The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed seismic transformation in education, particularly for Health Professional Education (HPE). Following a decade of imaginative innovations, the pandemic disrupted education systems everywhere, accelerated adoption of online technologies, forced major institutional rearrangements to accommodate hybrid instructional models, and laid bare pre-existing inequalities in access to educational resources within and among countries.
In the report “Challenges and Opportunities for Health Professional Education in the Post-Pandemic Era”, recently published by The Lancet, my co-authors and I evaluated how transformative developments have emerged, including in competency-based education, interprofessional education, and especially the large-scale application of information technology to education.
By tracking institutional and instructional reforms, we pose two crucial questions: What has happened to Health Professional Education over the past decade, and how has the Covid-19 pandemic altered the education process?
While the pandemic did not initiate such transformations, it greatly accelerated them, and they are likely to have a long-term impact on HPE. These educational developments converge with broader societal shifts exposed and fostered by the pandemic.
The challenge is not merely to adapt to a new normal, but to proactively build a better normal. The first step in this endeavor is to develop novel ways of conceptualizing the models that could shape Health Professionals Education in the post-pandemic era.
Two main forces are driving this transformation. First, advances in educational technologies rooted in cognitive sciences are revolutionizing how we teach and learn. Second, the rapid evolution of health systems, marked by technological and organizational complexities, demands a more dynamic approach to education. The traditional notion of completing education before entering the workforce is no longer viable, as new jobs emerge and existing ones evolve faster than educational programs can keep pace.
This means that initial instruction is not sufficient to assure successful performance, either in terms of professional proficiency or of personal well-being. At the same time, new educational technologies make it possible to extend competency development beyond the traditional confines of formal full-time instruction, thus blurring the borders between the previously separate life stages of learning and work.
Taken together, the two drivers of change demand a strategic shift in higher education towards a model that could be called Education for Life, with profound implications for both instructional and institutional design.
Based on our assessment, we offer three core recommendations, the first of which highlights the importance of adopting Education for Life as a guiding principle for health professional education. The concept of Education for Life encompasses three dimensions—learning throughout life, learning to promote and restore healthy lives, and learning to live one’s own life.
The challenge is not merely to adapt to a new normal, but to proactively build a better normal.
Learning throughout life refers to education that lasts a person’s entire lifetime, rather than merely during a defined period. Traditional educational models divide the life course into separate stages for learning, work, and retirement. Closed educational systems that front-load the content and cost of education before learners enter the labor market should be complemented and eventually superseded by open systems designed to meet the evolving needs for new competencies along the entire career trajectories of health professionals.
Learning to promote and restore healthy lives is at the heart of the substantive content of HPE, which centers on developing the competencies to preserve and improve the lives and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. In other words, this is education to help the lives of others through the technical expertise and service ethic of health professionals.
The final dimension, learning to live one’s own life, highlights that part of the educational experience should enable learners to preserve their sense of purpose and mental well-being. This involves learning to balance work life and family life. It also means learning to cope with stress and adversity. Preventing burnout, however, is not only a matter of developing these individual capabilities but also of learning how to transform the organization of work in ways that promote the well-being of all team members, while promoting equity among the different categories of the health workforce. In the face of increasing workloads, adequate staffing is essential for freeing up time to manage the stress and pressures that compromise wellbeing.
If institutions providing HPE are to effectively implement the three dimensions of Education for Life, they must face the challenges and leverage the opportunities presented by technological innovations and health system disruptions, which were already present before the pandemic but have since become even more crucial drivers of change.
Health Professional Education will continue to be challenged to respond to societal concerns over health equity and to strengthen a new professionalism that incorporates concern for the individual and the community. Meeting these challenges while nurturing the core values of the healing professions should remain a vital goal for health educators.
Julio Frenk is a global public health expert and president of the University of Miami.
The average age of a college president today is sixty. That makes them too young to have participated in the major social movements of the 1960s and not too old to be keenly aware of the emotional and mental health problems reported by young people today. These leaders are now navigating the minefield of issues laid bare by student protests over the war in Gaza, including the internal and external political pressures that have pushed them into defensive positions. As they contend with conflict in the most public of ways, they should make a connection amid the chaos to something most have long advocated for: the wellbeing and personal development of their students as they stand in solidarity around an issue for which they care deeply.
Every protest movement has a wide range of viewpoints, and this does not excuse any of the bad actors or extreme views on any side of this issue. But for someone who has reported on college student mental health and wellbeing throughout the “college mental health crisis,” I cannot help but link the most active campus protests we’ve seen in years with some of the elements of emotional wellbeing we hope our young people will experience – agency, empathy, belonging and sense of purpose. The absence of these elements has created the loneliness and isolation that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy included in his young adult mental health advisory of 2021 and his book Together, wherein he discusses America’s loneliness epidemic and the healing power of human connection.
For over a decade, college students have reported a significant increase in anxiety and depression, along with high rates of loneliness, plateauing during the pandemic and remaining prevalent today. Gen Z students, who have been dubbed “The Anxious Generation,” are also feared to lack independence, to be overly tethered to their parents, and to be unable to advocate for themselves. College administrators have addressed this problem in myriad ways, from increasing mental health support resources to experimenting with co-curricular programs designed to help students build resilience and a sense of belonging. First-year programs now frequently include reflection about purpose and meaning as a way to center anxious students and give them the grace of seeing themselves in the bigger picture. Affinity groups, often organized by the school, help socially wary young adults find their people.
The students united in protest, some in traditionally opposing camps, are their own curated affinity group.
There is a connection here between students’ fervent reaction to the war in Gaza and their social and emotional health that is understandably buried in the severity of the issue and the thorny consequences of the protests. Participation in protests can improve students’ sense of belonging and identity, leading to positive mental health outcomes. “In higher education, we want students to feel like they belong to a community. Participating in activism, such as protests, allows students to be in a community with other people who share their same values and can provide them with meaningful connections to others,” wrote Dr. Samantha Smith in an op-ed for LearningWell.
The literature is particularly robust on the connection between purpose and wellbeing. Research indicates that having a purpose in life is significantly associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety and may increase resilience after exposure to negative events. To the extent that their method of protest aligns with their good intent, we should recognize that the majority of these students are standing up for the humanity of others — and that is a good thing for a generation accused of obsessing about their images on social media.
The more the movement grows, the more valid these arguments become. Given the momentum, administrators can no longer view this as the predictable behavior of certain student groups. There is something bigger going on. Perhaps most promising is that the movement is entirely student-driven. The students united in protest, some in traditionally opposing camps, are their own curated affinity group. Their passion is evidence that the teenagers who finished high school in their bedrooms and on their screens have learned to find their outside voices. Let this be a positive element in an otherwise complex and difficult leadership challenge.
