Category: Flourishing

When Leïlah Sory was a structural engineering student at Montreal’s McGill University, she won a scholarship in 2020 to participate in a sustainability program hosted in Toronto. There, 140 students from universities throughout Canada were divided into small interdisciplinary teams exploring sustainability challenges in global communities. Sory’s cohort focused on transportation solutions for San José, Costa Rica.

For several days, they combined what they knew from their respective fields of study, guided by industry professionals and community experts, to design an electric bus infrastructure to support underserved parts of the capital city. 

“We were teamed up to develop a project based on pairing our interests with SDGs [UN Sustainable Development Goals] that are critical there. Because I study engineering, I was paired with a project that focuses on the UN Sustainable Cities and Communities goal,” says Sory. Originally from Burkina Faso, she came with an appreciation for collaborating on projects pertaining to the communities that were foreign to her. But this project brought new aspects of that lesson home. “Everyone has different backgrounds and knowledge they can contribute and learn from one another. But you also need to remember the importance of the specific community and think about what their needs really are before you start thinking about a solution straightaway.”  

When she returned to McGill, she had gained more than hands-on, real-world problem-solving experience and a digital portfolio. She came away with a new way of looking at sustainable development, a mentoring network, and a place in a budding alumni network of young people developing critical skills and passions in a world ready and waiting. 

The program that enabled Sory to focus on the challenge in Costa Rica was How to Change the World, a London-based social enterprise connecting diverse students, educators, industry professionals, and community stakeholders in experiential learning programs.The goals are as pragmatic as they are lofty: Namely, tackling some of the world’s thorniest sustainability challenges while training students in the skills of tomorrow, and introducing them to the companies that will need them. Students use the 17 UN SDGs as their north star addressing substantive global issues – poverty, transportation, education, climate change, waste management — on the local level, designed to target specific communities all around the world.

It started—as many things do that later catch fire—as a college course. Prof. Jason Blackstock started as a quantum physicist in Silicon Valley, originally from Canada, and then made his way via a master’s in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School to work on global climate and sustainability policy. In 2012 he was invited to the University College of London (UCL) to set up a new department encompassing science, technology, engineering, and policy-making, and to examine critical bits missing in current disciplines. UCL queried both employers about what recent graduates were missing when they started in the workforce, and alumni about what they wished they’d learned in their years as students.  The answers came back from across disciplines – accounting and engineering, business and computer science: there had not been nearly enough exploration of real-world problems to prepare recent graduates. Employers had to retrain them to learn how to tackle problems when there were no answers in the back of a textbook. Alumni felt the solutions required more than technical excellence in their fields; they needed collaboration with people in entirely different disciplines, an understanding of what they did – and how it would be useful in concert with their expertise.

The final ask from the Dean was not what Blackstock had expected. “When all the input came back, he told me, ‘We’ve got all this data. Can you add one course to the program that addresses that please?’ ’” Blackstock recalls. “And I told him, ‘What you want is me to teach students how to change the world in one course.’ And he was like, ‘Yes. And you should call it that.’”

UCL’s Engineering program had just completed a rebranding, and conveniently enough, the side of the building had been painted with the motto, UCL Engineering – Change the World. For the pilot course, students would be assigned project-based work challenges in highly interdisciplinary teams, combining their shared technical excellence on corporate challenges, government challenges, economic challenges…anything, really. 

Blackstock asked students, ‘What kind of things would they like to work on?’

“It was summarized best by one young British student who stood up and said, ‘Well sir, you old people broke the planet. We’d like to know how to fix it, please.” 

In 2014, the initially 500-student program began tackling stubborn sustainability challenges for communities around the world. It flourished for several years, and in 2016 it became a required capstone for over a dozen engineering and business degree programs. By then word had spread through conferences and summits to a wider horizon of universities, and the requests began to trickle in: Could you do one for us?

In 2019, Blackstock spun the program out of UCL as an independent social enterprise, partnering with global entrepreneur Alana Heath, who’d spent a decade mobilizing businesses as a force for good across the financial inclusion, energy access and impact investing sectors. In their newly formed enterprise, partnerships were developed with communities, professionals, and educators who could bring object lessons to life.

​“We’d officially launched,” recalls Heath. “It was February 2020, and we had almost 150 students from more than a dozen Canadian universities gathered in Toronto for a fantastic in-person program. And when the program finished, we’d run this incredible experience, and basically flew back into lockdown.” The response from participants and stakeholders was overwhelmingly positive. But the model had to shift immediately. “We had a bunch of deans very excited about what we’d done, getting rave reviews and feedback from their students. And they said to us, ‘We’re all online right now. Can you figure out how to do what you just did in person, virtually? Our students really need these types of opportunities.’” 

“Companies need both current employees and a future talent pipeline who are able to apply a sustainability lens to their work.”

“Need” is an apt word. In January 2023, new research released by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) examined some of the employee-talent obstacles that stand in the way of global companies reaching their sustainability goals. From 2017 to 2022, the number of large companies setting science-based targets grew by 36 times, to over 4,200 companies. But only 17 percent are on target to meet those goals. BCG partnered with Microsoft to research the experience of 15 companies trying to reach their goals, a project that included polling sustainability leaders at a wider selection of companies. 

Responses showed that companies are relying heavily on their internal talent. Of sustainability leaders surveyed, 68 percent are “homegrown” (hired from within the company), while just 32 percent are brought in from the outside. Sixty percent of people on sustainability teams say they were not hired for their sustainability expertise; 32 percent consider themselves an expert in another field, while 28 percent did not consider themselves an expert in any field.

​“There’s a massive sustainability skills gap within industries and corporations today,” says Blackstock. “Businesses are hungry for talent, and hungry to upskill and develop their employees to understand how to apply a sustainability lens. That’s the only way companies can hit the sustainability targets they’ve set – and that regulations are increasingly requiring them to hit.”

