always viewed the initiative as a “long game” effort.
“We could have made a big announcement telling everyone they have to use these, but that was never going to work,” he said. “Instead, we said, ‘Let’s do this slow and steady, get the modules developed, and engage some early adopters.’”
With leadership backing him, Pritchard focused on two tracks: implementation and assessment. After introducing the concept as a pilot, he expanded it to the entire university with a grant from the Templeton Foundation. To allow the initiative to scale quickly, he developed online modules. Core modules are included in the orientation course that all incoming U.C. Irvine students take, with other introductory modules embedded into regular courses or taken for extra credit. More advanced modules, including a capstone version, round out a more in-depth experience.
To help assess the work, Pritchard enlisted the expertise and support of Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education and the former dean of the U.C. Irvine School of Education. The well-known sociologist and author is also the director of the U.C. Irvine MUST Project (Measuring Undergraduate Success Trajectories). Arum’s unprecedented data collection on undergraduate experiences and outcomes would now include measuring the effect of Anteater Virtues. Like Dennin, Arum became an eager partner.
“This work really spoke to me as a faculty member and a scholar and as someone who has been thinking about how we educate individuals in the 21st century,” said Arum, who is the author of “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.”
“A lot of character education to me is politically challenging and not very productive, given people’s different perspectives,” he continued. “But shifting some of that work into intellectual virtues — academic values — that can promote scholarly dispositions, I found to be a very useful intervention.”
It became clear that for the virtues initiative to be embraced on campus, even one as free-spirited as U.C. Irvine, it would need to be strategically positioned — from the chancellor’s endorsement to its distinction among character work to its iterative implementation. Perhaps the most important step to ensure the Anteaters Virtues’ acceptance on campus was the careful identification and communication of the virtues themselves.
Dispositions for Life
“When I think about the core of a research university, I don’t think we could do much better than to start with curiosity,” Dennin said. “That’s what we’re all about. It is important as a virtue but also as an antidote to something I find disturbing in society today: that questioning things, which should be a positive, has become a negative.”
“When I think about the core of a research university, I don’t think we could do much better than to start with curiosity. It is important as a virtue but also as an antidote to something I find disturbing in society today: that questioning things, which should be a positive, has become a negative.”
A major theme throughout the four virtues is a return to inquiry as a core value of education. After curiosity comes integrity, which at first glance may appear to be about plagiarism and misconduct in the age of A.I. Pritchard said Anteater Virtues turns this around, asking students: What does good conduct look like? The last two virtues — intellectual humility and intellectual tenacity — complement one another, though Pritchard said they are often misunderstood.
“The reason we chose intellectual humility and intellectual tenacity is that a lot of students think of them as opposing concepts — that to have conviction is to not listen to another’s point of view and that humility is a lack of conviction,” Pritchard said. “What we are trying to convey is that intellectual humility is respect for others’ viewpoint and is critical to one’s capacity to learn new information, and tenacity means stick to your guns but also be sensitive to the fact you could be wrong.”
Arum is particularly appreciative of this virtue pairing and believes it holds a strong message across the board.
“Some of the problems we are having in the sector as a whole, with students and faculty alike, come from not embracing intellectual dispositions,” Arum said. “It’s great to have convictions and want to do good in the world, but the way that that is acted upon sometimes abandons humility and curiosity. So it becomes just advocacy, and that’s very off-putting. If faculty are not showing an openness to other perspectives, how can we expect that from students?”
Getting faculty to embrace Anteaters Virtues is a large part of the effort. To gradually build the virtues into the curriculum, Anteater Virtues is now part of pedagogical training for faculty and teaching assistants, hundreds of whom have taken the modules. Pritchard said the reaction thus far has been encouraging.
“Now we’ve got engineers talking about intellectual grit, an educational theorist talking about humility. We have a Shakespearian scholar talking about integrity. In each case, they are connecting the intellectual virtues to what most interests them,” he said.
Pritchard said they are well on their way to attaining their target of 80 percent of students being exposed to the virtues programs through general education courses, and all of them have taken introductory modules as part of their orientation. Students, faculty, and staff are also regularly reminded of the virtues by posters on campus and continuous references by Chancellor Gillman, who promotes the project whenever possible — from convocation to commencement.
For those who remain skeptical, or less enamored by the virtues’ philosophical core, Pritchard said he uses the development of durable, enduring skills as his pitch. In a technology-based marketplace, specialized skills can quickly become redundant. “This is something that you learn at university that will stay with you for life,” he said.
Evidence of the program’s effectiveness is also convincing. Arum’s research on the effort is nascent though promising. Following pre- and post-studies of student and faculty experiences with Anteater Virtues, one report revealed: “The intervention was effective at promoting knowledge of what intellectual virtue is, why it is important, and how to implement it, suggesting the importance of instruction in virtue learning.”
But despite the early data, Arum summons the integrity virtue in cautioning against broad conclusions. “Large public universities are very noisy places,” he said. “It is very hard to capture the attention of either students or faculty.”
As the Anteaters Virtues team continues to communicate the project’s benefits, they are expanding the focus to other universities in the United States and abroad with support of their institutional impact grant from the Wake Forest E.C.I. program. Public versions of the model are now freely available and come with a commitment to help other universities learn how to implement and assess the program.
“We’re sort of a beacon now,” Pritchard said. “We’ve done it here, and we want to use it to promote a conversation about higher education generally — what its purpose is and how we can use this model to help meet the existential challenges that are coming our way.”
Dennin agrees, believing an intellectual virtues framework can address a number of the issues facing higher education from academic freedom to the value of a college degree to the myriads of opportunities and challenges posed by the proliferation of technology.
Dennin even wonders if Anteater Virtues can help with a critical question about the use of A.I.: “What do we do that A.I. doesn’t do?” he asked aloud.
“What does faculty bring to class if A.I. can deliver information and answer questions?” he said. “How does a student learn if they are just using A.I. to do the work? This is where curiosity, integrity, humility, and tenacity come into play. You may have all the information, but what conclusions are you drawing?”
Following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, war broke out in the listserv for alumni of Patrick Mason’s graduate program in peace studies.
Not even advanced training in conflict management could stop the former classmates from dividing into camps and hurling accusations back and forth. For Mason, now a professor, the vitriol was disturbing, but also “galvanizing.”
“What it revealed to me is that it’s not enough simply to have knowledge; it’s not enough even simply to have skills,” he said. “This kind of work has to sink deep into your heart and soul.”
At Utah State University, where Mason teaches Mormon history and culture, the belief that mastering peacebuilding requires certain personal aptitudes has inspired a new approach to the field — one focused on equipping students with the character traits they need to be successful, as much as the tools or theories.
This fall, with a $747,310 grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, U.S.U. launched a three-year project to promote, as its name suggests, “The Character of Peace,” campus-wide.
The project’s two primary initiatives include the development of general education courses to expose more students to “the character of peace;” and strengthening an existing program, Space-Makers, through which students trained in conflict management talk peers through life challenges.