Nestory Ngolle is a sophomore at Georgetown University, a biology and global health major, an EMT, and a member of the Engelhard Project Student Advisory Council. The Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning is Georgetown’s curricular approach to integrating whole-student learning and wellbeing into academic contexts — and, as Ngolle sees it, creating an environment where students can connect what they learn about the world to what they learn about themselves.
Bringing health and wellbeing into the classroom increases engagement, encourages collaboration and self-reflection, and cultivates a sense of purpose that helps students flourish across all facets of college life, he says. In late March, Ngolle joined Joselyn Schultz Lewis, Director of Inclusive Pedagogy at Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, for a presentation on Engelhard’s innovative, student-informed pedagogy at the Coalition for Transformational Education’s national conference in Washington, D.C. LearningWell caught up with Ngolle to see what his experience can teach leaders and learners in higher education.
In his first semester at Georgetown, Ngolle took a foundational biology class that happened to be an Engelhard course. “Rather than memorizing information and applying it to problems, we were applying what we learned to ourselves and our experiences. It helped students feel connected to what they learned and reflect on their own lives in relation to the academic material.” The following semester, Ngolle enrolled in a medical anthropology class, another Engelhard course. “From there, I think I sort of fell in love with the Engelhard mission,” he said. “You can see the positive impact in the classroom, in student participation, and in how students approach the work.”
Bringing health and wellbeing into the classroom increases engagement, encourages collaboration and self-reflection, and cultivates a sense of purpose.
While we tend to look to college counseling centers, peer advising, or support groups as the first frontiers of student mental health, Ngolle emphasizes the transformative potential of acknowledging and promoting wellbeing within the content and culture of academic life. In the classroom, that means inclusive pedagogy and exploring the relationship between student wellbeing and engaged learning. Engelhard’s course model invites faculty to redesign existing courses by identifying an area of wellbeing that is relevant to the curriculum. Engelhard courses exist across academic disciplines, so students of philosophy, mathematics, business, or medicine have opportunities to enroll in courses that incorporate topics such as substance use, depression and anxiety, sleep, social media use, or sexual assault into their curricula.
Crucial to this integration is getting students to understand that good grades, even superlative grades, are not at odds with wellness. Rather, Ngolle says, academic success and wellbeing can coexist and complement one another. For students like Ngolle on the pre-medical track, academic rigor and ambition have a reputation of souring into severe stress or competitive, unsupportive peer relationships. Professors can be active in dismantling this process before it begins, Ngolle says, by creating a sense of community and belonging among classmates. “Those are the people we are going to walk across the stage with in four years,” Ngolle said of classmates, who often see each other as opponents rather than as peers. A spirit of unconditional individualism, he argues, can get in the way of finding community and belonging, an essential ingredient for good mental health in college.
The end goal, as Ngolle sees it, is to arrive at a point where “all classes are centered around students and strive to cultivate a sense of health and wellness in the classroom.”
Ngolle believes that healthy behaviors, improved memory and information retention, positive peer networks, and the confidence to talk to professors or speak up in class all reinforce one another. He hopes to dismantle the narrative that students, in order to achieve a good GPA or ace their exams, must compromise their sleep, suffer under stressful conditions, and work themselves to the point of burnout. The Engelhard Project has taught Ngolle that wellbeing and care can extend into every aspect of a person’s college existence, including academic life. He now amplifies his peers’ voices as a Student Advisory Council member for the Engelhard Project, and he hopes to see the program’s reach grow. The end goal, as he sees it, is to make every course an Engelhard course, eliminating the need by arriving at a point where “all classes are centered around students and strive to cultivate a sense of health and wellness in the classroom.”
Ngolle’s experience as a student in classes that prioritize wellbeing has affirmed and shaped his ambition to pursue medicine. “Healthcare is more than just prescribing medication to a patient. It can mean connecting with patients on an individual level, being there to just sit and talk with them. These courses have led me to see patients as people: the goal is not to treat a disease; the goal is to treat a patient.”
For Ngolle, the pre-med student experience has expanded his definition of what it means to be well, both for himself and for all medical patients receiving care. His professors have “challenged student perspectives of what it means to be healthy and well. That means that going to the doctor or talking to a psychiatrist are not the only settings where we can talk about our health and wellbeing. In the classroom, we can achieve wellness — not just through grades, but through the knowledge we acquire.” Students connect more meaningfully to course material when they are able to see its relevance to daily college life, Ngolle says. That connection not only leads to better academic outcomes, but to better lives.
Clayton Spencer served as the President of Bates College from 2012 to 2023. A lawyer by training, Clayton was the vice president for policy at Harvard for seven years, and she has also served as chief education counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources.
When I arrived in Lewiston, Maine in the summer of 2012 to become the eighth president of Bates College, I was captivated by its grand landscape of manufacturing. Enormous mill buildings, most now quiet, line the city’s river and canals, their perfect rectangular forms, huge courses of impeccable brickwork, and row upon row of tall, symmetrical windows embodying the very essence of the industry they made possible. The number and sheer scale of these buildings speak to the might of Lewiston and its sister city Auburn as a textile and shoe manufacturing hub well into the twentieth century. The beauty and precision with which these structures were crafted reflect “industry” in a different sense—namely, the diligence and skill of the human beings who built the mills and ultimately worked within their walls.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had landed myself in a world whose deep logic involved “work.” Work as a beacon of hope for generations of French-speaking Canadians who saw in the mills of Maine the promise of a paycheck and a means to build new lives. Work as a source of vibrancy and community in a new country. Work in its most concrete form—making things.
Yet, I was charged with the seemingly cerebral task of leading an excellent undergraduate college devoted to the liberal arts and justly proud of its strong academic culture. How, then, was I to think about the work of the liberal arts in this particular setting? To be sure, a liberal arts education is not primarily about making things, but might it, in fact, involve making?
I found a compelling starting point in the words of Peter Gomes—Harvard professor, theologian, long-time minister of the university’s Memorial Church, and, as it happens, a Bates graduate. He died in 2011, after forty years spent sharing his wisdom with successive generations of Harvard undergraduates. About the aims of a Harvard education, he famously said: “We put the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”1 According to Gomes, we do this by helping students figure out what kind of life they wish to lead: “What is my purpose? How can my life be better? How can I help to make a better world? These are the questions worth asking, and college is one of the few places that allows you, even requires you, to do so.”2
The Logic of Purposeful Work
If motivating and equipping our students to live lives of meaning and contribution is a core purpose of the liberal arts, then work is central to the project. Whatever a person’s particular interests, choices, or constraints, most people wish to figure out a way to stay healthy and happy, to nourish human connection, and to leave the world—or at least their corner of it—better than they found it. For many people, this means, among other things, finding work that contributes to an overall sense of fulfillment, while also furnishing the practical and financial means to sustain a life.
