Author: Mollie Ames

Peace of Mind at Utah State University

Posted on by Mollie Ames

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.

Invented Here | Character at Scale with Steve Sosland, Texas Tech University System

Posted on by Mollie Ames

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.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

You can reach Jack Tucker, LearningWell’s strategic communications manager, at jack@learningwell.org with questions, comments, and other ideas.

New Thinking in College Student Mental Health

Posted on by Mollie Ames

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. 

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

Leading the Next Chapter of College Mental Health

Posted on by Mollie Ames

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.

Uncertainty Weighs on Mental Health Researchers

Posted on by Mollie Ames

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.

BentleyPlus

Posted on by Mollie Ames

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 meet 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. 

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

Questions and Answers with Wendy Kopp

Posted on by Mollie Ames

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. 

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

Invented Here | Cultivating Purpose-Driven Leaders with Julia Macias, Washington University of St. Louis

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Julia Macias believes “leading is not about formal position.” She tells us “everyone, regardless of formal status, has the potential to influence and energize others towards a common goal.”

On this episode of Invented Here, Julia shares the origins of the George and Carol Bauer Leaders Academy at Washington University of St. Louis and how her program has scaled to ensure all WashU students have integrated and immersive opportunities to become purpose-driven leaders of character and capability.

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

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

You can reach Jack Tucker, LearningWell’s strategic communications manager, at jack@learningwell.org with questions, comments, and other ideas.

Collective Wellbeing

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Faculty and staff at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va. don’t typically have resources for new campus initiatives that aren’t absolutely necessary. 

But when students at the formerly Methodist-affiliated school requested a renewed focus on spiritual life, administrators were able to answer those prayers. Renovations began on the college’s chapel, which was empty and in disrepair, to forge a revamped, interfaith space for not only religious gatherings but meditation, lectures, and performances.

The explanation for the sudden deepening of Randolph’s pockets is a share of a $3.275 million investment from the Endeavor Foundation. The two-year grant, which started in November 2023, funded the collaboration of 13 different small liberal arts colleges to develop new ways of enhancing student mental health and wellbeing. Last month, Endeavor announced it has committed another $5.22 million to launch a second phase of the project over the next three years. 

At a time when many are counting liberal arts colleges out, questioning their focus on broad intellectual development over vocational training, Endeavor is betting on them for the same reason. Its support of Randolph and peer institutions stems from a belief that their “whole person” educational approach and close-knit, engaged communities are uniquely poised to help young people find the sense of purpose and belonging that so commonly elude them. And by working together, the theory goes, the schools may push their innovation and impact even further.

“Ultimately, our hopes were to generate initiatives that would strengthen these institutions — that would showcase the liberal arts and the power of a liberal arts in a world that’s increasingly skeptical for various reasons of its value,” said Ashley Kidd, the program director of grants and research at Endeavor.

In 2016, Endeavor first united small liberal arts colleges after noticing a trend of “really wonderful, community-engaged” schools struggling against declining enrollment and finances, Kidd said. The foundation invited presidents from some of these at-risk colleges to discuss institutional issues and other developments, and the convening became an annual tradition.

Over the following years, Endeavor awarded various presidents small to mid-size grants to tackle discrete projects on their campuses. Toward the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, though, the foundation approached the larger group with a proposition: to form a collaborative of their schools with a focus on one issue of their choice.  

“The conversation turned to: ‘What do you really all need? And if we were to invest a larger sum of money in something that was a collaborative project or two, what would be the primary initiative or initiatives on your plate?’” said Lori Collins-Hall, who was involved at that point as interim president of Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vt. 

“The presidents very quickly gelled around student mental health and wellness, and from there, the collaborative was born,” she said. 

13 colleges from Maine to New Mexico, Ohio to North Carolina, signed on to join what has since been named the Endeavor Lab Colleges (E.L.C.) Collaborative. Collins-Hall also left her post at Sterling and became the E.L.C.’s project director. Beyond Sterling and Randolph, the initial member institutions included Antioch College; Bennington College; Blackburn College; Northland College; Prescott College; St. John’s College, Annapolis; St. John’s College, Santa Fe; Unity Environmental University; Warren Wilson College; and Wells College. 

Not all would make it. Wells and Northland have since closed, while Unity Environmental left the collaborative after structural shifts, including an emphasis on remote learning, meant it no longer shared the profile of the other member schools. 