For years, U.S.U., which Mason estimates serves a majority of students raised in the tradition of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been increasing attention to peace studies.
In 2020, a group of U.S.U. faculty from different departments recognized a shared interest in peacebuilding and decided to create a formal certificate around it. Together, they identified a collection of classes across disciplines that covered conflict management and could count towards such a program.
It wasn’t long before one certificate turned into five. In 2022, philanthropist and U.S.U. alumnus Mehdi Heravi made a donation generous enough to endow an entire center dedicated for peace studies on campus: the Heravi Peace Institute.
Now, students can pursue certificates in global peacebuilding as well as conflict management, interfaith leadership, leadership and diplomacy, and social entrepreneurship.
Beyond academic work, one of the funder’s personal priorities was to support experiential learning opportunities, like study away, internships, and foreign language training, that would help students apply their education to the real world. In a diversion from semesters abroad in popular cities like Barcelona and London, students of the H.P.I. head to some of the most consequential conflict sites in modern history.
In nearby Preston, Idaho, a group visited the site of the Bear River massacre, the largest mass murder of Indigenous Americans by the U.S. military. Trips to Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Rwanda have offered similarly powerful insight into post-conflict societies, although in less familiar cultural contexts.
Other activities at the H.P.I. include academic research, campus events, and community engagement. Non-students can attend conferences, workshops, and even entire courses in conflict management.
In 2024, when H.P.I. Inaugural Director Austin Knuppe applied for and received a first, smaller grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest, the official foray into character education began.
Students of the H.P.I. head to some of the most consequential conflict sites in modern history.
“It just so turns out in order to do that work effectively, you have to be a person of a certain type of disposition or character,” said Knuppe, a political science professor who specializes in political violence and conflict processes in the Middle East.
Alongside a team of interested colleagues, including Patrick Mason, Knuppe used the initial support from the E.C.I. to begin crafting a more formal framework around the attributes of a successful peacebuilder and how to teach them.
The group ultimately landed on four key traits: moral imagination, or the dual compassion and creativity to consider undiscovered solutions; cognitive flexibility, or the open-mindedness to hold contradictory narratives; emotional attunement, or an awareness of the human lives at the core of any conflict; and reciprocal love, or the capacity to relate and, especially, forgive.
Another central concern in these early conversations about character, Mason said, was how to engage as many students as possible in the work.
The primary objective has never been only to prepare the next generation of “peace professionals,” he explained, but to help young people across a range of degree programs with a range of professional aspirations become “better citizens.”
“If students only take one class from us, that’s okay. If they take three or five classes — if they get a whole certificate — fantastic,” Mason said. “We’re just really convinced it’s going to serve them well and serve our society well if we have more people out there with good conflict skills.”
For Justice Cheatham, a current junior at U.S.U., the original motivation to pursue peace studies stemmed from needing to tackle a personal conflict, rather than an academic or even professional one.
When Cheatham started his first year of college, he was still struggling with the disappointment of having left early from his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had been stationed in Columbia, when he came down with a mysterious illness that forced him to return home and finish his service from there.
An introductory class during his first semester at U.S.U. covered conflict management and offered Cheatham a way forward. In a few sessions on interpersonal conflict, he gained a new vocabulary and skillset to deal with the difficult emotions he was battling.
Today, he is pursuing a certificate in conflict management alongside his major in communications and serves on the H.P.I’s inaugural student board.
With general education courses in conflict management in the works, more students like Cheatham without prior interest in peacebuilding may similarly start to see its wide-ranging applications.
Junior Abbi Zaugg isn’t pursuing any of the academic certificates through the H.P.I., but she still attends events there. “I am just a great lover of thought exchange,” the double major in political science and creative writing said.
That’s the outlook that inspired her to join a recent conversation following the killing of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University — just a two-hour drive away from U.S.U. — about whether controversial speakers should appear on campus.
“I was participating very, very heavily,” Zaugg said of her role in the session. Her favorite part of dialogues like these is being able to hear her peers respond to her ideas, even if they disagree.
The common narrative that Gen Z is unwilling to engage with viewpoints unlike their own indeed does not seem to apply to Zaugg, nor her peers who attended the same event.
Zaugg even wondered if today’s young people are uniquely suited to deal with conflict, given that “most of us have been in conflict since we were very young.” She called her nearly lifelong concerns about school safety “a normal fact of life.”
Justice Cheatham, who also attended the H.P.I. event, stepped away feeling proud of his fellow students. They didn’t have to show up to an uncomfortable conversation. The weather had been nice that evening. He knew they could have been hiking instead.
“I have a lot of faith in our generation, and I think we can change the world,” Cheatham said.
Soon, students like Cheatham may have the opportunity to participate in change-making on the state level.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who is a U.S.U. alumnus, has been considering new partners in higher education for his think tank, Disagree Better, to help advance programs for peace. The H.P.I. is at the table.
The Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University recently announced a request for proposals for grants between $50,000 and $1,000,000 to fund character education projects at U.S. colleges and universities.
You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.
As former Vice Chancellor for Leader & Culture Development for the Texas Tech University System, Steve Sosland oversaw the creation of the Leader & Culture Development office and its opportunities for over 80,000 students across five campuses. On this episode of Invented Here, Steve shares how his office came to be, how they approached top-down leader development, and how to enhance both capacity and capability for students and faculty.
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.
Alexis Redding has a clear perspective on the well-publicized struggles of today’s college students: The crisis narrative is not helping to solve the problem. Talking about the “crisis,” she argues, sets us up to look for a quick fix. But the issues are systemic, and it is time to address what her research shows are the persistent challenges that students experience during a stressful time of life.
Redding is the co-author of “The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood,” which documents the emotional ups and downs of the college years based on a trove of lost interviews she uncovered that feature college students from the 1970s. In the tapes, she heard echoes of the experiences with loneliness, stress, and emotional angst that students talk about in her classroom today. This work and her teaching led her to question the stories we tell about student wellbeing in college.
This spring, Redding will release a new book “Mental Health in College: What the Research Tells Us About Supporting Students.” The developmental psychologist, author, and professor brings together experts in college mental health, including students, to offer a new path forward. Redding and her co-authors argue for a community approach to student wellbeing and offer a deeper examination of the causes — both universal and specific — that make the college years challenging for so many students.
Here is an excerpt from our recent interview.
LW: Who is the target audience for the book?
AR: The book is written for student affairs professionals and campus leaders — the people who are making decisions about supporting student mental health at an institutional level. But I think that everyone, including students, faculty, and parents, can benefit from reading it. Each chapter is layered with student stories that make the challenges they are experiencing both tangible and relatable. We hear, in their own words, about the experience of being in college. And, once we listen to what they are telling us, we are better equipped to create a support structure that genuinely helps them.
LW: There is an underlying theme in the book that challenges the reader to think about college student mental health differently. Can you explain that thinking?
AR: One of the core distinctions of this work is that it focuses on the wellbeing of all students —not only those in crisis.