The most important dimension of the Purposeful Work approach is the sense of agency and confidence it fosters in students.
Which is why preparing students for work and career should not be—as it has been for far too long at many excellent colleges and universities—an afterthought relegated to the waning months of senior year. (Remember the binders of banking jobs?) Nor can it be addressed by tactics alone—online hiring platforms, access to alumni networks, job shadows, internships, or industry info sessions. These practical tools are important, but only as part of a framework that locates questions about work where they belong—at the center, not on the outskirts, of the project of the liberal arts.
Purposeful work, as we came to think about it at Bates, is not a kind of work. It is not found “out there” inherent in a particular type of job or career. It can be paid or unpaid, within a family or for an outside organization, part-time or full-time, manual or intellectual, artistic or managerial. It is not “do-gooder” work, though for some individuals it might be. Rather, purposeful work is about aligning who you are with what you do and how you choose to move through the world.
Because life is a journey and we evolve over time, even as the world and ourworlds also evolve, the answers to the question of how we wish to live our lives change over the lifespan. But the essence of the exercise—learning to navigate the dynamic relationship between “self” and “world”—remains the core pursuit.
In a liberal arts setting, we give our students a great deal of choice about which courses they will take, what they will major in, and how they will populate their college experience outside the classroom. We also do our best to give them the tools to approach their choices with self-awareness, diligence, and discernment so that they can carve out a path, in college, first, and ultimately in life, that will be authentically their own.
The concept and methodology of the Purposeful Work program are built on these core principles. It is not, for instance, about exhorting students to “find their passion.” Just as purpose is not found “out there” inherent in certain types of work and not in others, it also does not typically reside within a person as a pre-existing passion waiting to be liberated. Unless, perhaps, you are Albert Einstein, or Toni Morrison, or Yo-Yo Ma.
For most ordinary mortals, purpose tends to emerge in the “doing.” This is how Richard Courtemanche, a handsewer in one of the shoe factories of Lewiston, described his purposeful work.
An average handsew[er], back in those days, in the ’60s, would probably do about twenty pairs a day. A good handsewer would do around thirty pairs a day, as he was considered to be fast.
A real fast guy, we’re talking, you know . . . thirty-five to forty pairs. I would do around sixty pairs a day, for many years. Myself and Vern, Vernon Daigle, locally, were probably the fastest handsewers. That was unheard of, what we could do. We did it because it was, it came natural, what other people would do, unnatural. So he was a good man. I learned from him, because he used to handsew quite a few years before me. I used to watch, and I’d say, I can do the same thing. And then from there I picked up the tricks that my dad used to show me, then I picked up some others, then after that, I loved it.3
Richard Courtemanche did not start with a passion for shoemaking that he unleashed on the world. Rather he waded in, he paid attention, he learned the skills, and then along the way he discovered that he was really good at stitching shoes. Only “after that,” did he come to love his work. In other words, the passion did not precede the engagement with work, it was the other way around.
Learning a set of skills or a base of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of identity formation, of becoming fully human. I can sew shoes. This is what I do. This is who I am. I am proud of it. “Myself and Vern . . . . That was unheard of, what we could do.”
For our students, most of whom have a luxury of choice that Richard Courtemanche could only dream of, purpose emerges (or not) as you try different things and get your hands dirty. But this only happens if exploration is paired with reflection. The Purposeful Work team at Bates works with students beginning in first-year orientation to ease them into the notion that the starting point for making life choices is understanding who you are and what matters to you. The staff use various tools and strategies to help students gain an awareness of their interests, strengths, and values—what brings them joy, what kind of things they know they are good at, where they are, or are not, confident in their abilities, what sorts of things they might like to try, and how much risk are they willing to take, to name a few examples.
Unquestionably, the most important dimension of the Purposeful Work approach is the sense of agency and confidence it fosters in students as they make their way through various cycles of exploration, reflection, and adaptation. These elements are specific and concrete, and students internalize the process. Based on what you’ve figured out about yourself, what kinds of work would you like to explore? Once in an internship or a job shadow, how was the experience for you, and do you wish to pursue it further? If it feels like the right field, but the wrong role, you refine your choice for your next opportunity. If the experience does not feel right at all, you move on, consciously rejecting pathways that do not align.
Learning a set of skills or a base of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of identity formation, of becoming fully human.
Not only is the Purposeful Work program built on the core values of the liberal arts, it also reinforces them. The emphasis on self-knowledge as the starting point, and the structured approaches used to develop it, puts students in the habit of making conscious choices about many aspects of their college experience—whether in the classes they choose, the activities they jump into, or the leadership responsibilities they take on. Students begin to think of their college experience itself as their “purposeful work” during the undergraduate years, even as they look toward how they will find it after graduation.4
This well-scaffolded approach is proving to be powerful for all students. It is particularly important, however, for students who may be the first in their families to go to college or have not had much exposure to a broad range of careers. From the beginning, Bates conceived of the Purposeful Work program as an important piece of its equity promise to all students. Bates is committed to providing broad access to the education it offers, and it has become much more intentional about supporting all students for academic success and full participation in the college experience. Purposeful Work adds another piece of the puzzle. A well-thought-out and well-executed approach to helping students bridge from college to work and career ensures that all students—not only those whose parents are able to connect them to networks of opportunity—have the skills and confidence to seek out career opportunities commensurate in scope and ambition with the education they have received.
Testing Our Assumptions
Bates developed its Purposeful Work program based on the intrinsic logic of a liberal arts education. Yet, the link between finding purpose in work and overall fulfillment resonates far beyond a particular set of colleges and universities and the students who attend them.
In the fall of 2018, Bates partnered with the Gallup organization to conduct a survey of nationally representative college graduates, of varying ages, career stages, and types of higher education experience, to examine how they think about purpose and work.5 Since the mid 20th-century, Gallup has explored global measures of well-being in terms of five interrelated elements: purpose well-being, social well-being, financial well-being, community well-being, and physical well-being. In examining the relationships among these, Gallup identified purpose (defined as liking what you do every day and learning or doing something interesting each day) as the most important element given its disproportionate impact on one’s overall well-being.