Bennington College in Bennington, Vt. was particularly influential in the presidents’ decision to coalesce around wellbeing. Shortly before choosing this focus, the leaders had heard from Bennington President Laura Walker on the results of a study she commissioned to assess student needs and institutional gaps around mental health on her campus. That report, Walker said, “became kind of the foundation for not only our work at Bennington but also the work of the Endeavor project.”

“The presidents very quickly gelled around student mental health and wellness, and from there, the collaborative was born.”

Next, the presidents agreed on four areas to direct their collective and respective institutional energies: infusing curricula with wellbeing-related content; helping students explore their sense of purpose and meaning; creating experiential learning opportunities, especially in nature; and enhancing clinical and nonclinical services, like counseling and peer support.

The majority of the first Endeavor grant went towards compensating faculty and staff, who came from all levels across the institutions, in their joint work to determine the best ways of approaching and executing the collaborative’s priorities. The remaining money was split among the schools for practical capacity building according to distinct institutional needs. 

Randolph dedicated funds to not only the redesign of its chapel but the addition of a comprehensive telehealth service, TimelyCare, as well as mental health training and professional development for staff. A minor in contemplative studies, an interdisciplinary field exploring the human contemplative experience, also took off.

Bennington, meanwhile, invested in the renovation of its fitness center and a revamp of the first-year career preparation course. The college’s standing interest in the arts also inspired a pilot course combining art engagement with mental health processing.

“It was a wonderful mix,” Bennington’s President Walker said of the class. “The students reported they had increased motivation, reduced isolation, and positive changes to mental health. And because so many of our students are artists and creative, it also gave them the sense that they had power to change people’s lives and their mental health through their art.”

For both Randolph and Bennington, another perk of the Endeavor partnership has been the ability to leverage the funds to raise money from other sources. By pointing to dollars already secured for, say, bolstering interfaith programming at the chapel or building out career services, the schools have garnered even more support for their efforts.  

By the end of phase one, the collaborative’s ideative efforts had resulted in the transformation of the initial four priorities into five fine-tuned initiatives to guide future work: Cultivating Curricular Review and Innovation, Building Models of Community Care and Resilience, Center for Purposeful Life and Work, Mapping Belonging, and Nature Rx.

Mapping Belonging and Nature Rx evolved from the commitment to experiential learning, where Mapping Belonging uses reimagined campus maps to cultivate student belonging to the place and its history, while Nature Rx helps connect students to the school’s outdoor spaces.

Unlike phase one, when colleges might use their individual funding to pursue whichever of the priorities was most compelling to them, this next stage will urge every school to tackle each of the five initiatives. According to the president of Randolph, Sue Ott Rowlands, this part of the new grant is especially important. 

“We’re not just going to pick and choose what we do,” she said. “We’re going to commit to all of the five areas, and that’s going to push us — make us really expand our engagement and thinking and open up a lot of opportunities for our students.”

Also in the second phase, the collaborative efforts of the colleges will continue to grow. Currently, a working group of faculty from across the participating schools is spearheading each of the five initiatives, while the chief academic officers of every college also work together.

Part of the mission of the working groups is to devise a way of assessing the impact of their particular initiative. On a larger scale, each institution will measure how the whole of the Endeavor-funded work is affecting campus by conducting pre- and post-surveys on student wellbeing, as well as that of faculty and staff.

Despite the colleges’ limitations resources-wise, Bennington President Laura Walker said she’s been excited to have access to the wealth of “real talent” on their other campuses. “I think one of the best things about this project has been the collaboration among colleges and the support group,” she explained.

Collins-Hall said she thinks most participating faculty and staff have been similarly “jazzed” to work together and come to meetings. “I have people who have been doing this for two years on a biweekly schedule who are excited to be back for year three. That doesn’t happen with any committees in higher education.”

At Randolph, one of the unexpected challenges of Endeavor’s support has been acclimating faculty and staff to the idea that there are now resources to pursue projects that were once off the table — that they no longer need to stretch every dollar to the extent they might have before.

“It was a very interesting process to say, ‘No, wait, we can do that. We have Endeavor funds to help us with that,” President Ott Rowlands said.