​The most common corporate-sustainability pitfall Blackstock hears about is having the whole effort rest on one individual or department instead of having knowledge, and accountability, spread throughout multiple departments. “It’s a great way to fail ethically, having one sustainability officer burdened with the success of something no one else understands or acts upon. But more than 75% of corporate leaders today expect every job will have a sustainability component by 2050,” Blackstock says. “That’s why we support the idea that every employee should have a sustainability lens to their work.”

To support companies with this challenge, How to Change the World is now developing programs that combine students from higher ed with working early career professionals from the companies. This provides businesses with a way of upskilling their existing workforce, investing in their future talent pipeline, and generating innovative ideas that can help them reach their sustainability targets – and ideally develop new sustainable products and services along the way.

This model has strong benefits for higher ed, Blackstock says, because the students get to learn and engage directly with the companies they want to go work for. To support this connection, How to Change the World has also started running Careers Nights, bringing program alumni together with sustainability professionals and leaders and interested companies. Two of the most common questions he gets from participants who feel their career-view expanding after an eye-opening project: How can I get a job with a sustainability angle? And, What’s the role of private industry here?

“That’s generating just a huge amount of interest, sort of a built-in recruiting process. It’s integrated as a follow-on from our boot camps and courses to provide a bridge between higher ed and the future of sustainable work,” says Heath.

“If you can bring higher ed to the table with the students bringing in new ideas, employers can pick the best-fit ones to hire,” she says. “It’s that mix of value that can significantly benefit businesses.”

Post-covid, the virtual programs that grew to take the place of in-person ones had the same practical problem-solving focus through the lens of sustainability. Blackstock initially worried that remote programs wouldn’t pack the same punch as they did in person. But in fact, he found that they had all that and more. 

“It proved to be as good, and in some ways better than, our in-person experiences. We didn’t try to replicate the in-person ones. We really asked ourselves, ‘What’s different about virtual? How can we access extra benefits and still retain the human connection and real-life problems?’” he says. “You’re not going to get the hugs, but whole new virtual collaboration skills can bloom, and that’s going to be needed in the future, too.”

“I chose to join How to Change the World exactly because I was seeking a connection to the real world. We need to be mindful of never losing track of the big picture.”

As How to Change the World continued to grow, the target audience of their programs was also expanding. Students were being trained in the same creative questioning and community-oriented approach, with a growing understanding of the sustainability skills needed for the solutions, as well as the careers they wanted to step into. Companies were increasingly interested, very much in need of the types of skilled students stepping out of these programs. Educators were interested in learning too; foundational lessons in guiding experiential learning ‘at scale’ is a valuable form of professional development, while increasing knowledge base in sustainability for themselves as well. 

​Francesco Ambrogi is a teaching fellow in mechanical engineering at Queen’s University in Ontario. When he was a second-year PhD there, he received a departmental email looking for engineers to volunteer as teaching associates for university students participating in a How to Change the World bootcamp. He signed up, thinking, ‘I like teaching, I’d love to get more experience and learn about this.’ Since then, he’s become a teaching member and course lead for many How to Change the World programs, and calls it tremendously influential in his development as a professor. 

​“It’s had a huge effect on my career. I’ve taken a lot of what I learn from How To Change The World and implemented it in my own classes,” Ambrogi says. He cites the skillful use of virtual resources, so important for how students learn today, from short-form video and online resources to synchronous, collaborative virtual discussions with industry leaders and visionaries, a wider range of whom are accessible to How to Change the World in virtual format than in-person programs. He reserves the most praise for the multidisciplinary approach.

“It forces students to go out of their little comfort zone, which is mainly engineering, and expands a discussion with someone from business school and law school and the biological sciences, which I think is the key to actually solving any real problems these days,” says Ambrogi. “Otherwise, you could go through four years of undergraduate studies never having the opportunity to brainstorm with class members in other fields. You iterate the process, and the new ideas are kind of raw, but it’s exactly through this kind of repeated process that the solution comes up.”

​The lens of sustainability, he admits, wasn’t one that had been a focus in his studies, something he’s grateful to have changed.

​“I never heard much about it, to be honest. When you’re working on your PhD you’re so focused on your small tiny problem. My research area is very abstract, computer simulations of fluid flows, and can be very isolated,” he says. “So I chose to join How to Change the World exactly because I was seeking a connection to the real world. We need to be mindful of never losing track of the big picture. We need to go in that direction now more than ever, because of climate change and pollution and the economy, and at the end of the day, we’re teaching students how to solve problems. You never know what the course might spark in their mind, what they might be able to do.”

A few months ago, Blackstock and Heath received a message through LinkedIn from a student who’d participated in a 2021 bootcamp. She’d wanted to reach out and let them know How to Change the World had changed her life. The University of British Columbia student, Anastasia Kiku, had worked on a coastal community challenge for Lagos. Now, she was co-founder of a startup providing reusable containers for take-out food service and had just been named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30. 

“The most influential part of the program for me was an introduction to systems thinking,” says Kiku, of reusables.com. “There were so many lasting lessons. Before you implement something, you really have to work within the local context to understand what the core problems are. You can’t assume what the answer is. And to address one area, like customer behavior change, you have to move one piece of the puzzle at a time, instead of closing your eyes and creating policy.” 

To her, the real value of the program is creating an excellent experience by bridging academic ideas with very tangible problems, in terms of both employability and inspiration. 

​“It’s all about that transformational experience for the student, and how we help create it,” Blackstock says. “How do we make an educational experience about more than how to do math or thermodynamics? Okay, checkmark, you’ve learned the basics. But if you don’t know how to connect it, and it hasn’t been given meaning and purpose, you’ve missed a piece. You can always go back and learn bits of math you missed. But it’s harder to relearn purpose.”

Listen to this story here:

After Adrienne’s first year on full scholarship at an Ivy League university, she just wanted to go home.

She knew she should be grateful, though she also knew grateful was a complicated and somehow inappropriate response to the placement she’d earned through hard work. She couldn’t put her finger on why she didn’t feel at ease at the school; she certainly wasn’t the only mixed-race first-year student from a lower-income family. She didn’t particularly want to return the following year, but her mother wouldn’t let her consider transfer options. This was a full ride at an Ivy. A Wonka golden ticket.