The Bates/Gallup study was designed to build on the existing research related to purpose well-being by specifically examining the extent to which college graduates seek purpose in their work. The findings were striking. Eighty percent of college graduates say that it is very important (37%) or extremely important (43%) to derive a sense of purpose from their work. Yet less than half succeed in finding purposeful work, and purposeful work was found to be particularly important to the younger workforce. Reflection and self-understanding are central to finding purpose—graduates who align their work with their interests, values, and strengths are three times more likely to experience high purpose than those with low levels of reflection. Finally, graduates with high purpose in work are almost ten times more likely to have high overall well-being. Only 6% of those who have low levels of purpose in their work have high levels of well-being, whereas fully 59% of those with high purpose in work have high well-being.
I offer this study not as the definitive word on a topic as deep and rich as “purpose.” Rather, I mean to describe the impulse we had at Bates, as we moved forward in developing the Purposeful Work program, to pressure-test our assumptions with a broader audience not necessarily steeped in the goals and methods of a liberal arts education.
Concluding Thoughts
We live in a world defined increasingly by complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change, where a college graduate can expect to have multiple distinct jobs before the age of 50. It is no longer sufficient or even plausible, therefore, to prepare our students for work or career based on the availability of a particular kind of first job, or on the notion of “career” as a stable and well-defined pathway through life. Instead, the ability to sustain work over a lifetime will increasingly depend on individual agency that combines the content knowledge, cognitive skills, and interpersonal abilities required for employment with a mindset of informed self-determination and adaptability.
Far from being irrelevant to preparing students for work and career, these are precisely the strengths that a liberal arts education brings to the table.
The Purposeful Work program at Bates reflects the efforts and contributions of many, including faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, and outside experts. It began with an idea and generative discussions on campus, followed by the appointment of the “Purposeful Work Working Group” that crafted its report and recommendations in 2013-14, further program development led by a small design team reporting to the President, and the creation of the Center for Purposeful Work in the fall of 2018.
To learn about other efforts across higher education focused on the education of the whole person for growth and transformation, visit https://thecte.org.
Notes
Gomes, Peter, Never Give Up! And Other Sermons Preached at Harvard, 2008–2010, ed. Cynthia Wight Rossano, Cambridge Memorial Church, Harvard University, 2011, p. 21.
Ibid., p. 41.
Richard Courtemanche, “Portraits and Voices: Shoemaking Skills of Generations,” Exhibition, Museum L-A, Lewiston, Maine (2012).
Almost half of Bates faculty have formally integrated aspects of Purposeful Work into their classes, and all Bates students at this point engage with the program over the course of their college, many in multiple ways.
Andrew Delbanco has argued that, as innovations go, the American university is a pretty distinctive one. Right up there with abstract impressionism and fast food.
But Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, worries that higher education has increasingly moved away from one of its core obligations: to help students think deeply and collectively about life’s most profound questions.
Instead, he says, “colleges and universities — without quite saying so — have begun to think of themselves more and more as vocational training institutions.”
The fate of higher education has long captivated Delbanco, author of the 2012 book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. And to be fair, as he notes in College, folks have been complaining about American higher education pretty much as long as it’s been around.
In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband that professors too often shirked their teaching duties; the state of education, she said, had never been more dire.
Still, for all the hand-wringing, colleges and universities in the US have been distinguished by their willingness to allow students to explore various interests, rather than — as in many other countries — immediately hone in on a very specific course of study. It’s an environment where folks from Condoleezza Rice to Bill Bradley have encountered people and ideas that changed their lives.
“Young people want an experience of self-discovery,” says Delbanco. “They want to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. And it’s a betrayal of the American promise to expect young people to know exactly what they want to do, what they’re fit for, and what their life is going to look like at the age of 17 or 18.”
Delbanco has spent more than 40 years as a professor, penned books on everything from Herman Melville to the Puritans, and received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. But he says he’s not concerned that fewer students now major in the humanities. Nor is he surprised that young people are drawn to science and technology.
What does worry him is that while a student is pursuing a degree, they “should be having an experience in college that allows for some kind of reflection, that allows for learning… Learning how to listen to other people with different points of view. Learning the difference between an argument and an opinion. Learning that debating with somebody is not the same thing as fighting with that person. And the classroom where those lessons are most likely to be learned is the humanities classroom.”
But as college sticker prices have skyrocketed, haven’t the humanities become an increasingly unaffordable luxury? No, Delbanco argues. “One of the things that employers are telling [colleges and universities] is: We want people who can actually work together with people with whom they disagree. We want people who understand that there are multiple perspectives on the world.”
“It’s a betrayal of the American promise to expect young people to know exactly what they want to do, what they’re fit for, and what their life is going to look like at the age of 17 or 18.”
“In an increasingly diverse society, in an increasingly global economy, we don’t only want people who can code or do actuary tables. We want people who can work productively with other human beings, and who can think creatively.”
“And as the humanities majors have been emptying out, general education becomes all the more important. Because it’s going to be the only place where students will have an experience of reading a great novel or seeing a Shakespeare play or grappling with a philosophical concept.”
Beyond that, as institutions diversify, there are more opportunities for students to splinter into identity-based groups and organizations. Foundational humanities classes provide a place to transcend those differences, a place where everyone comes together around a common text.
Over the last few years, a wave of schools have brought back core courses designed to engage with questions around meaning and purpose. In 2020, for example, Stanford instituted a requirement for first-year students: Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). The program echoed a century-old compulsory course introduced at Stanford in the 1920s, amidst the backdrop of global and national upheaval (post-WWI realignments, women’s newfound right to vote, and an enormous surge in foreign-born Americans).
“An educational model that leaves no room for a core curriculum shaped by the demands of 21st-century democracies leaves students woefully ill equipped for dealing with disagreements,” Stanford’s Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein recently noted in The New York Times.
In his role as president of The Teagle Foundation, Delbanco has sought to support these sorts of efforts around the country — at Stanford, Vanderbilt, Purdue, and nearly sixty other schools. It’s worth keeping an eye on, he says, “because I think this could be the beginning of a real change.”
Melinda Zook, a history professor who leads the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program at Purdue, agrees. “This should have always been the job of the liberal arts… To me, the point of college is to challenge you.”
The Cornerstone Program requires that first-year students — who, at Purdue, often plan to major in engineering, computer science, or business — take a sequence of two courses on transformative texts. There are usually about 30 students in each class, and texts can range across time and place, from Plato to Frederick Douglass to Virginia Woolf.
But Zook emphasizes that great texts only come alive in the hands of great teachers. So when she preps professors — who are drawn from the ranks of liberal arts faculty — she tells them to “create the class you always wanted to teach. So it gives them a lot of flexibility, and you know it’s going to fill up. It fills every time.”
Zook notes that while technical knowledge can become outdated, certain skills never will, like learning how to think, communicate, and interact with a wide range of people. One day, she recalls, “I’m walking back to the parking garage, and I bump into one of our basketball players, who you cannot miss because he’s so tall. And he’s in transformative texts. And he says to me: ‘who would have thought Plato would have been so relevant?’”