Now she’s telling her team: “Think a little bigger.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Looking to Michigan

Posted on by Mollie Ames

When asked about the state of higher education in America today, University of Michigan’s president, Domenico Grasso, is unabashedly ambitious about what needs to be done and who needs to do it. “As the most comprehensive and distinguished university in the world, the University of Michigan bears a profound responsibility not only to lead in scholarship and innovation but also to serve as a thoughtful compass in challenging times,” he wrote in a recent white paper. 

Grasso is leading Look to Michigan, a multi-faceted, multi-year mega-plan that is at once a capital campaign, media blitz, and strategic realignment aimed at optimizing Michigan’s inner and outer strengths. With five priorities, including the establishment of the American Dialogue Center, Look to Michigan assumes a leading role in demonstrating to the American public why higher education is such a valuable asset at a time of diminished support and extreme politicization. As the title suggests, Michigan asks, “If not us, then who?” 

Launching such a bold, public agenda may seem unusual for a president serving in an interim capacity, but Grasso vowed he was never going to be just a placeholder when he took over the role from former President Santa Ono. Grasso is the former chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, a branch of Michigan that serves largely first-generation students. He’s a staunch believer in the life-changing power of higher education.  

As a Michigan alum, and a rabid Wolverines football fan, Grasso is as comfortable talking about Michigan’s waste production during home football games as he is running the Prez Quiz during T.V. timeouts, when students answer trivia questions to win U-M swag. In this interview with LearningWell, President Grasso offers his perspective on the many issues he and his peers are dealing with and why he believes the best defense is a good offense. 

LW: As a Michigan alumnus and a chancellor here for many years, how did you feel when you were chosen to be president of the University of Michigan? 

DG: I would first say that I was surprised because I did not expect it. And I did not seek it. But of course, it was an honor because Michigan is, in my mind, the best university in the world. We have 110 programs in the top 10. We have a world-class medical center that’s unrivaled. We have an athletic enterprise that is second to none as well, and all that is together under one roof with three campuses that have different missions and constituencies. It’s just a terrific place.

LW: Speaking of the three campuses, U.M.-Dearborn, which you oversaw as chancellor, is very different from Ann Arbor. Have your experiences at Dearborn influenced your new role? 

DG: One of the things that I experienced at Dearborn is that it has a very close-knit family of students, faculty, and staff. Everyone is super nice. They are not internally competitive with one another. They come from modest means; they are authentic and are there to improve their lives. Many of them are very humble while also having a great deal of talent, and that always impressed me. 

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is a very high-powered school. There is a lot of, I would say, energy on this campus that we all benefit from, but I’m trying to bring some of the values — the empathy, the family-like interactions — I witnessed at Dearborn here to this campus.  

LW: I read your LinkedIn post with a message to your students about civility and kindness. Is that part of what you are talking about?

DG: I am a staunch advocate of the First Amendment, and I’ve said that in multiple places. But being a staunch advocate of the First Amendment doesn’t mean that we have to give up our kindness and civility in exercising our First Amendment rights. This is one of the things that I would like to bring to campus: the ability to talk across differences and perspectives in a way that we are truly trying to reach common ground and not just trying to preserve our own particular views.

LW: How do you go about doing that? 

DG: It’s not easy. I think that the first thing to do is to model it. I have a lot of people around me with very strong opinions. How I interact with them models how to interact with people that may have differing opinions from you. Before this semester, a number of my senior staff and I met with every single Jewish group that we could find in southeastern Michigan. And we also met with every single Muslim and Arab American group, all part of an effort to encourage a peaceful and collaborative reentry into the fall semester. 

So far it seems to have paid dividends because we have not had a lot of the acrimony that we had on this campus in the past. People want to be heard. They want to express their opinions, and they want to be taken seriously. And that’s what we’re trying to do. For me, it’s about this concept of intellectual empathy: trying to understand other people’s perspective. Not just tolerate it but to really understand it. You want them to find their voice but also have open ears.  

LW: You are hitting the ground running with the announcement of the Look to Michigan campaign. What is that all about? 

DG: We have our $7 billion capital campaign, which we recently launched, and a strategic vision we are now calling Look to Michigan, which is consistent with our capital campaign but different. 