Developmentally, the college years are inherently unsettling and disorienting. Students struggle for many reasons that go beyond clinical diagnoses. We need to decouple two intertwined realities: the typical developmental challenges that come with growing up and the clinical mental health concerns that require specialized care. Only then can we respond appropriately to each.
The crisis narrative, while well-intentioned, often fuels panic — for educators and for parents sending their children to college. Out of fear of under-reacting, we sometimes overreact, even when students describe expected challenges, like loneliness, anxiety, or uncertainty, as they navigate transition. By defining everything as crisis, we end up addressing only those who meet clinical thresholds and overlook the broader developmental picture.
When institutions lean too heavily into this framing, the default solution becomes: more counseling. Of course, clinical care is essential for students who need it. But not every student meets that benchmark or feels ready to seek therapy. Directing everyone to counseling by default overwhelms already strained systems and can even limit access for those in acute distress.
This book is meant to reframe that conversation — to move from crisis response to community care. Every student needs connection, purpose, and a sense of mattering. When we recognize that, we can begin to design campuses where all students can thrive.
LW: How does this perspective connect with what your research shows about the state of college mental health throughout the decades?
AR: What we know is that college students have always struggled. My archival research goes back to the 1940s and shows that students are struggling in many of the same ways that our students are struggling today. That’s not to say that we don’t have unique struggles in 2025. We don’t want to ignore the role of social media and the impact of the pandemic on youth development and what it means to grow up in the 21st century. Yet, the developmental challenges — how hard it is to grow and change and ask the big questions about who we are and what we want out of our lives — that is remarkably similar across generations. So, the challenge is to differentiate between what students have always struggled with and what is new in today’s experience.
My hope is that we can pivot to a conversation about what is typical about stress and anxiety and loneliness — things that we know have been persistent across generations — so that we can find a way to both build a campus community in which we can better support students and change the culture more broadly. That will help us reframe what it means to get support in college and make systemic change. And it will also help us more clearly identify what is new and what needs a more targeted solution.
“By defining everything as crisis, we end up addressing only those who meet clinical thresholds and overlook the broader developmental picture.”
LW: Where did the idea for the book come from?
AR: A couple of years ago, I was asked by our dean to create a professional development program on mental health in higher education as part of our Harvard Graduate School of Education professional development arm. Each year, we work with a cohort of practitioners that includes student affairs professionals, clinical mental health providers, members of the president’s cabinet, and faculty members. We have an exceptional faculty of 16 leading voices in the field, including Tony Jack (Boston University), Jesse Beal (University of Michigan), Dustin Liu (New York University), Adam Pierson Milano (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill), and a team from the JED Foundation.
The course looks at the entirety of the student journey, thinking about the different transition points that students experience, from admissions to career search. We work hard to break down the silos we all experience in higher education to think more meaningfully about how we can work together to support students. I love the experience of running this program and being able to build a robust community of practice. But it is a small group by design, so I started to think about how to get these really important ideas in front of a wider audience. That was the spark for this book.
LW: The book is organized into three parts with seven chapters, each written by a different author. Can you tell us more about this format?
AR: The first part of the book looks at the scope of the problem from two very different perspectives: the student’s and the institution’s.
Section one starts with Rainsford Stauffer (author of “All the Gold Stars” and “An Ordinary Age”), who is joined by three student authors, to give us a student perspective on navigating colleges and universities today. They share stories of struggling with mental health challenges, navigating the typical stress and anxiety around the experience of being a student, and their range of experiences in finding the right support.
Next, Dr. Laura Erikson Schroth, medical director of the JED Foundation, and Dr. Janis Whitlock, founder of Cornell’s Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, bring us an institutional perspective of what is going on in our colleges and universities. Their clinical lens helps to underscore how we can meet the needs of students struggling with acute mental health crises, including suicidality and self-harm, as well as those navigating the more typical ups and downs of college.
Together, these two chapters frame the book with student voices and national data on the two types of challenges students are experiencing — developmental vs. clinical — and help us to understand both the depth and breadth of the challenges.
Part two focuses on how to build holistic supports for students who are more likely to struggle during the college experience: students who are under financial strain, community college students juggling school with other responsibilities, and military-affiliated students. The idea in part two is to deeply understand some of the challenges that those three groups of students are facing. This helps us to develop and design supports on campus that not only are targeted at helping those particular groups but benefit all students more broadly.
For example, the chapter on community college students, written by Amanda O. Latz of Ball State University, is focused specifically on what faculty members can do and how they can be part of this conversation about transforming our institutions. She shares actionable takeaways that are beneficial to faculty across institutional types. There are suggestions for using your syllabus to name and normalize struggles, encourage proactive help-seeking on campus, and to make sure we meet students where they are. She also asks important questions about how we can structure our classrooms and our assignments to recognize the realities of students’ experiences and to balance rigor with compassion.
LW: Part three focuses on transitions but not just the obvious ones. Can you tell us about that?
AR: We tend to put boundaries on the college experience. We talk as if the experience starts the day that students arrive and it ends the day they cross the stage. But that framing ignores the stresses they arrive with and the anxiety most people feel when thinking about what comes next. We’re trying to broaden the narrative of the student journey and to recognize that those experiences that bookend college also inform what happens during the undergraduate years.
To think about admissions stress, we have Angél Perez, the C.E.O. of the National Association of College Admission Counseling (Nacac), and his colleague Melissa Clinedinst, Nacac’s director of Research Initiatives and Partnerships. They conducted research on the stress students experience in the admissions process and advocate for a more humane and holistic approach that considers student wellbeing. They offer actionable insights into how we can rethink the messages students receive and how we can better scaffold this transition.
To consider the transition from college to career, we have a chapter that focuses on the lessons of Stanford’s Life Design curriculum by Dustin Liu (N.Y.U. Stern School of Business) and Joseph Catrino (Dartmouth College). They help us see that we all have a responsibility to help students consider what comes next. Inside the classroom, we really need to be thinking about building the kinds of conversations, the kind of supports, the kinds of mentoring relationships that help prepare students for their careers. We are preparing our students for life, and it is important to lean into what it means for them to be prepared in that transition to the workforce and to be able to thrive there as well.
LW: In the community college section, I’m assuming there will be an examination of different student profiles, including students with marginalized identities or first-generation backgrounds.
AR: Absolutely. Considering student identities and experiences is central to every chapter of the book. We did not want to silo any individual identity in a stand-alone chapter. Instead, we wanted a nuanced look at the lived experiences of a range of students to be embedded in each. This approach recognizes the reality that students hold many different identities at once. Each author in the book has been tasked with thinking across the realities of who our students are to capture the nuances of their lived experiences. And they’ve done that in a powerful way.
LW: I was pleased to see you had a section on financial stress. Why did you think that was important to include?