“We in the liberal arts! We thought of that,” she tells me, laughing.
But Purdue’s program has a significant, additional upside, says Zook. It creates a space in which a faculty member gets to know a small group of students. “One of the things that we do at Cornerstone is we use it as sort of a hub, where we have eyes on the students. We know their names. We know how they’re doing. And none of their other classes do, because they’re huge.”
Zook notes that, while there was a mental health crisis among students prior to the pandemic, it has gotten much worse. And building strong relationships with faculty early on can be crucial to getting students the support they need.
In Delbanco’s view, a small class that tackles big questions around a text or piece of art “can become a safe space where you can trust the teacher to teach you like a person… The teacher is not in the room fundamentally because he or she wants to show off how much they know about a given subject. They’re not in the room on behalf of the discipline. They’re in the room on behalf of the students.”
The Teagle Foundation now seeks to envelop even younger people in this effort to read great authors and ask big questions. Their “Knowledge for Freedom” program offers grants to colleges to create on-campus, humanities-focused programs for local, low-income high school students. And there are now more than 30 such programs around the country.
Delbanco sees the program changing kids’ lives. And, he says, it’s a way of “reminding them that when you go to college, you should expect this kind of experience. You should be able to ask yourself questions about justice, about how society should be organized, about what kind of life I want to lead.”
Purpose is a ubiquitous word these days on college campuses. From solicited statements on applications, to alignment with one’s major, to leadership and career development, purpose is popping up in nearly every domain in higher education. There is an entire field dedicated to purpose in the social sciences and abundant research as to its benefits, and yet, what does purpose really mean to someone who is 18, or 20 or 25?
Answering that question and applying it in the university setting has become the life’s work of Anthony (Tony) Burrow, a developmental psychologist and professor at Cornell University who runs the Purpose and Identity Processing Lab. He and his team of doctoral students are building a foundation of scientific evidence, measurement, and translation that informs the understanding of purpose so it can be incorporated into people’s lives, particularly adolescents and emerging adults.
“Research on this topic is growing and the evidence so far is clear that having a sense of purpose promotes health and wellbeing, longevity, stronger relationships, and even increases one’s earnings,” he said. “But too few of us on college campuses are familiar enough with this literature to use it effectively to engage students in courses and experiences.”
Part of the problem is the varying definitions of purpose and the way young people are assumed to know what it is and how to incorporate it into their lives. From Aristotle to Einstein to Stanford’s William Damon, brilliant thinkers have put their mark on the term. But the rest of us, particularly the college students who are frequently asked about it, may only know it as a good thing to have or strive for without any practical application. “There is a tendency for people to assume everyone shares a similar understanding of what is meant by ‘purpose’, but when you really dig into things, people don’t always mean the same thing,” said Burrow.
Burrow teaches a class called “Translating the Science of Purpose” to help decipher different interpretations of purpose. It starts with examining the deep body of literature around purpose: “its scholarly definitions, its demonstrated role in life’s outcomes, and what it is related to or unrelated to.” The second part of the class examines how we communicate about purpose, a powerful term that’s fluidity can be used to anyone’s advantage as often happens with political narratives. A collective sense of purpose can be called upon to evoke hope and change or a return to making things great again.
“Purpose isn’t so much a north star as it is perhaps a compass.”
Burrow says exploring identity is an important step to understanding purpose, (hence the lab’s name), though, as a developmentalist, he is less concerned about who you are in the current moment than who you will eventually become. “We’re trying to unpack how people understand themselves,” he said. “How is that when people start to engage with the world around them, they are able to internalize some features to say ‘that’s me—that’s who I am.’ Yet, in other cases, engagements do not become meaningful aspects of ourselves? The intricacies of identity processes are fascinating.”
For young people, these questions are particularly important, and often vexing. Burrow gives an example from his own background. “My grandfather grew up on a farm, with relatively few options of vocation available beyond being a farmer himself; and indeed he became one. For him, his identity and role were perhaps foreclosed due to lack of options. By contrast, identity may be much more of an asset today. For example, most universities offer long menus of majors and minors for young people to choose from. How should we expect they successfully navigate these choices if they don’t know something about who they are? Today, identity may be more of a requirement for navigating the experiential landscape.”
Burrow says identity and purpose are linked, but identity is often confused with purpose when, according to Burrow, it is actually codified by it. “Identities are important because they reveal insights into a person’s motivations, interests, values, and goals,” said Burrow. “But alone, those things can be static and fixed in a particular time. Whereas a sense of purpose can organize and orient aspects of your identity toward the future, and make clearer the broader intentions that drive your behavior and decisions in everyday life.’”
Part of how the lab team defines and communicates about purpose comes from studying what they believe it is not. It is associated with altruism which is often an avenue on the purpose infrastructure but it is not a prerequisite to having purpose. Researcher William Damon defines purpose as a generalized intention to accomplish something meaningful to the self with consequences to the world beyond that. While Burrow respects the definition of his friend and colleague, he sees the prosocial aspects of this definition as but one type of purpose, among many other types available to people. A purpose could be imbued with many contents and motivations for pursuing it. Some of them will be socially desirable and others may be less so—but we shouldn’t diminish the impact of purpose for the person holding it by calling it something different.
“By purpose, I don’t necessarily mean one role, or singular interest, or one ultimate value. Instead, purpose can be thought of as being capable of taking stock of all of those things when we put them together. It is a center of gravity for the various aspects of who we are and where we are heading. What does that look like? It looks bigger than merely setting goals.”
Goals often get used interchangeably with purpose, but Burrow cautions against reducing them to synonyms. Whereas goals can be accomplished, doing so does not lend itself easily to knowing what ought to happen next. It is a sense of purpose that can help align goal pursuit and clarify that once a goal is achieved, which goals ought to follow.
For Burrow, purpose is a continuous prospective state of mind – or, an intention – that propels you forward but is not ever actually accomplished. This is consistent with the theorizing of other purpose researchers like Todd Kashdan and Patrick McKnight, who articulated that purpose isn’t so much a north star as it is perhaps a compass. That is, it is a personal resource that allows you to move steadily forward through life in the direction you intend to set course.
“To apply purpose in a practical way, the question we should be asking students is not ‘what is your purpose?’ but ‘when do you feel most purposeful?’”
On its web site, the Purpose and Identity Processing Lab states,“We believe everyone has the potential to cultivate a sense of purpose,” with links to research papers that chronicle how it can be done in a variety of settings. Burrow believes weaving purpose more thoroughly and explicitly into the tapestry of student experiences is critical work for colleges and universities.