There are five pillars of Look to Michigan. The first is transformative education: the need to deliver life-changing education focused on students’ agency and purpose, empowering them to lead with integrity, intellectual empathy, and rational thought. The second is human health and wellbeing, which has to do with all sorts of things for which Michigan is so well known, from health equity to cutting-edge medical care and transformative medicine. 

The third one is civic engagement and democracy. Here, we are launching a civil discourse center, tentatively called the American Dialogue Center. The fourth pillar is energy and climate change, and the fifth is advanced technologies — everything from AI to nanotechnology. We’re investing $1 billion over 10 years — a hundred million dollars a year — in these initiatives. This isn’t a check-the-box to get everything done in a year or two. This has a 10-year shelf life, and we’re only in year two. It’s a vision that spans a decade and is centered on these core initiatives.

LW: These are not just internally facing initiatives. This is also a public campaign, correct? 

DG: Absolutely. One of the main focuses of the Look to Michigan campaign is to regain the public’s trust in higher education. The University of Michigan was founded in the public interest in 1817, and it’s remained there ever since. A lot of schools have been struggling to make a case as compelling as ours in this regard, but here it is in our institutional D.N.A. 

“The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, in large part because we have the world’s greatest universities. If we do anything to threaten that, we’re threatening the future of the United States.”

The Look to Michigan campaign is also a media campaign. This month, we’re going to have full-pageads in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Atlantic, and other publications — digital, print, audio, social media. And it’s going to explain that we are committed to the public interest and why that matters to every citizen in this country.  

The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, in large part because we have the world’s greatest universities. If we do anything to threaten that, we’re threatening the future of the United States, and we have to make that point very clear. Some of my colleagues at Princeton and Harvard are saying the same thing, but this is Michigan’s chance to move into the passing lane and to be the leader in reacquiring the public trust in the mission and purpose of higher education. 

We have 7,000 faculty members. I want each one of them to consider themselves public intellectuals and ambassadors for this cause. I want them to explain their work to the general public in terms everyone can understand. They have to be able to translate what we do in a way that a farmer in Nebraska, a textile worker in New England, or an office worker in the southwest will understand. As part of the campaign, we’re going to use digital storytelling to connect to the public good and explain why Michigan is so special — unique — in this area. 

LW: Does it help your message that you are such a highly regarded public university?  

DG: We are a public university, but I want us to stop using that as a qualifier because I don’t want us to be the best public university in the country or in the world. I want us to be the best university in the world that is in the public interest.  

LW: How much of this is to fend against what’s going on in Washington? Or is it more of a long time coming?

DG: I think it’s the latter. In certain ways, it is a defense against criticism that has been directed at higher education. But we should have been doing this whether it was Trump or Obama or whoever in the White House. I think we need to have a better social contract with the American people as to why higher education is so valuable, so worthwhile, and so worthy of investment and trust. The erosion of it started many, many years ago — well before MAGA. I watched this happen, and I thought it was devastating for universities and for America, and I thought that Michigan was well-positioned to take the lead on reversing this trend.  

LW: That’s a lot to take on for an interim president.

DG: I told the board of regents right at the start that I was not going to be just a placeholder. Either we were going to move the university forward or I wasn’t interested in the job, and everybody agreed with that.

LW: I am guessing that the “attack on science” is not going over well at Michigan.  

DG: No. We are a very science-focused school, and a lot of great things have come out of the University of Michigan. Science comes from “scientia,” which is the Latin word for knowledge, and it’s hard to argue against wanting to obtain knowledge. I know people think there are different views of it, but the whole scientific method — the Enlightenment — was all designed to help us improve the human condition, not to determine the human condition. For us to walk away from that at this point in time would be devastating for the future of humanity.

LW: Is it difficult to keep everyone on campus calm among such uncertainty in higher ed? 

DG: Everybody is concerned about the future because every time we open up a newspaper or a website, another school, or another nine schools, is in the hot seat. Everybody is a little bit on pins and needles, but I don’t want that to influence our commitment to who we are and to what we do.

LW: You’ve been a Wolverine for a long time as both a student and administrator. Now that you are head of the pack, are you having some fun as well?  

DG: It’s a lot of work — an enormous amount of work — and it is all-consuming, but it is also so much fun. As graduates — my wife Susan is a graduate three times over — we have such a sense of love and affection for this university, and it is terrific to be here in this position. It’s surreal, and it’s just been a wonderful experience. 

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

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Posted in Q&A