Now a senior, Adrienne says school is “fine,” with the enthusiasm of someone settling for an overcooked burger. Her mother can’t help wondering if she would have been better off somewhere else. “But who’s to say whether it was the school, or her shyness, or the fact that she’s majoring in the classics and philosophy—probably not the easiest place for a Black woman to feel like she belongs,” she said.

Psychologists call belonging a universal human need, a critical component of wellbeing and success in all arenas of our lives—academically, professionally, socially, and so on. When a student struggles to understand course material, there are visible red flags, and any number of pragmatic supports. When a student struggles to connect to a place and thrive, vague euphemisms don’t really flag a solution. It wasn’t a good fit. Things didn’t resonate. It was fine. 

For his 2019 book The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us, journalist Paul Tough looked at the role of elite colleges in economic mobility for low-income students. And then he examined the interventions that haven’t quite succeeded in getting them to go, even if they very likely could have been accepted with a great aid package. And then, importantly, to stay.

One of the most impactful examples Tough highlights is the University of Texas, where student retention and four-year graduation rates had been an area in need of improvement. UT’s efforts were initiated in 2011 by then-president William Powers, Jr., whose graduation task force produced a report “that showed the institution to be deeply out of balance.” It illustrated significant gaps in retention and graduation rates between different demographic groups on the Austin campus: the students whose families had higher incomes were mostly graduating on time, and the kids from lower-income families mostly weren’t. Thirty percent of first-generation students at UT dropped out or were dismissed before they could complete their degree.

Chemistry professor David Laude dedicated himself to raising graduation rates among Pell-eligible students. His approach: introducing multiple programs to orient freshmen, provide summer supports, expand mental health services, and customize tutoring. 

“Laude’s kitchen-sink approach did make a difference for students at the University of Texas—and the evidence for its success comes not just in the stories of individual students. The data support it, too,” Tough wrote. “Those campus-wide four-year graduation rates were the numbers that led the press releases and earned headlines at UT in 2017 and 2018. But what made David Laude proudest was the fact that the biggest gains in UT’s four-year graduation rate came among the categories of students whose rates were the lowest. Pell-eligible students at UT improved their four-year graduation rate from 40 percent in 2012 to 61 percent in 2018.”

By 2023, the rates had soared to 75 percent. Dr. Laude’s student success initiatives were based in part on community-building, which he found to be a critical component for those who experience “belonging anxiety.” Schools trying to understand troubling retention statistics — particularly in under-represented populations, lower-income families, and first-generation students — typically look to a wide range of data while reading between the lines of SATS and GPAs. They may be equally well served by asking, “What do we have in place to make all students feel like they belong?”

Belonging by Design

Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, more casually known as the d.school, is no stranger to applying design thinking to solve problems that, a generation ago, might have been called intangible, squishy. In terms of design, problems refer to challenges that get in the way of products, services, and systems meeting people’s needs. Those needs could be building anything from better public policy to a more effective vegetable peeler. At the d.school today, it can also be the engineering of spaces, events, and practices that are better designed to evoke a sense of belonging.

​Susie Wise is an educator at the d.school who specializes in designing equity into the educational and social sectors. When the school decided to roll out a series of books on design insights and creative approaches—small inspirational tomes like Drawing on Courage and Creative Hustle—Wise was asked to contribute Design for Belonging. Published in April 2022, it is a guide to using the tools of design to create greater inclusion within groups of people in just about any setting, including campuses and classrooms.

“Instead of questioning your belonging, you can question the resources to help you — what are they, where are they, who are they?”

​“It was written for anyone hosting a community to show that belonging is something you can think about no matter what you’re creating. It was also meant to be provocative for designers, who I think have responsibility to think about whether their systems create more belonging, or inadvertently creating othering,” she says. “Nowadays it’s very normal in the design space to think about the environmental impact of something you’re creating. So part of my effort was to remind designers that a belonging lens is actually a really important one to think about, and particularly for folks who work on diversity, equity, and inclusion and are feeling stuck.”

​Wise is fully aware that belonging is a feeling, and that you can’t design a feeling. But, she says, you can ask people to think back on the environments and circumstances where they’ve felt most welcome, and drill down into what contributed to it. She’s also well aware that you can’t design away exclusionary behavior. However, you can consciously design environments that lay the groundwork for inclusion.

In her book, Wise identified two umbrella categories of opportunity for inclusiveness. The first is being attuned to moments of potential belonging (or not) – namely, key times when something begins, ends, or is changing in a community. These include some predictable moments, like the way an entrance is made into a room or event, with either a welcoming greeting and signage, or a physical barrier or checking of credentials, a sort of “bouncer” effect. The way conclusions and exits are handled can also leave a positive or negative impression, with someone feeling either valued or uncomfortable. 

​“Think about the difference it makes when you are made to feel awkward or judged for having to leave a class or event early. Now imagine if the professor or moderator mentioned at the outset that if attendees had to leave before the end – because let’s face it, people often have good reason – they can find the materials in a certain place online and are welcome to drop by their office at another time,” said a chemistry professor in the University of California system. “I mean, I’ve been to yoga classes where you’re given the hairy eyeball for having to slink out early. And I’ve been to others where the instructor says, ‘If you have to leave early, please be sure to give yourself a little stretch first and a moment of Savasana.’ What a difference it makes, offering up front that you’re trusting the person’s reasons for doing what they’re doing.”

The list also includes subtler moments that can fly under the radar, such as “code switching.” This is when people have different ways of speaking and behaving in different groups – it could be language, or dialect, a looser bearing, or humor – and is a marker of belonging to more than one culture. When and how it’s used can either include or exclude someone—signaling familiarity and identification, or otherness. 

​“As a moment of belonging, code switching can be both a powerful resource and an added weight to bear, and is likely experienced as both at times,” Wise writes. “By seeking to notice and understand code switching in your community, you effectively give voice to the many groups and subgroups that are part of people’s identity. This is a huge win for belonging.”