“Those of us privileged to work on college campuses have a front row seat to the development tasks of adolescence and emerging adulthood– observing how students answer questions like ‘who am I? what is my place in the world?, what will I contribute to it?’” said Burrow. “Without more intentionally engaging students’ sense of purpose we are leaving something important on the field. If we bother to ask students to articulate a purpose statement in admissions, why wouldn’t we ensure that we follow-up with them about how well we are helping them pursue it throughout their studies? To me, this seems absolutely vital.”
But fuzzy interpretations of purpose have allowed institutions to drop the ball on this. Evoking the term throughout the college experience might be good messaging but without the work behind it, purpose is more of a platitude than the self-organizing benefit Burrow describes. To apply purpose in a practical way,he believes the question we should be asking students is not “what is your purpose?” but “when do you feel most purposeful?” The question for colleges should then be “under what conditions on this campus do people feel most purposeful?” That way, patterns of behaviors and routines that lead to purposefulness can be identified, replicated, and more strategically integrated with course contents and experiential opportunities.
Burrow says that Gen Z students are ripe for this kind of intervention. He and his team run the Contribution Project where students at Cornell, and now neighboring SUNY schools, offer ideas on who or what they would contribute to if given $400 to pursue their idea. One student identified buying plane tickets for their roommate’s parents who couldn’t afford to come to graduation. Expecting a handful of students to sign up when he first introduced the idea, Burrow was pleasantly surprised that close to 200 students responded. He now invites administrators, faculty and staff to participate in an end of project showcase event to provide a window into the ways students see themselves contributing. “We could be building classes and programs around what students showed us they want to do in the world. Above and beyond their role as students, leveraging their emerging identities as contributors may provide inroads into deepening their learning and connections with key concepts.”
On campuses and in communities worldwide, students and young adults are protesting in the name of justice. Over the past ten years, we have seen college students protest after officer-involved deaths of Black Americans, for climate justice, and for the rights of women domestically and globally. While the hearts of students and community organizers are warmed at the sight of students protesting, for many higher education administrators, campus protests raise concern. Concerns that students will destroy property, students will physically clash with other groups or campus police, or that students will disrupt the learning environment. In turn, many administrators attempt to quell protests before they get started. The irony is that many of our current higher education administrators were once student protesters themselves. Some were silenced by their administrators, while others persisted amid attempts to silence them. So why silence the efforts of today’s students?
Students have been protesting and exercising activism strategies on college campuses since the 1960s. During the Civil Rights Movement, college students were involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and they were instrumental in their communities and Freedom Summer(McAdam, 1988). Students protested the Vietnam War and Apartheid in South Africa. Many students who participated in protests during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 2000s have become state and federal legislative leaders and higher education administrators. I argue that while many former protesters might not participate in protests or demonstrations anymore, many still participate in other forms of activism. They intentionally choosenot to support private sector businesses that do not align with their values (boycotting), sign petitions, donate their time and resources, and/or use their platforms and spheres of influence to advance justice whenever possible.
Some of the Boomers or Gen X-ers, who serve in many higher education leadership roles, might say that the world has become more violent and that protesting on campuses can quickly get out of control. While these concerns might prove legitimate in some cases, these instances should be treated as outliers and not the norm. I offer that persons (administrators, parents and families, or community members) might be equating protests with riots. Riots specifically involve violent features such as the destruction of property and are often not connected to a broader justice-oriented goal. Conversely, many protests are peaceful and empowering spaces, including those that our current college students attend and organize.
Late millennials and Gen Z-ers currently populate our campuses. The issues they are facing are not new, such as calls for racial justice among minoritized racial and ethnic groups, war, and the erasure of women’s reproductive rights. What is different is that the United States of America they are experiencing is the most divided we have seen in decades, and extremism is a constant presence in our socio-political environment. If the world they are facing is reaching such a critical point, why would we quell their voices?
Dr. Samantha Smith
Research has shown that participating in protests can increase students’ sense of belonging, identity development, and positive mental health outcomes.
Allowing students to scream in the name of advancing justice is deeply aligned with the values of higher education. Research has shown that participating in protests can increase students’ sense of belonging, identity development, and positive mental health outcomes (Smith et al., 2023; Hope et al., 2018; Ballard & Ozer, 2016). In higher education, we want students to feel like they belong to a community. Participating in activism, such as protests, allows students to be in a community with other people who share their same values and can provide them with meaningful connections to others. Being in community with others can promote feelings of racial pride (Phoenix, 2020). Additionally, protests can act as a source of education and exposure that allows students to develop a sense of how they want to influence their communities during or after college. Students might also garner feelings of hope and empowerment(Smith et al., 2023; Ginwright & James, 2002). Hope and empowerment have been shown to be protective mental health outcomes (Griggs, 2017). Protests also provide an emotional catharsis for students (Smith et al., 2023; Ballard & Ozer, 2016).
The elements of protesting that help to generate these positive attributes are the ability to gather around a shared cause and to freely use their voices at whatever volume they choose (Smith et al., 2023). Also, hearing from speakers or hearing the stories of others impacted by the subject of the protest enhances the communal experience (Smith et al., 2023).
We must use strategies to help students engage in conflict with love and empathy in their hearts.
While many institutions might argue that students should use traditional forms of civic engagement to exercise their voices, I argue that activism and civic engagement are not in contrast. In fact, these two concepts must work together intimately to truly advance justice. Disruptive forms of activism, such as protests and demonstrations, are used to grab the attention of lawmakers and those in positions of power. Civic engagement can capitalize on the work of activism to increase voting and discourse with change-makers. Similarly, higher education administrators can support student protests and uphold institutional values.
I hope today’s administrators who were once protesters, and those who still protest, will remember how it felt to scream for what they believed in. Administrators must encourage students to use their voices. However, with the increased knowledge and insight about the mental and physical toll of fighting for justice, administrators must also encourage students to practice self- and community care during and after protest participation.
Supporting an environment where students are encouraged to engage in activism, such as protesting, does not mean we abandon the values of our institutions. We must denounce and challenge actions and ideas such as discrimination and bigotry. In some cases, we must acknowledge that there are two sides to an argument and that multiple truths can exist simultaneously. We cannot erase the pain of history. However, we also cannot allow difference and conflict to make us forget our humanity or believe that change is impossible. We must use strategies, such as restorative practices and intercultural dialogue, to help students engage in conflict with love and empathy in their hearts.
References
Ballard, P. J., & Ozer, E. J. (2016). The implications of youth activism for health and well-being. In Contemporary youth activism: Advancing social justice in the United States (pp. 223–243). ABC-CLIO.