AR: I’m excited about this chapter as well because we don’t talk enough about the impact on financial stress on student mental health and wellbeing. The authors, Bryan Ashton and Allyson Cornett, come to us from the Trellis Foundation in Texas. They really look at the complexity and nuance of what students are juggling while attending college, including student parents, by conducting large-scale research studies. Their chapter helps us to recognize the complexity of the student experience and to think meaningfully about designing a college community and robust support system that meets their needs.
LW: Do you think faculty are opening up to the idea that they have a role here?
AR: Yes, I do. We each have a part to play in building the kind of campus where all students feel supported. This includes faculty, staff and administrators, campus leaders, and other students as well. I like to draw on the research of Laura Rendón and the Ecological Model of Validation about the power of each individual interaction that you have on a college campus. Faculty are key in creating the kind of community where students feel seen and heard. But these moments of validation can also come from staff in the library, the dining hall, and facilities and maintenance. We need to think of every single member of the institution as part of the solution of creating the kind of caring environment where all students feel seen, heard, and valued.
When Eric Wood talks about the future of college mental health, he does so from the front lines. The longtime director of Texas Christian University’s Counseling and Mental Health Center and past president of the Texas University and College Counseling Directors Association has just been elected the next president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (A.U.C.C.C.D.). His tenure will begin in October 2026.
Known for his innovative Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model and award-winning e-book, “A New Narrative for College Mental Health,” Wood is stepping in to lead the nation’s largest organization for campus counseling leaders at a moment when the field, like all of higher ed, is confronting change. We caught up with him fresh off hosting a national symposium on performing artists and athletes and took the opportunity to ask him about A.U.C.C.C.D.’s plans and priorities.
LW: Congratulations on your election as president-elect of A.U.C.C.C.D. What do you see as the major challenges for the organization in the coming year?
EW: We as counseling centers have done a really good job capturing the narrative of how important college mental health is. College mental health has a lot more significance than people realize. If you think about the demographic we serve, the traditional 18- to 25-year-olds, that’s a prime demographic for pretty much anything — substance use, suicide, emerging disorders. It’s also the best time to treat them because if you can treat them then, they may have fewer episodes later, or none at all. Whereas if they wait 10 or 15 years, it’s a lot more ingrained and harder to treat.
Colleges and universities have greater access to that demographic than any other health-care system. They live, walk by, and travel by our campuses every day. So the question is: What opportunities does that create if government and other organizations really recognize this?
LW: You’ve become known for T.C.U.’s innovative model of collaborative care. Can you explain what that is and how it ties into your national leadership goals?
EW: We call it the Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model, and it’s reshaping how universities think about their role in mental health. We started it during the pandemic. The mindset had always been that college counseling centers were designed for developmental concerns — the stress that comes from change — not necessarily for students with high mental health needs. But those dynamics have shifted. Now we have students with much higher needs, and our systems weren’t designed for that.
So instead of building hospital-style treatment centers, we built bridges. We partner with community providers who were designed to work with individuals with high needs but who lack the infrastructure and access we have. They come onto our campus, use their programs, and our students stay in school, on our campus, in programs with other college students. It’s a win-win-win: The student’s insurance covers most costs so there’s just the co-pay, and we’ve gotten grants and donors so the treatment centers have the chance for little or no overhead. We’ve trained over 100 schools to replicate various parts of the model.
LW: You mentioned that politics and policy changes are affecting mental health care on campuses. What are you seeing?
EW: If you’re in a university that’s depending on federal funding, there’s a new level of raised exposure. There’s a perception that if a state or federal funding source doesn’t like something at your institution, they’re going to cut your funding off. People don’t realize that even if it had nothing to do with college counseling centers, it is going to trickle down if schools have that cut in funding. When universities face federal or state funding cuts, that trickles down to us. A 20 percent budget cut across campus means a 20 percent cut for the counseling center, too. And yet the demand for services has never been higher.
A lot of the culture-war legislation, like D.E.I. bans, has had unintended consequences. Some states have medical exemptions for those laws, but others don’t. We’ve seen schools cut services that were never meant to be targeted, like gender specific groups with mental health and addiction issues. This is an age group much more likely to seek help on campus than they would after graduation, so when you remove those options, you lose opportunities to intervene early.
“When policymakers pass laws or set funding priorities, I hope they think carefully about how that affects college mental health.”
We’re trying to make lawmakers aware that mental health has never been a partisan issue. Surveys show eight out of ten Americans believe schools are responsible for providing health care to students. The narrative we’re pushing is: “Look at the possibilities higher education offers society. Why would you want to limit that potential?”
LW: What other issues are most pressing for college counseling centers right now?
EW: We’re still seeing the ripple effects of the pandemic. And we do know that in this age group one of the things that spiked is their likelihood to transfer. The students entering college now were in middle school during the shutdowns — the classes of 2028 through 2030. That’s a critical cohort with a lot of struggles. They missed key developmental years, and those formative years had a lot of disruption going from middle school to high school, and we see that in their social and academic adjustment carrying over to higher education.
And as digital natives engaged in all the social platforms, they’re used to absorbing all the culture and content and polarizations in society. That’s their reference point, and a lot of them may not know what it’s like to not have that level of polarization. So they’re bringing that to campus. When they see politicians saying certain words or treating each other some way, you’re going to see that carry over to how they treat faculty. They see that people just break rules; you see that happening in politics and society, and that carries over into the res halls because that’s the frame of reference.
We’re also seeing a higher level of parental involvement. Their parents spent more time with them during lockdowns, engaged in a closer front-row seat to their education, so now we’re seeing that continue — sometimes helicopter-level involvement — in college life.
LW: What’s on your personal wish list as incoming president?
EW: To keep building that narrative and have a stronger voice nationally. We’ve had some success getting attention from politicians and national outlets, but there’s so much more to do. When policymakers pass laws or set funding priorities, I hope they think carefully about how that affects college mental health.
And college is where the developmental concerns play out because this is the prime age. The reason why colleges created counseling centers wasn’t because we thought every student had a clinical diagnosis. Most students do not. The centers exist because we define stress as heightened in times of major change, and a major one is when you start college. You only have about four or five of those moments in your life when everything can change. So starting college is one of them — you change where you eat, where you live, your identity, everything — and then graduating college is a second one. So you have so much change bookmarking the college experience. And then you do have associated stressors, like navigating the social environment, and we know that demographic tends to engage in high-risk behavior, so a lot of prevention work is important. That is why college counseling centers exist, and I contend colleges and universities are the best in the world at doing that. But because there’s currently a lot more students with high mental health needs coming to campus, the disconnect occurs that we aren’t good at what we’re doing. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
The mental health of young people is always going to be a popular, bipartisan cause. We just need to remind people of that and continue the collaboration.
LW: How do you see that collaboration playing out at the national level?
EW: Collaboration is essential. Some states have strong organizations, like Texas, but not all do. One of my goals is to help develop those networks. State laws affect us differently, so we need local collaboration as well as national unity. There’s strength in numbers, whether it’s state collectives, regional conferences, or collaborations across university systems, like the athletic conferences.