Key moments of tension can also serve as an opportunity for positive impact, like instances of disagreement. For someone to dare to speak up in dissent in a community, they risk being ostracized. But if they feel confident of their position, and they remain included and accepted even while introducing conflict, and it’s a strong indicator of belonging.

“This was one example of belonging in the student journey Susie described that really stuck with me,” said Kate Canales, chair of the department of design at the University of Texas at Austin. While working on research and writing for the book, Wise spent time in a “microresidency” in Canales’ department conducting workshops with students and faculty, both collecting information and sharing the principles of her research. “She said a part of belonging was being able to dissent. That if you belong in a community, and feel accepted and valued, you’re able to disagree with that community without being expelled. Since so much of higher education has hidden power and hierarchy, it was very relevant to many who heard her. You could see people thinking, ‘Oh, okay, we really need to rethink the way we perceive certain things.’”

​The second umbrella category of opportunity for belonging is one Wise calls “levers of design,” tools you can use to make it easier to move toward your goal. The trick is creating concrete experiences, environments, modes of engagement, or even tangible objects (such as food, clothing, and devices that have value or meaning to the group). These are things you use, circumstances you manipulate – in the language of design, levers you push – to create a desired effect. 

​The use and architecture of shared space is a critical one. Wise uses the example of a skateboard park to illustrate the many ways the ramps and seating offer a multitude of opportunities to enter, watch, and participate in the space as an insider. Sensory playgrounds are another example of public space designed with accessibility in mind for children sensitive to overload. For educational or professional environments, space designed for belonging could include moveable furniture and walls, lighting options that allow for dimming clusters, bright overheads, and seating near windows and natural light; areas conducive to talking, tables useful for spreading out work, and armchairs that invite more ease and relaxation. Other design features could include media and signage that can be customized, and changeable boards that allow for leaving behind personalized traces of ideas.

“If you belong in a community, and feel accepted and valued, you’re able to disagree with that community without being expelled.”

​“Our design department is one of the new tenants in an old historic building that’s been restored after being vacant on campus for like 40 years. So we were a huge contributor to the design process, and we’ve let the student experience dominate the way it’s set up to behave around collaboration,” says Canales. The resulting space for the design school is at the furthest extreme from, say, a shushed law library. “We mostly have open flexible spaces where everything is movable and the tabletops are butcher block work surfaces, so there’s permission to use your hot glue gun or whatever else you want to do. It really looks and feels different from other spaces of higher education anddispenses with the formality and makes it accessible and welcoming to use the square footage the way you’d like.” 

​Levers of design might have elements of levity, but don’t mistake them for gimmicks. Like most aspects of design for belonging, they are about authentic connection that makes its users feel understood and at home rather than put off by structures and systems that are distracting reminders of “otherness.”

​“I use the book to help people who are training to become teachers so they can think of moments and levers to increase the sense of belonging in their classrooms. That’s not something enough secondary teachers think a lot about—it’s more associated with elementary—but these kids desperately need connection. And many teachers don’t see it as part of their job to connect kids,” says Nora Wynne, an instructor of the secondary education program at Cal Poly Humboldt and a learning specialist at the Humboldt County Office of Education. 

Wynne brought Wise and her book to classes, conferences, and workshops, and led book groups with administrators, faculty, and parents. “No one’s saying this is a brand new or revolutionary idea. They’re saying, ‘Oh my God, of course.’” 

​At Texas Christian University, Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado works as the chief inclusion officer, and is always looking for ways to move beyond the typical spectrum of DEI matters. “I’d had exposure to design thinking previously, and I thought, ‘These ideas are low-hanging fruit, some real grist to make an impact on campus.’ I want to get past the lip service to have more meaning,” he says. 

When he read Wise’s book, he immediately saw the practical application of the stories and ideas for the institution, which recently hired a new president. 

“We have a mechanism for data collection, and we are already seeing an uptick in people’s reported belonging,” said Benjamin-Alvarado. He calls the book’s reception at TCU a tremendous win. “HR, my department, and the president are all supporting taking a deep dive on liberatory design. For me, that’s hitting the triple word score in Scrabble.”

​For students, particularly those like Adrienne whose marginalized identities make them vulnerable to feeling isolated, Wise’s most salient piece of advice may be about the way belonging is perceived. 

“In a time of difficulty, one of the first things you might do is question your belonging,” said Wise. “But instead of questioning your belonging, you can question the resources to help you — what are they, where are they, who are they? How can I talk to my professors? So it becomes solution-oriented, rather than a first reaction of parachuting out of a place because you assume you don’t belong there.”

D’Aubre’ Lewis has always been a good student. That track record is a comfort for the sophomore at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical (A&T) State University when the financial road to becoming a therapist feels overwhelming. On top of her federal loans, she needs to come up with $8,000 of tuition each semester, mostly from summer earnings back home in Baltimore. She can’t work too much during the school year because she needs to keep a 3.5 GPA for her scholarship, and attending part-time isn’t an option her scholarship allows. Her loans will total about $20,000 when she graduates, and then grow with whatever she’ll need to borrow for graduate school.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” she concedes. “I’ll be the first one on my mom’s side to finish college.” Her mother contributes what she can, but also supports several of D’Aubre’s older siblings wholeft school before finishing their degrees. D’Aubre’ is all too aware that if she doesn’t keep juggling the plates just right, she won’t be able to graduate, and will still be responsible for the loans. 

“I’ll be in debt my whole life,” she says with flat pragmatism. “I just want to get the degree.”

Getting the degree has never been so expensive for so many people. Student loan debt in the US has swelled to nearly $1.8 trillion owed by 44 million people. An estimated 55% of all undergraduates finish school carrying debt. And this doesn’t include the number of people who, like D’Aubre’s siblings, didn’t finish—and are still responsible for payments, but with their earning potential unenhanced by a degree. 