Ginwright, S., & James, T. (2002). From assets to agents of change: Social justice, organizing, and youth development. New Directions for Youth Development, 2002(96), 27–46.
Griggs, S. (2017). Hope and mental health in young adult college students: an integrative review. Journal of psychosocial nursing and mental health services, 55(2), 28-35.
Hope, E. C., Velez, G., Offidani-Bertrand, C., Keels, M., & Durkee, M. I. (2018). Political activism and mental health among Black and Latinx college students. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, 24(1), 26–39.
McAdam, D. (1988). Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press.
Phoenix, D. L. (2020). Black hope floats: Racial emotion regulation and the uniquely motivating effects of hope on Black political participation. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(2), 662–685.
Smith, S. A., Arria, A. M., Fryer, C. S., Roy, K., Green, K. M., & Dyer, T. V. (2023). “It Just Felt Nice to be Able to Scream”: A Qualitative Examination of the Experiences of College Students Participating in the Black Lives Matter Movement. Journal of Adolescent Research, 07435584231202216.
Thomas C. Katsouleas is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University of Connecticut, where he was the 16th president. He is also a member of the Coalition for Transformational Education, an organization dedicated to fostering opportunities for life-long wellbeing through higher education.
It is widely reported that public confidence in higher education is in decline, the reasons for which consistently line up around affordability and value. Given steep tuition increases and the resulting student debt burden, it is understandable that Americans are questioning whether pursuing a college degree is worth the investment. What is missing, however, in the increasingly polarizing debate about the value of higher education is the opportunity for colleges to improve a person’s life-long wellbeing as well as engagement in career.
As a long-term academic and former college president, I have come to believe that career development and human development are intrinsically linked and not the competing forces colleagues on both sides of this argument would like us to think. This is not based on a specific liberal arts perspective or on a romantic notion about campus traditions that lead to “the best four years of our lives.” Rather, our understanding of these mutually reinforcing dynamics stems from data that show that what we teach and how students learn influence both their level of career engagement as well as their sense of wellbeing. It should not be surprising that these two outcomes are linked and together determine whether graduates view themselves as flourishing adults.
Since 2014, Gallup has measured the post-graduation outcomes of a nationally-representative sample of more than 100,000 US college graduates, showing a link between those life and career outcomes to key experiences alumni had as undergraduates. Through the Gallup Alumni Survey (formerly the Gallup-Purdue Index), Gallup finds alumni who had experienced the “big six”: those who have had three key supportive experiences with faculty and mentors and participated in three experiential education opportunities are significantly more likely to be thriving in their post-graduation lives and their careers. The criteria for “thriving” is based on Gallup’s five dimensions of wellbeing (career, social, financial, physical, and community), all of which were influenced by how they experienced college.
Is college only about getting a job, or can it also be the foundation for a life well lived and a career that brings meaning, as so many graduates say is important to them?
These experiences include emotionally supportive mentoring and opportunities for students to connect curriculum and classroom work to real-world problem solving. The Gallup Alumni Survey results show that graduates who reported having had meaningful experiential learning and reported that “someone cared about me as a person” were more than twice as likely to report high levels of wellbeing and work engagement later in life. (Additional data show that highly engaged teams produce 21% greater profitability, providing a check in the societal ROI column.) Unfortunately, the data also show less than 5% of college graduates surveyed strongly agreed that they had both of these experiences while an undergraduate student.
These findings were reinforced in another study conducted by Gallup in partnership with Bates College designed to explore the extent to which college graduates seek purpose in their work and to identify the college experiences that align with finding purpose after graduation. The study found that 80% of college graduates say that it is extremely important (43%) or very important (37%) to derive a sense of purpose from their work. Likewise, the study showed that graduates with high purpose in work are almost ten times more likely to have overall wellbeing. Again, the disappointing caveat to this information is that less than half of college graduates reported succeeding in finding purpose in their work.
Put in this context, the life-altering decision about whether to go, or send your kid, to college becomes more complex: is college only about getting a job, or can it also be the foundation for a life well lived and a career that brings meaning, as so many graduates say is important to them? We are starting to see evidence of how high impact practices, like project-based learning that connects curriculum to real-world problem solving, is empowering for students. This type of relation-rich education, and a stronger focus on mentoring and teaching generally, increases identity, agency and belonging in current students—all of which we know can lead to improved mental health. From my experience, this can happen just as easily at Santa Monica Community College, where I received my first degree, as it can at Duke, UVA or UConn where I held leadership positions.
Less than half of college graduates reported succeeding in finding purpose in their work.
According to the National College Health Assessment, 60% of college students reported experiencing one or more mental health challenges in the last year. Mental health has become a major driver in dropping out of college, leading to one of the most egregious consequences in the college ROI debate: the large percentage of students who are loaded with debt for degrees they never received. If we are the heed the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s warning that mental health challenges are leading to “devastating effects” among young people, we need to look to every community, including higher education, that can foster the kinds of connections and experiences that will improve mental health and wellbeing.
This is where the real examination ought to occur. Given the data on what little opportunity there appears to be for the big six experiences in college that lead to wellbeing, as well as the low numbers on those who find purpose in career despite their desire, higher education needs to face a sobering fact: Perhaps the question is not: “Should people go to college?” But “Is college giving people the kind of learning and life experiences that we know to be truly valuable?”
Eric Wood currently serves as the Director of Counseling & Mental Health at Texas Christian University. With over 16 years of experience in college mental health, Dr. Wood founded TCU’s innovative Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model and has helped train over 100 colleges and universities to implement various aspects of the nationally recognized program. Dr. Wood serves on LearningWell’s Editorial Board.
As more states move to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming, there is one consideration that should be placed above political ideology: student mental health. No matter how sensitive or controversial an issue is, student counseling centers on college campuses see to students’ mental health needs without judgement, and this is true for any issue. Yet new laws recently passed by the 88th Texas Legislature reflect a very specific point of view which threatens to compromise what the data show are best practices in college mental health.
The first law is Senate Bill 17, which prohibits public colleges and universities from having diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and policies. It specifically states that these schools cannot conduct any “training, programs, or activities designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation…” When SB17 was introduced, it included an exemption for “health services provided by licensed professionals at an institution of higher education.” This part of the exception was removed, which was surprising to those of us in college mental health.
Eric Wood, PhD
Health care professionals need to talk about and provide outreach specific to race, ethnicity, and gender identity. The Texas State Occupational Code even requires licensed mental health care providers to obtain bi-yearly Continuing Education Units on multicultural issues. This is because appropriate interventions address identity. Senate Bill 17 allows schools to focus on first-generation students, students with low-income, or students in underserved populations. However, students do not define their identity by these concepts, and many mental health concerns relate to identity.