It’s also about mutual support. A lot of what’s in the headlines about higher education doesn’t directly involve counseling directors, but it still affects us through funding cuts, political pressures, or staffing shortages. Directors need to come together because having a collaborative amplifies our method, our messages. We need each other to stay resilient.
LW: You just hosted a symposium on athletes and performing arts. What can you tell us about the thinking behind spotlighting those populations?
EW: It really came out of conversations we were having on our campus about performing artists and athletes — two groups that represent the university in powerful ways but have very different kinds of support systems. Varsity athletes get a lot of institutional support, but there are just as many performers and non-varsity athletes who face similar pressures and injuries without the same safety nets.
For example, if a student athlete gets hurt, the university often covers the care, and they can still progress toward their degree. But if a dancer or musician gets injured, they often can’t progress toward their degree because performance is part of their coursework. That difference really highlights why universities need to think more broadly about how they support these students.
So we decided to organize a symposium to explore that. We reached out to experts from Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Harvard — literally the pioneers of performing arts medicine — and every single one of them said yes. We even had ballerina Tiler Peck as a keynote. It turned into a two-day virtual event that drew about 100 sign-ons per session; many of them were in classrooms watching together. It was the first time we’d done anything like it, and it really underscored how much synergy there is between athletic and performing-arts wellness.
LW: How long have you been at T.C.U., and what do you think your election says about A.U.C.C.C.D. and where it’s headed?
EW: I started at T.C.U. right out of my Ph.D. program in 2007 and became director in 2019, so I had one good semester before the pandemic hit. Everything we’ve built since then has been about adapting to change and meeting students where they are.
I’m honored by the role. I think part of the reason I was elected is because we’ve done a good job at innovation at T.C.U., and I think it shows a shift in the narrative about college mental health. For a long time, the assumption was that we as colleges were limited — that if a student had a serious mental health disorder, they needed to go elsewhere, just like you wouldn’t expect a university to perform surgery. But that’s changing. For example, one of our specialized programs is an intensive outpatient program on campus. I’d love to see every residential campus in America have one. The impact would be generational.
So, I think my election signals that people are starting to recognize the potential and the possibilities of what we can do — and that we can do it at a fraction of the cost, using programs that already exist. And why would you want to do anything to ruin that potential? To have my colleagues across the country say, “We want that kind of innovation leading us forward” — that’s deeply meaningful. It tells me people see the potential of college mental health, and they’re ready to invest in it.
Last year, social psychologist Kathleen Ethier was going on 26 years at the Centers for Disease Control and feeling hopeful about the growing response to national mental health concerns, especially among America’s youth.
The Covid-19 pandemic had ushered in new urgency to understand why young people were struggling and find solutions, including ones schools and colleges might help implement.
“In the 35 years that I had spent in the field, I had never seen us all come together in that way,” said Ethier, who was the director of the C.D.C.’s division of adolescent and school health for eight years.
But that was another time and another administration. When Ethier left her post in January of her own volition to enter the private sector, her faith in the progress of her field was slipping. The conversations that had been fueling her optimism seemed to stop. “We were no longer talking about youth mental health,” she said.
Since the beginning of the year, widespread cuts to federal funding for scientific inquiry have been chipping away at the advancement of work on student mental health. Despite the issue’s record of bipartisan support, pertinent research and services have become casualties amid slashes to government agencies, programs, and grants
On college campuses, the fallout is multi-fold, threatening the wellbeing of not only students who struggle with their mental health but researchers and practitioners who now find their livelihoods at risk.
“All of these high points of funding were just taken away,” Ethier said of the shift under the second Trump administration. “Everyone on the other end of that — whether those are school systems or universities or researchers — are all suffering from the loss of those resources, which means the loss of viable alternatives for young people.”
This summer, a group of mostly Harvard University-affiliated researchers released their findings on the total cost of mental health- and substance abuse-related grants cancelled between February 28 and April 11: The estimated loss is more than $2 billion from 474 grants across the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
On college campuses, the fallout is multi-fold, threatening the wellbeing of not only students who struggle with their mental health but researchers and practitioners who now find their livelihoods at risk.
While some grants have been reinstated since the spring, others still hang in the balance. An online database, Grant Witness, continues to update a list of all grants cancelled by both the N.I.H. and N.S.F. As of November 3, the tracker marked around 140 grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, spanning less than $50,000 to more than $9 million, as “terminated.”
In an unfortunate but telling irony, Grant Witness co-founder Scott Delaney launched the database after being conditionally laid off from his work as a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where a federal funding freeze had affected his salary. The former lawyer turned climate scientist called Grant Witness a “tool to fight for these grants and to fight for American science.”
“We’re losing a huge competitive advantage in global research. We’re losing health benefits from research,” Delaney said of some of the concerns motivating his work. He also contributed to the report on mental health-related grant losses this spring.
Those N.I.M.H. grants that remain terminated had been supporting research on a range of populations and neurological and behavioral conditions. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, had a $3.8 million grant cancelled that was funding a longitudinal study following preschoolers into adolescence to determine early risk factors of psychopathology. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, another $3 million grant was cancelled that had been designated to help strengthen understandings of “Aging, Major Life Transitions, and Suicide Risk.”
Certain grants were terminated for backing projects deemed in conflict with the Trump administration’s orders against the promotion of ideas like “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the mental health context, these cancellations could threaten developing understandings of unique factors and barriers affecting the wellbeing of racial, gender, and sexual minority groups. More than one lawsuit is now underway in an effort to reverse these types of cuts to research on “disfavored topics and populations.”
Another subset of grant losses has been the result of funding freezes on entire universities. Because these kinds of actions are targeting institutions, rather than particular research areas, mental health is one of countless disciplines implicated.
At Harvard Medical School, Professor Haiden Huskamp had been overseeing multiple training and research projects supported by the N.I.H. when the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion worth of federal funding for the Ivy League institution.
The freeze came in April after Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands from the Trump administration that the Cambridge university considered overreach and an attempt to curb academic freedom. (These same events led to the frozen salary of Scott Delaney from Grant Witness.)
For Huskamp, the fallout meant her research on the impact of telemedicine for the treatment of mental illness and opioid use disorder was put on hold. While Harvard launched a lawsuit to restore the funding, she grappled with the uncertainty of both her work and her team.
“You’re in the middle of a project, and you’re moving full steam ahead, but you basically just have to stop,” she said. “You worry that, depending on how long it goes, will you have to lay people off? Will you not be able to keep accessing data? Will you be able to pick it up easily?”
After around five months, Huskamp was able to reclaim her funding when a judge sided with Harvard and ruled the government’s funding freeze unconstitutional. But the damage of the delay was done.
Harvard’s researchers may not be completely out of the woods. President Trump has promised to appeal the judge’s recent ruling in favor of the university, while his administration already launched separate proceedings to bar Harvard from all business — grants included — with the government.
For other mental health researchers, the challenge is not having lost grants but rather trying to raise money for the first time in this new funding environment.
At Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, psychology professors Karin Coifman and John Gunstad are seeking support for what they hope will become one of the largest lifetime longitudinal studies ever on college student health, including mental health. For the aptly named Student Life Study, the researchers aim to recruit 10,000 students and collect health data from them throughout their lives.
With an initial $450,000 from their institution to get them started, Coifman and Gunstad knew they would need to raise the rest of their funds — the majority — from other sources. What they couldn’t have anticipated was a confusing standstill at the N.I.H. this winter, just when they started applying for federal grants.
In February, the N.I.H. temporarily stopped reviewing grant applications after the Trump administration blocked the agency from calling the necessary meetings. About 16,000 applications and $1.5 billion in funding hung in the balance as a result. At the same time, more than 1,000 employees at the N.I.H. had been laid off.
Given the upheaval, Coifman held off from reapplying for N.I.H. funding this spring. She only decided to reenter the fray in the fall after she served on a panel to review N.I.H. grant proposals and found things were once again proceeding smoothly.
Still, with the 2026 federal budget up in the air, the potential scarcity of available funds continues to stoke concern. President Trump proposed to slash the N.I.H. discretionary budget by a daunting 40 percent, or $18 billion, although his plans seem unlikely to pass given Congress’ push for funding at current levels or higher.
Preparing for all scenarios, Coifman said she will continue pursuing funding from every possible source: at the state level, as well as from private foundations and corporations. She understands other researchers, feeling a similar crunch, will be doing the same.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty and there’s a lot of vulnerability,” Coifman said. “Because we don’t really understand the processes and how they’re shifting.”
Eric Wood, the director of counseling and mental health at Texas Christian University, called the evolving state of federal funding at universities a “pendulum swing back and forth.”
“I think what most people would want is just stability — just to be able to predict what’s going on,” he said.
Wood is also sensitive to what he believes to be growing perception of higher education as generally unstable. This narrative, he worries, could prevent not only researchers but clinicians like himself from wanting to work at universities, if they think the job security is precarious.
“People wanted to work in higher education because you get so many different avenues, where you can explore different treatments; you have different populations of students,” Wood said. “But now I think people are saying, ‘Would I just have more freedom working in private practice?’”
“That obviously disadvantages our students if we can’t fill a position,” he added, referring to job openings for counseling staff.
According to Sara Abelson, an assistant professor at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, graduate students who once planned for careers in research are similarly reconsidering their paths. Lately, they’ve been expressing their skepticism about the availability of future opportunities.
“What can I do with my timing? How can I not come out as a new trained researcher in the current moment? Is it a safe and stable field to go into?” Abelson said students have been asking her.
So while Abelson has personally avoided funding cuts to her work, she maintains a front row seat to the fallout for not only colleagues but the wider mental health field. The message she said she and fellow staff are hearing is to “play it safe — pick something safe and do it perfectly.” She worries about how innovation in mental health work will suffer — about the capacity to make headway on behalf of all students going forward, and not just some.
“There’s no doubt that it is impacting the field,” she said of the funding upheaval.
“It’s impacting the mental health and wellbeing of those who are the focus of the grants and those leading the work, and it’s going to have lasting impacts.”
You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.
This September, The Wall Street Journal ranked Bentley University the 12th best college in America. Its criteria included considerations such as the institution’s impact on salary and how quickly the degree will pay for itself. While pleased with the bankable metrics, leaders at the Boston-based business university will tell you their real differentiator is fostering the personal formation of their students.
“We put a lot of emphasis on technical fluency and quantitative literacy, but what really makes the difference in the marketplace is the ability of our students to think critically, to communicate extemporaneously with comfort and poise, and to exhibit confidence, not hubris,” said Brent Chrite, President of Bentley University.
Helping students gain and demonstrate these attributes is the thinking behind BentleyPlus, a competency development program focused on encouraging experiences that lead to dispositions such as resiliency, purpose, and agency. While reflecting the business university’s high regard for the liberal arts, BentleyPlus is a separate and intentional effort to get students to understand that marketable skills are not confined to the classroom.
BentleyPlus began as a pilot in 2021 and is now a university-wide effort combining career readiness with dimensions of wellbeing. The program involves four major pillars, starting with an introductory program where first-year students select two out of 11 competencies to work on throughout their time at Bentley. The competencies, such as ethical reasoning, leadership, and work ethic, are organized into three buckets: cognitive skills (Think), intrapersonal skills (Develop), and interpersonal skills (Act).
Students are then encouraged to pursue co-curricular experiences that help them develop these competencies — not by adding more to their plates but by making what they’re doing more meaningful. BentleyPlus advisors meets with students three times a year to help them reflect on their experiences and articulate their value. An awards ceremony with a BentleyPlus certificate completes the program.
While a nod to the university’s holistic pedagogy, BentleyPlus also reflects a concern, among employers nationwide, about the lack of “durable” skills in entry-level employees — everything from communication and collaboration to grit and work ethic. Another factor driving the project is the persistent emotional and mental health issues college students and recent graduates are reporting, including disengagement with work and school post-pandemic.
While a nod to the university’s holistic pedagogy, BentleyPlus also reflects a concern, among employers nationwide, about the lack of “durable” skills in entry-level employees.
As vice president of student affairs, Andrew Shepardson has his eye on all of these phenomena. He sees BentleyPlus as more evidence of the university’s long history of student-centered education. In 2014, Gallup released the groundbreaking Gallup Alumni Survey, originally known as the Gallup-Purdue Index, showing the influence of certain college experiences on career readiness and wellbeing. Shortly afterward, Bentley became one of the first schools in the country to enlist Gallup in conducting its own alumni survey.
As with the national research, Bentley’s alumni reported higher levels of wellbeing correlated to experiences like “having professors who make me excited about learning,” “having someone who cared about me as a person,” and actively participating in extra-curricular activities.
“That information was huge for us in terms of sending a strong message to our students and faculty,” Shepardson said. “You may be a finance major fixated on working at a hedge fund, but you would really benefit from taking a discussion-based humanities course or working on an initiative off campus.”
Shepardson said that while students regularly participate in co-curriculars, he noticed they can struggle to articulate how these experiences transfer into skills in the marketplace. He recalled one example of a senior who became flummoxed when asked in a job interview how his experience as president of a club had helped prepare him for the position he was seeking.
“He made no connection between this significant leadership experience and what might be expected of him in the real world,” Shepardson said.
A natural partner for BentleyPlus was the team from the Pulsifer Career Development Center, who, as front-liners, recognized the importance of curating durable skills in addition to academics. “Our career folks thought this was phenomenal,” said Lauren Hubacheck, assistant vice president for student affairs. “They said, ‘We can do all the career development work with our students, but you all are connecting tangible stories that show skills like dialogue and leadership.’”
While focused on competency building, BentleyPlus eventually took a stronger turn towards wellbeing, as Hubacheck and Shepardson began to see this as the through line in all of the work they were doing.
“Employers were telling us that the greatest number of leaves of absences were with entry-level employees and for wellbeing purposes,” Hubacheck said.