Student loans are the second-largest type of consumer-generated debt, just behind mortgages, and account for 9.5% of the consumer debt in the US. But unlike mortgages, they have the stultifying effect of suppressing the progress to adulthood, as student borrowers put off milestones like home ownership andmarriage until they feel more secure.

“The reality of what over-leveraged looks like depends entirely upon who holds the loans, and what other life circumstances they’re juggling that make monthly payments difficult.”

The burden of student loan debt has become a growing part of the national conversation about not just loan forgiveness, but the value of a college degree. While the high cost of education continues to rise—169% in the last four decades—earnings for new graduates in the workforce have not, with wages for 22-27 year olds increasing by just 19% in that time. 

“The math doesn’t add up. The business model is unsustainable,” says Kevin Fudge, a higher education finance executive with 20 years experience as a consultant to schools and families. “People overleverage themselves, and end up hurt by taking on more than they can chew.”

The reality of what overleveraged looks like depends entirely upon who holds the loans, and what other life circumstances they’re juggling that make monthly payments difficult. 

“We think of the ability to pay off student debt as only having to do with student debt,” wrote Mark Huelsman, author of The Debt Divide research paper published in 2015 by Demos, an organization for democratic and economic solutions rooted in racial equity. “[But] we know the ability to pay off your loans has everything to do with wages and the ability to gain secure employment, it has everything to do with housing affordability, it has everything to do with child-care costs.”

In short, borrowers are increasingly stymied by the life challenges they hoped would be made easier by getting a degree.In this way, student loan debt is becoming the long covid of higher education.

The unequal demographics of debt

Looking at data like gender and race, it becomes apparent that not all debt burdens are created equal. Women carry a disproportionate amount of the nation’s overall student debt (66%), are more likely than men to take out loans (41% of female undergraduates, compared to 35% of male), and have parents that are less likely to save for their education (39%, compared to 50%). And since women earn 82 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts (60 cents for Black women, 55 cents for Latinas), it takes longer to pay off the loans. The increased time to repay also means that women pay more interest over the life of their loans. Perhaps unsurprisingly,women report higher levels of stress and lower quality of living while they do.

Black graduates have an average of $52,000 in student loan debt—$25,000 more than white college graduates, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Black students made up around 14% of all students entering college but constitute more than 27% of those with $50,000 in debt, and nearly 22% of those with over $100,000. Four years after graduation, 48% of Black students owe an average of 12.5% more than they borrowed.

“In addition, Black Americans are more likely to have a disproportionate amount of parent loan debt,” said Fudge,“given the historically Black colleges’ over-reliance on students who are propped up by parents with PLUS loans.” 

And the parental loans create a multi-generational debt pressure for the sandwich generation. Fudge recalls one woman he’d mentored who took out loans to go to Spellman College. To make up the gap between what she had and what she needed, her parents took out loans, too, as did her grandparents and her aunt. And then she didn’t finish, plunging three generations into debt for a degree that never materialized. The pain points are at risk of increasing from there, as students who leave college without completing are more than twice as likely as graduates to default on their loans.

The temptation is strong for a family to go all in on a relative’s acceptance to college, which is why many end up with a double-decker club debt sandwich. A school will offer aid packages, and present sums that should represent the so-called family contribution, supposedly based upon what the family can afford. But Fudge advises families not to let the college define what’s affordable—and not be tempted to give up their assets. 

“On paper, if you own a home, they treat the home like an ATM to pull money out of,” he said. “That decision, that investment, impacts everyone, not just the individual child.” 

When parents sacrifice everything for their kids to go to college, he says, it may feel like a Hallmark movie, but the reality is it’s a decision with serious repercussions; there are options and avenues available to young people, who have time on their side. There is little in the way of aid and safety nets for older people who don’t have any assets for retirement.

Risky return on investment (ROI)

Undergraduates carrying debt can’t help being affected by the questions and doubts swirling around their choices. Is going to college going to be worth it? Is this degree going to be able to land me a good job? Do I have to compromise what I love to do for something more lucrative? Can I justify majoring in the humanities?

“Today, the reality of student loans definitely informs the choice of majors,” says Beth Throne, senior associate dean of Student Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College.  “Students are 100% mindful of fiscal choices, and if anyone isn’t, it’s because they have the economic luxury of choice to approach it differently.”

Throne is seeing the confluence of several financial factors shaping students’ choices of careers: Pressures among first-generation students to show their degree’s ROI to their parents; students increasingly committing to jobs before graduation to have a “bird in the hand”; and seniors’ reluctance to bind themselves to further debt of graduate school, unless they have access to resources and don’t require aid. 

She believes it’s the job of the school to equip students with the best information to back up choosing the course of study, and career, they love. “If we’re doing our job in liberal arts, we’re showing them how to apply value to their chosen field, to do what they love and find ways to make it monetarily rewarding.” 

Last year Throne worked with a student who was a double major in business and creative writing. The young woman had no passion for business, but as a first-generation college student, was struggling to justify writing. 

“She wasn’t fulfilled in business and was sort of looking for permission to drop it as a major. We helped her secure a very prestigious internship at a literary agency, setting herself up well for the business applications of literature,” says Throne. “She was thrilled, and so were her parents—who of course wanted her to do what she loved, but also to be able to support herself doing it.”

Life, delayed

How much does student loan debt affect the way young adults progress toward their life goals? A lot, as it turns out.

A CNBC/Momentive poll in 2022 found that 81% of people with student loans say they’ve had to delay one or more key life milestones because of their debt. In the breakdown of data, 42% said they’d delayed paying off other loans, 38% didn’t save for retirement, 33% put off buying a home, 16% held back on starting a family, and 12% avoided pursuing a different job. 

Student loan debt was designed to make the impossible possible. Instead, it now prevents people from making decisions about their life, according to Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “Student loan debt was supposed to be good debt—the type that you take out so that you can invest in your human capital formation so that you can live your life afterward,” Smith said,“and it’s morphed into something much more insidious.”

Looking at debt through the lens of age, most of the total national debt belongs to the 25- to 34-year-old age group. But on average, 35- to 49-year-olds owe the most money as individuals, with 50- to 61-year-olds not far behind. When the Biden administration found ways to cancel certain demographics of federal debt, one person who benefitted from the slate-wiping was Chuck Ertel-Hoy, a 72-year-old retired professor in Indiana, who still owed $41,000 after paying his loans consistently whileteaching. “I didn’t know how I was going to keep paying this in retirement,” he said. “This changes everything.”

On the early end of debt chronology are current students like Emma Lamoreaux, a senior at Temple University. An in-state resident from Hershey, PA, Emma chose the least expensive of her acceptances, and has worked throughout her four years to keep her loans as low as possible. But with plans to go to law school, future debt is “a pretty big looming thing” that weighs on her as heavily as getting accepted to the programs.

“When I was younger, my goals were to go to college, graduate, get a house, a job, a dog, have kids. And now I feel like I’m not really sure,” she says. “It feels like my student loans will put all of what I thought I wanted on hold indefinitely. I don’t really have a plan for much else of anything anymore beyond the loans. I’m kind of in a no-man’s-land.”

The degree to which debt causes excessive stress and impedes personal growth creates a disturbing paradox for colleges and universities who view higher education as leading to a life of flourishing. “Colleges and universities seek to empower their students so that they will thrive post-graduation based on the experiences they have had,” said John Volin, executive vice president for Academic Affairs and provost at the University of Maine.  “However, financial wellbeing is an important domain of overall wellbeing. And this is one of the reasons why we must tackle college affordability.”  

Aging into debt

The size of the debt, and the way it’s handled in the first 10 years, determines how it continues to affect later stages of life. K, a 33-year-old financial executive, still carries a loan balance of about $20,000, and her husband has $40,000. They are homeowners with a two-year-old daughter, and would like to have another child. But they are already paying $1,700 a month in daycare. 

“How can we even think about affording her future college? There’s very little we’re able to put aside, let alone start retirement savings,” she says. “It’s a different world than when our parents were doing this. The cost of living has gone up so much, but the wages haven’t caught up to it. None of my friends have pensions, and social security is going to be a much smaller part of our retirement. You plan ahead as much as possible, but you feel screwed no matter what choices you make.”

As the years pass for those whose debt is remaining and compounding, there are the concerns for their own college-aged children whose debt they can’t help shoulder. KK is a divorced mother with three college-aged children, but she can’t co-sign their loans because of the years she fell off-schedule with her own payments, in the early PhD years that she was juggling diapers and debt. Now a full-time associate professor of cultural anthropology, she is still more than $100,000 deep in her own outstanding debt. 

“It’s a constant reality, always on my mind. I’ve tried to raise my children so this isn’t their reality. They have to have the work ethic and be able to do well but there’s not a lot of margin for error,” she says. One of her children is on full scholarship at an Ivy League school. Another was accepted to some schools last year, but without scholarships, has not been able to attend until he can navigate his own loans. “I wish I could help more. But also I kind of don’t. This is how you dig deep to figure out what you really want.”

B, a 44-year-old divorced mother of a college-aged daughter, left being a college professor a few years ago for a more lucrative position as a communications executive. Her PhD is tucked under her bed, both literally and metaphorically, and theslowly shrinking $40,000 debt molders there, too. A few years ago, a man she’d been dating broke off the relationship when he found out she was still carrying loans. “He saw it as a liability,” she says. 

Daily bread

Students like Emma regard their loans as future burdens, an IOU taped to the horizon. But for some others, the future debt loadcoexists alongside imminent need. Without the security of school housing and meal plans, many students live hand-to-mouth alongside peers who don’t think twice about daily mochaccinos. 

In Class, a recently released memoir, author Stephanie Land writes about cleaning homes to make ends meet while she attended the University of Montana as a single mother. The book is a sequel to her bestselling memoir, Maid, which became a critically acclaimed Netflix series about her escape from an abusive relationship with her toddler daughter. Land’s jackpot is acceptance into college in another state, through a combination of scholarships, financial aid, and student loans. But tuition doesn’t cover rent, health care, transportation, or childcare solutions while she attends class and cleans homes. Land relies on food stamps, and she’s often hungry. 

Unfortunately, not being on a college meal plan—and not having money for food—isn’t entirely an anomaly. Today, food pantries are cropping up on more and more campuses across the country, including The Cherry Pantry at Temple University, the Aggie Cupboard at New Mexico State University, and the Ole Miss Food bank. More than 600 campuses have signed on as members of the national nonprofit Swipe Out Hunger, which has served more than two million meals and funded $200,000 in grants to alleviate food insecurity.

“Maybe my college education was an unnecessary luxury,” Land wrote in Class. “Who the —- was I to get a Bachelor of Arts in English? There weren’t a lot of jobs for people with degrees in creative writing. Even now, with loans, grants, and scholarships, there was no way I could pay off the money I had already borrowed. The irony was not lost on me that in order to make enough money to pay off my student loans, I needed to take out more…Given the monumental sum, I knew with certainty that I would have debt for the rest of my life.” 

Land was aware that by the time many borrowers paid off their loans they were easily double the original amount borrowed, and she envisioned never being able to afford a car, house, or to help her own children go to college. 

“The degree to which I was —-ed was overwhelming. But this was GOOD debt, I told myself, a GOOD investment… Beyond college, I’d magically qualify for jobs because of a paper that cost me fifty thousand dollars, and then we’d live happily ever after.” 

She writes this last bit with cheeky irony. But she was one of the ones who, against all odds, did thread that needle less than a decade ago to emerge with work, success, and debt headed in the right direction. Her author’s photo smiles from the book jacket like a billboard of what is possible even when the odds seem impossibly stacked against you. Part of her early success is due to dogged navigation of every bit of available aid, every piece of paperwork, no matter how exhausted she was. 