In talking with his staff and colleagues around the country, Shepardson was hearing about disengaged students whose anxiety was keeping them from talking with their professors or connecting with other students.
“It became apparent that wellbeing was the higher order,” Shepardson said. “We needed to give students a clear understanding that their ability to work on a competency was not going to be successful if they didn’t have that wellbeing piece in place right from the beginning.”
This year, BentleyPlus 2.0 was launched with its own strategic plan; a full-time associate dean, director, and assistant director; and a commitment from leadership to promote wellbeing in all aspects of university life.
The Underlying Competency
Rebecca Jimenez is the newly hired associate dean of wellbeing and BentleyPlus. She said she had her first “pinch me” moment when working the negative mindset table at orientation, where students were asked to select from an array of cards displaying unhelpful concepts like blame and self-doubt.
“I said to them, ‘Let’s work on how to change that,’ and they loved it. They did the exercise with such intention. I thought, Wow, they really care about this stuff.”
Jimenez had been working on what she calls “wellbeing communications,” an effort to help people understand what wellbeing means in their lives and to arrive at a definition that incorporates all of its associated elements. Often confused with wellness (mindfulness and yoga), wellbeing can mean different things to different people. After extensive research, Jimenez created a new wellbeing narrative for the university that is part of the BentleyPlus strategic plan.
“Wellbeing at Bentley is a dynamic balance of personal and community wellness, where students feel supported, connected, and empowered to flourish,” the plan now states. “It’s about caring for oneself, making intentional choices, nurturing meaningful relationships, and engaging in environments that promote joy, purpose and belonging.”
As part of the BentleyPlus first-year program, students take a wellbeing self-assessment and develop wellbeing goals to be addressed over time with their advisors. Right now, all of the BentleyPlus advisors are student affairs professionals, but the enthusiasm they convey in working one-on-one with students has attracted the interest of other community members, including faculty.
For Jimenez, bringing BentleyPlus into the classroom is an important next step.
“Not only can we make wellbeing front and center in the classroom, we can help faculty connect what they are doing with wellbeing outcomes. We can help them say out loud to their students: ‘What we’re doing here is critical thinking.’”
As with the pilot, the new version of BentleyPlus has the strong backing of career services. Staff there suggested that first-year students participate in the wellbeing self-assessment prior to a popular career development course, acknowledging that wellbeing work proceeds career prep. Perhaps most significant is the new way they encourage graduating students to consider their career choices.
With support from BentleyPlus, they now ask: “Does the organization you are interviewing with align with who you are as a person? Do they value building relationships and connecting with others?”
These may just be the questions today’s employers are waiting to hear.
Wendy Kopp was fresh out of Princeton when she launched Teach For America, the premier teaching corps for college graduates hoping to change education and, with it, the world. Along the way, Kopp was able to prove that early career choice involving proximity to social challenges was the most fertile ground for strong leadership. Her proof of concept is the success of the program’s alumni — a group that includes leaders of education, social innovation, and government.
Over 35 years later, Kopp is working to reinvigorate the national call to service among a generation jaded by the weight of the world’s problems and drawn to a culture, on and off campus, that puts “I” before “We.” Kopp, who is now the head of Teach For All, has recently launched Rising Generation, a campaign of sorts to change the perception about what constitutes a successful career and what it takes to be the kind of leader the world needs.
The initiative aims to counter the declining participation among recent graduates in social impact jobs and the prevailing narrative that lucrative careers are the best path for our brightest students. In this interview with LearningWell, Kopp lays out the barriers and opportunities inherent in bringing today’s students into jobs that will change people’s lives, as well as their own.
LW: What was your main motivation in launching Rising Generation?
WK: For 36 years and counting, I’ve been obsessed with the question of how to inspire the next generation, first, to commit themselves to the work of Teach For America and, now, to the similar organizations across the global Teach For All network. Working alongside many others across the world, I think we all felt collectively like we were pushing a boulder up a hill in terms of inspiring the engagement we need for this work.
In a way, I would think that it would be easier than ever to recruit this generation to commit two years to teach in under-resourced communities — to go through that kind of learning journey that gives them the capacity to tackle these systemic inequities throughout their lives. The challenges of the world — the inequities of the world — are more visible than ever. And yet, statistically speaking, more recent graduates are foregoing these opportunities and putting their energy towards, say, finance, consulting, and tech, than they did even ten years ago. I’m just constantly obsessed with that puzzle, and that was one factor.
“The ability for young people to assume professional responsibility in proximity to injustices is really crucial for developing the leadership we need in the world.”
And then the second is the growing evidence we have across the Teach For All network about just how transformative those two years are for young people. That’s led me to believe that the ability for young people to assume professional responsibility in proximity to injustices is really crucial for developing the leadership we need in the world.
Our research shows that through these two-year commitments to teach, these young people come to believe in their own self-efficacy and agency and come to believe even more in the potential of students and families in low-income communities. Their analysis of the issues they’re addressing shifts from thinking it’s more a technical fix — that more funding will solve the problem — to believing it’s a deeply adaptive systemic challenge.
And their priorities shift. Across the world, 75 percent of these individuals of all different majors and career interests, who begin their two-year commitments to teach unsuspectingly, end up committing themselves to this mission long term. They’re working long term as teachers, school principals, school system administrators, social innovators, advocates, policymakers, and elected officials.
What that research shows us is that not only are we getting a different group of people who might not otherwise have engaged in this work and are staying with it but this experience is turning them into the leaders we need: people who have a sense of agency, who have a sense of possibility, who understand there’s no silver bullet solution and are committed to tackling the issues long term.
Another factor, I have to admit, is my own kids. I have college-aged kids and, in spending time with them and their friends, I’ve learned more about their experiences and what they’re thinking about, and that gave me a sense of possibility that we could do something about this.
I think it’s all of that. It’s seeing the challenges of recruiting the next generation to this work, understanding just how formative these kind of professional experiences are in generating the leadership we need in the world, and then finally coming to believe that we could actually do something about this problem.
LW: In a LinkedIn message about Rising Generation, you note that data from the Deloitte Global 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey showed some of those generations’ lowest–ranked considerations in deciding where to work were “its values and purpose align with my own,” “the positive impact it has upon wider society,” and “the opportunities it gives me to address social problems.” I’m guessing that was disappointing. What do you make of this, and do you think it reflects a real turn away from social impact careers?
WK: Initially, I thought it was really surprising because there’s so much evidence that this generation cares so deeply about the challenges facing the world. I think there’s a deep concern among many, many young people that they would love to help make the world a better place. But what the latest research shows us is that they’re not thinking that the way to do that is through their jobs.
This is not a new phenomenon. The more I’ve talked to people, the more I’ve come to think of this as a societal norm. We think about our jobs like our houses. We get a job. It meets our needs, and then it’s how we do our jobs that matters — how we work with others, how we vote, and what we volunteer for that enables us to make a difference in the world.