“There are really high hurdles for people who are poor, and everyone applauds when they have the fortitude to keep going like five Energizer Bunnies with five jobs and finally achieve that degree and that job,” says KK, the anthropology professor and mother of three, who still works in a café on weekends. “But early on, those same people are telling you that you shouldn’t want what you want. It feels like you have to try five times harder and read every single line of small print on any loans you sign. But you do it. Because what choice do you have?”

Introduction

Foundational to learning well is a campus ecosystem that encourages healthy behaviors. Making healthy food accessible, offering opportunities for movement and exercise, and preventing substance use are key to a healthy campus, though all of this is easier said than done. On top of these challenges, it is commonly recognized—and research confirms—that students are not getting enough high-quality sleep. Less than half (46%) report getting seven or more hours of sleep per night¹ and only 35% meet standard criteria for getting good quality sleep.² Similar to substance use, some college students, parents, and even administrators, might see lack of sleep in college as something that is to be expected. However, sleep could just be the key to unlocking successful prevention efforts—it can support, or hinder, all the aforementioned healthy habits.

For many young adults, sleep habits are established prior to coming to college, and therefore these behaviors might be difficult to shift. In recent years, there has been much discussion about homework, extracurriculars, and school start times and how they impact sleep during high school. These concerns are well founded; short sleep duration among high school students in the US increased between 2009 and 2019,³ with 78% getting less than the recommended eight hours of sleep per night.

Navigating a new college environment is difficult, especially for students who have moved away from the structured environment of a family home. Students not only have to negotiate differences in routines and sleep habits with new roommates, but they are also pressured to socialize late into the night.⁴ There are plenty of opportunities to stay up later and messages about “pulling all-nighters” are pervasive. Shifts toward later bedtimes are common among undergraduates.² Therefore, sleep problems that began in high school can worsen during college. With all that colleges have to offer, if a student is chronically tired, these opportunities might be lost. However, the science of sleep is complicated. Quantity is important, but quality of sleep is key and impacted by many different factors. Further, establishing good sleep habits during college is not only essential for the college years, but can carry forward into adulthood. So, what can colleges do to encourage healthy sleep patterns?

First, what do we mean by “good sleep” and which conditions make it possible?

“Good sleep” is restorative in nature. It is ideally for the right length of time, with few disturbances or awakenings throughout the night. Experts recommend that young adults sleep just under eight and a half (8.4) hours per night.⁵ Importantly, sleep schedules should be consistent. Although napping during the day might seem like a good idea, it is not a substitute for nighttime sleep.⁶ Making up for lost sleep on weekends should also be avoided because it interferes with the regularity of sleep cycles. Sleep hygiene, which health promotion professionals refer to as the habits that surround getting good sleep, depends on both personal and environmental factors. Personal factors include sticking to consistent bedtimes, reducing nighttime anxiety, limiting screen time close to bedtime, not relying on late nights to catch up on work, and avoiding excessive drinking, caffeine use, and other forms of substance use.

Academic behaviors can indirectly influence sleep. Attending class regularly, being attentive during class, and asking for help with the material as one progresses through a course, can reduce the pressure to catch up and “cram” to learn the material. Positive environmental factors that a student might be able to control include creating a quiet room with low light and noise levels, creating a comfortable sleep space, and communicating with roommates about sleep preferences. Environmental factors that are mostly under the control of the university and faculty include setting sensible course policies and schedules and timing campus events so that they promote healthy sleep patterns. We discuss these factors in more detail below.

Why is sleep important?

Regularly getting high-quality sleep is essential for several reasons, three of which are especially critical for college students. First, sleep affects both physical and mental health. During sleep, the human body repairs tissues and fights off disease-causing pathogens.⁷ Although it is commonly recognized that having mental health issues can affect your sleep,⁸ the reverse appears to be true as well. Individuals who do not get enough sleep are more at risk for experiencing depressive symptoms.⁹ A recent review of several research studies concluded that insomnia is a predictor for the future onset of depression, anxiety, and alcohol abuse.¹⁰

Second, sleep quality is linked to cognitive functioning and academic performance. One of the primary reasons why we sleep is to consolidate memories of things that happened and information that we learned during the day. It is well-documented in the research that sleep affects academic performance, which is reliant on the ability to recall and process new information.Even after accounting for several other predictors of academic success,  getting fewer than the recommended number of hours of sleep during the first year of college is uniquely associated with lower GPAs.¹¹ 

Hartmann and Prichard¹² analyzed data from the American College Health Association’s annual survey of more than 55,000 students and found significant associations between the frequency of sleep problems during the past week, GPA, and the likelihood of withdrawing from a course. Each additional day per week that a student experienced sleep problems raised the chance of dropping a course by 10%, and decreased GPA by 0.02 points. Multiply that throughout a semester, and we have a serious problem. The authors concluded that “sleep education represents an underutilized opportunity for universities to maximize retention rates and academic success.”

The relationship between sleep and academic performance is not a simple one. A student’s level of interest in a course, having a disruptive living situation, being involved in athletics, having a job, or being a parent can all complicate the relationship between sleep and academic performance. Assessing how these variables affect one’s sleep, and making modifications, if possible, is important.

Third, several studies have shown that getting poor sleep might increase cravings for alcohol and cannabis¹³ as well as lead to a greater likelihood of binge drinking and cannabis use.¹⁴ Though not entirely clear, some speculate that poor sleep might contribute to elevated stress levels and/or irritability and anxiety where substances might be used to alleviate a negative mood state.  

Regardless of the directions of all of these associations, it is clear that establishing consistent sleep routines will result in significant payoffs for student well-being.

“The vast majority of undergraduates (73%) report never receiving any information about sleep from their university, despite two-thirds reporting interest.”

What interferes with sleep and how?

Schedules

For college students, the most obvious contributor to disrupted sleep patterns are the multiple demands on their schedules. Juggling responsibilities for class, work, and extracurricular activities with social and family obligations can create a situation where sleep becomes an afterthought. Ironically, getting enough sleep helps us use time more efficiently and productively during the day. Unfortunately, the overwhelming feeling of not being able to keep up with everything can create a vicious cycle where sleep becomes even more impaired.

Substances

Excessive caffeine use, especially later in the day, can impair the ability to fall asleep. Much research has been conducted on the negative health effects of highly-caffeinated energy drinks and how they can lead to disrupted sleep patterns.¹⁵

From a practical standpoint, staying up late to party and drinking alcohol impairs natural sleep cycles by delaying bedtimes and oversleeping in the morning. Biologically, alcohol use suppresses REM sleep time, which occurs in the second half of the night. Many studies confirm the negative impact of alcohol consumption on sleep duration and quality.^16,17

Drazdowski et al.¹⁸ studied 354 college students who used cannabis and found that 44% reported using cannabis to help them sleep. However, contrary to most students’ beliefs, greater use of cannabis for sleep predicted worse sleep, a longer time to fall asleep, and more problematic cannabis use. Research shows that chronic cannabis use can also interfere with sleep.^17,19 When individuals try to cut down or stop cannabis use, common withdrawal symptoms include restless sleep and strange dreams. Reinstating cannabis use will relieve these withdrawal symptoms, leading to a catch-22 situation where the student believes that cannabis is the key to better sleep.

Screen Exposure

An added challenge that this generation’s college students are experiencing like never before is the impact of technology on sleep. “Blue light” emitted from electronic devices acts as a stimulant to your brain by suppressing production of melatonin, the hormone that your body naturally produces to help you fall asleep in response to darkness. Exposure to screens, including cellphone use at bedtime, can prolong the time it takes for us to fall asleep and can lead to waking up too early.²⁰

Exercise

A regular exercise routine comes with many benefits, including improved sleep quality. Experts suggest avoiding intense exercise at nighttime, which can raise cortisol levels and make it hard to fall asleep. For student-athletes, who easily get enough exercise, sleep routines might still be interrupted because of the multiple demands on their schedules. In a review of scientific findings on how sleep deprivation adversely affects athletic performance, Vitale et al.²¹ states “Optimizing all three pillars (i.e., diet, exercise, and sleep) is critically important to overall health and recovery and is a better strategy than resorting to supplements and energy drinks that athletes (and the general population) may turn to when fatigued and lacking adequate sleep.”

What can campuses do to promote good sleep habits among students?

1. Engage students in discussions about the importance of sleep. The vast majority of undergraduates (73%) report never receiving any information about sleep from their university,¹² despite two-thirds reporting interest. In addition to offering actionable suggestions for improving sleep hygiene, students could also strategize in small groups about how to handle situations involving a disruptive roommate or work together with housemates to agree on nighttime routines that are conducive to better sleep.
2. Implement evidence-based strategies to reduce excessive drinking and cannabis use.  A comprehensive plan to address college student substance use will promote the health, safety, and success of college students.²² Because of the strong associations between these behaviors and sleep hygiene, reducing substance use will help students maintain healthy sleep patterns.
3. Refrain from promotion of highly-caffeinated energy drinks in dining halls and convenience stores on campus.
4. Train residence life staff to discuss expectations early on that part of being a respectful roommate is respecting the sleep needs of the other person. They can encourage roommate conversations on needs and preferences for rest and sleep. Also, students who appear to be up extremely late at night or always appear tired and groggy might need an extra check-in or a referral to resources to address either a mental health or a substance use issue.
5. Train health and counseling center staff to discuss how sleep trouble can be an indicator of other concerns. Given that sleep can exacerbate mental health problems, holistic screenings (assessing both sleep and mental health issues) in health and counseling centers might serve as a springboard for having meaningful conversations that illuminate a bigger picture of what might be impacting a student’s sleep.
6. Offer sleep workshops for students to educate them about strategies to minimize sleep disruptions. For example, using the Grayscale setting on a cellphone can decrease the stimulating nature of colors, posts, etc. on social media. One study showed that individuals who used the Grayscale setting significantly decreased their screen time, and few reported “annoyance” to using this strategy.²³ In general, students need practical tips related to using their time efficiently and decreasing procrastination, both of which can lead to nighttime anxiety and detract from getting a good night’s sleep.
7. Discuss what faculty can do, such as adjusting assignment deadlines. Many experts⁴, including Dr. Sarah Lipson, a principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Network, advise schools to revisit policies around deadlines and extensions. Faculty should consider multiple, shorter assignments and quizzes rather than relying on very few big exams, which likely exacerbate procrastination and cramming. Rather than traditional midnight and 9AM deadlines that might perpetuate the behavior of working through the night to finish an assignment, it might be prudent to set a more reasonable submission deadline, such as 5PM. Colleges should consider messaging about healthier ways to manage time and that staying up all night to study might not produce the best outcomes.  
8. Infuse information about sleep hygiene in classes through guest lectures or health center staff presentations. These can be good opportunities to correct misperceptions on the effectiveness of all-nighters, stimulants, and other “quick fixes” that can become habitual.
9. Reconsider how final exam programming is structured. Holding de-stress events at 11PM in the student center, while well-intentioned, is mixed messaging. Administrators should think about whether having study spaces open 24/7 is best for students. Putting a positive spin on health messaging by encouraging students to engage in healthy behaviors (e.g., get enough rest, eat nourishing food, and exercise regularly), rather than focusing on telling them what not to do might be more effective.

This generation’s knowledge of and fondness for better health and well-being is a facilitator of sleep conversations that campuses can use. Tapping into what matters to students already—good mental health, academic performance, and physical well-being—can go a long way. We can take the adage of “meeting students where they are” a step further by connecting their challenges to practical resources and solutions. Getting good rest is a worthwhile lesson that all of us can learn.

A commonly used tool to measure sleep quality is the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). The PSQI can serve as an efficient screening tool for sleep problems and takes about 5-10 minutes to administer.²⁴

Amelia M. Arria, Ph.D. is currently the Director of the Center on Young Adult Health and Development at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and a Professor in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health.

Kelsey O’Hara is the Training and Technical Assistance Coordinator for The Maryland Collaborative at the Center on Young Adult Health and Development at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

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