We need to really challenge that and help people understand that to tackle these big systemic challenges, it is going to take a whole lot of full-time, long-term work in the arena. It requires being close to the roots of the issues. It’s going to take going through the learning journey, trying things, learning from that process, and really playing the long game.
One thing I’ve discovered is that there is such power in just naming this issue. That’s true for young people. It’s true for people at the university level. The most valuable resource in the world is the time and energy of our most educated young people, and we need to be conscious about that. We need to start thinking a whole lot more about how to make sure that their energy is tackling our biggest challenges and that these young people have the early experiences that will enable them to actually be successful in tackling those issues.
LW: We hear a lot about “sellout jobs” — this idea that our highest performing students are just being funneled into higher paying careers at the expense of doing good in the world or even deriving purpose from what they do. What do you think has led to this phenomenon?
WK: There are so many different factors, but let’s unpack it a bit. Many believe this is an economic issue — that students are graduating with greater debt and greater financial burdens and are more worried about their financial futures. Those factors are real, but it’s not right to attribute this phenomenon to these factors.
“Instead of thinking these four years are going to be a time of great exploration, they are met early on — sometimes as early as freshman year — with corporate recruiters.”
First, we should question the financial narratives that young people are telling themselves. If you really start talking to these students who are taking the “sellout jobs” and get your head around what they think their baseline salary requirement is, you’d be shocked.
What the research shows is that students are far more likely to work in consulting, finance or technology if they are from an economically privileged background, so we can’t attribute this whole thing to the financial state of affairs.
I think a really important factor is that these young people aren’t experiencing a campus culture that fosters deep intentionality and reflection on what they see as their purpose in life. What are their values? Where do they want to put their time and attention? Instead of thinking these four years are going to be a time of great exploration, they are met early on — sometimes as early as freshman year — with corporate recruiters.
Before they can even think about it, here comes the very lucrative summer internships and then these two-year, post-college programs. There aren’t the countervailing forces on these campuses to create a culture of reflection and intentionality, and that’s a huge part of it.
I will say there’s something that’s giving me hope in looking at the research and talking to young people about what matters to them, and that is their priority around learning and development. The corporations have convinced them that the path to rigor and learning is through working for their firms. One of the things we’re thinking about with Rising Generation is how we can help young people understand that if they want to be a civic leader in our country and in our world, they need to find their way to a professional responsibility that gives them proximity to the roots of the social challenges we face; only then will they gain the perspective, the insights, the relationships, and the credibility to ultimately make a difference against the big systemic challenges we face.
LW: Do you think this reflects a kind of “I” vs. “We” culture on college campuses?
WK: We think a lot about that at Teach For All because we really believe that we need to shift the purpose of education from being about individual attainment to equipping young people to shape a better future — not just for themselves but for all of us. And I think if we don’t shift what happens in our classrooms to work towards that end, we won’t ultimately have the world that we’re all hoping for.
LW: How do you approach a problem like that?
WK: Well, this is how we see our work across the Teach For All network. The independent, locally led organizations in our network are working to develop what we’ve come to call “collective leadership” for ensuring all children fulfill their potential. By this, we mean we’re developing a critical mass of diverse people working around the whole ecosystem around children who are all on the same mission and who are reflecting and learning together and collaborating. As we develop this leadership, we’re orienting towards a vision of a world where all children have the education, support, and opportunity to shape a better future for themselves and all of us. We’ve recently launched the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future to foster learning among leaders everywhere — across and beyond our network — who are committed to reshaping education in this way.
Wendy Kopp meets with students on a visit to a rural school in Yunnan Province, China. Courtesy of Teach For All.
LW: Do you get the sense that graduates feel as though they will get to contributing at some point in their lives?
WK: Yes. We have to give young people some perspective that you can’t go spend 15 years working in a skyscraper and be confident that you can shift gears and know exactly what to do to tackle the social inequities in the world. You have to go through a deep learning journey to be able to do that.
LW: What is it that’s unique about the Teach For America and Teach For All experiences in this regard?
WK: I think that Teach For America and the Teach For All network partners are giving young people a chance to attain that proximity. You’re in a classroom; you’re seeing the microcosm of the world and all its social issues play themselves out in your classroom, and you’re on the front line directly working with students and families and others in the community. Our theory has always been that this would create leaders for social change far beyond education because the issues you see in a classroom are so systemic and cross-sectoral in their nature.
LW: What can colleges and universities do to embrace that concept and try to help students think about the value of these early, social impact experiences?
WK: I think this is so crucial. In the early years of Teach For America, we had so much allyship among professors and career service offices and college presidents in putting the Teach For America opportunity in front of their graduates. I think over time, we started hearing from folks that they needed to be neutral — that they couldn’t offer preferences for one job choice over another. And I’ve thought a lot about that because they’re professing neutrality, and yet honestly, they’re anything but neutral.
A lot of people — a lot of career service offices — are encouraging young people to take more lucrative paths for a variety of reasons. There are notable exceptions. I think about Michael Crow at A.S.U., who every year invites the top few hundreds of students to his house and says, “I want you to do Teach For America.” That makes a big difference. There’s a lot that universities can do to help people think about these options that might not be as present for them, given the recruiting practices of these corporations. But by and large, that’s not our experience, and that’s very unfortunate.
LW: Finding meaning and purpose in your career has proven to lead to improved wellbeing, but you don’t hear a lot about that in corporate recruiting, I’m guessing.
WK: This is one of the reasons we’re embarking on the Rising Generation initiative. I think we need to help young people understand — really think about — what it’s going to take for them to feel successful. I think we need to challenge the common narratives around that. There’s evidence showing that your wellbeing in the workplace is the biggest factor in your overall wellbeing. If you’re feeling the sense of purpose and connectedness to people through your work and a sense of agency and you’re able to contribute positively, that’s going to have a huge impact on your mental health.
I think about the people I know who have done work that involves proximity to big issues and have stayed the course. They are some of the most connected, grounded, and fulfilled people I know. I think we need to help young people understand the long-term consequences of those first decisions that they make.
LW: That’s a big part of Rising Generation, I assume. What are the ways you are going about this work?
WK: We’re really thinking about how to create a norm shift in how people think about first jobs.
We’re organizing our work in three buckets initially. One is around data, research, and learning — understanding how this issue is playing itself out differently across different segments of campuses and different student demographics and understanding what’s influencing young people and their job choices. We are going to pursue student-led focus groups to understand and inform the path forward.
The second is what we’re calling University Community and Learning. We’ve found our way to so many people who are working on these university campuses, from some college presidents to career service office heads to professors and thought leaders, and all who are really focused on doing something different — who are challenging the prevailing narrative and working to foster more intentionality and reflection among students. We are aiming to bring them together and build community among them so that folks can support and inform each other and think together about how to propagate these experiments.
The third bucket is around the options themselves because if you are a college student who doesn’t go the traditional path, it can be really hard to find your way to a job that gives you the kind of proximity you would hope for. We need to make the existing options more visible and create new ones. We think there may be some real opportunities to do that.