This is particularly concerning given the mental health crisis we continue to combat. The majority (73%) of college students reported moderate or severe psychological distress in 2021, according to the National College Health Assessment, and according to the National Healthy Minds Study, 60% of college students reported experiencing one or more mental health challenges in the last year.
Meanwhile, experts like Sara Abelson, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor and Senior Director at the Hope Center at Temple University, present significant research showing that sense of belonging in schools in general, and in college in particular, is protective for adolescent mental health and acknowledging and valuing one’s identity is a strong predictor of belonging.[1] Lack of perceived belonging is associated with a host of negative psychological outcomes and is a critical risk factor for suicide.[2] Conversely, strong sense of belonging has been shown to be a predictor of flourishing (or positive mental health) (Fink, 2014), particularly among African American college students. (Mounts, 2004).
“Health care professionals need to talk about and provide outreach specific to race, ethnicity, and gender identity.”
Senate Bill 17 is not only at odds with what the data show is effective, it is confusing and difficult to accommodate given other mandates such as the recent passage of House Bill 906. This bill requires that institutions of higher education provide students with information about mental health services and suicide prevention efforts on campus. This information must include education about “appropriate interventions” for a person considering suicide. Since it’s well established that individuals of various races, ethnicities, gender identities, and sexual orientations have higher rates of suicide, suicide prevention efforts need to address these groups. However, according to Senate Bill 17, providing direct outreach for these domains on campus might be perceived as excluding other students, so many counseling centers’ staff are thinking that they won’t be allowed to do this.
The 88th legislature did not intend to, and does not want to, hinder the ability of licensed health care providers to prevent possible suicides, or any other negative outcomes, on campus. Some might argue that there’s no contradiction between Senate Bill 17 and House Bill 906. I can attest that many directors of student counseling centers are confused, if not deeply concerned. If anything, clarification is needed about what licensed health care professionals can do regarding interventions that are specially designed for high-risk groups. The fact that health-care providers were originally exempt from Senate Bill 17 indicates that there was, at one point, awareness for these concerns.
Larry Moneta, EdD, served as vice president for Student Affairs at Duke University from 2001 to 2019, when he retired to a life of consulting, teaching, and grandparenting. Dr. Moneta serves as adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and teaches in the Global Higher Education Management program and the Executive Doctorate Program for Higher Education Management.He can be reached at lmoneta@gmail.com.
Sometimes, it’s all about choosing where to eat. On this particular day in 2012, I was deciding between a couple of places on the Duke University campus, with just enough time between Board of Trustee sessions to grab a bite. Fortuitously, I elected to grab a bagel in a venue in the student union where the president and vice president of The Duke Endowment (this is the Duke family endowment…not Duke University’s) also happened to be eating. At their invitation, I joined them where we engaged in a fascinating and, what would eventually become a significant, conversation about the status of students’ mental health.
The leadership of the Duke Endowment had apparently been following the news of rising suicides, greater expression of vulnerability and declining overall mental health of students and wondered to what I attributed all of this. I shared my thoughts which included concerns about over-protective parents, over-scheduled children, excessive use of technology and social media, overwhelming and global news dissemination, persistent and pronounced hate incidents, and more. In response to questions of solutions to this crisis, I offered vague but unclear ideas about population-level, preventative interventions rather than simply relying on more counselors and other forms of distress response efforts. We began focusing on resiliency-building techniques rather than disease response approaches.
At the urging of my luncheon colleagues, I began to develop a proposal for a research study that would lead to the development of population-level interventions to strengthen students’ resiliency. Over the course of that year, this idea germinated into a multi-million-dollar proposal that involved nearly 20 faculty and administrators, engaged four colleges and universities, and focused on tracking the undergraduate class of 2018 through their entire collegiate experience. The Student Resilience and Well-Being Project collected data on more than 6,600 variables across 11 waves of data collection from more than 2,000 students.
Unfortunately, just as our efforts to summarize and disseminate our findings were about to happen, the Covid crisis hit, and all attention was justifiably diverted to addressing that pernicious situation. Ironically and alarmingly, the post-Covid conditions on college and university campuses make this work even more important and valuable. According to the American Psychological Association:
“By nearly every metric, student mental health is worsening. During the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, according to the Healthy Minds Study, which collects data from 373 campuses nationwide (Lipson, S. K., et al., Journal of Affective Disorders, Vol. 306, 2022). In another national survey, almost three quarters of students reported moderate or severe psychological distress (National College Health Assessment, American College Health Association, 2021).”
The article goes on to identify a variety of approaches campuses are taking to address this issue. Unfortunately, most efforts seem more reactive than proactive, requiring more and more precious resources which have begun to dwindle as Covid emergency relief funds dissipate.
In the years since the completion of our Resiliency and Well-Being Study, many of the faculty and staff associated with the project have retired or moved on to other roles and assignments. I retired in 2019 but remain active as a consultant and teacher and have been involved with various approaches to virtual and campus-based healthcare. It seems clear to me that the outcomes of our study and the key areas of intervention identified by the study are more important than ever.
The study identified four key foundations of resilience as noted in this graphic.
The Duke Endowment publication notes several initiatives that were launched towards the end of the study period, based on preliminary findings that confirmed the influence of these four focal areas. But, years and the impact of Covid have passed since that time, and a fresh look at potential interventions guided by these findings is warranted. In the rest of this article, I want to offer my thoughts, as someone with 50 years of collegiate student support experience, on further ways to address the campus mental health crisis based on our findings.
Self-Control (Self-Regulation)
Can colleges really teach or even modestly influence students’ self-control? Vulnerability to negative influences seems well-established by high school age, so the challenge to campuses is to reverse a years-long period of social conformity and group-think mentality. We’ve struggled with students’ alcohol consumption and substance abuse for as long as I’ve been an administrator…and much longer. I do believe that campuses have made a difference but can do much more to establish a culture with reduced peer pressures and reduced willingness by students to conform to destructive behaviors.
“Being resilient doesn’t mean never failing.”
Creating a culture and climate of positive self-control—one where most students will make behavioral choices that conform to their values and ideals, rather than submit to the will of others—requires persistence and patience. There’s no inoculation for foolish or dangerous behaviors and occasional but measured risk-taking is well-recognized as part of the journey to maturity. But diminishing overt hazing, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct and other common, destructive aspects of American collegiate behavior is essential. In my experience, the practices that have had the best effect to achieve this objective include:
Surrounding incoming students with peer influencers and mentors who model healthy behaviors, reinforce messages of self-empowerment, and invite healthy forms of engagement. The selection and training of resident assistants, for example, at residential campuses is key. The same is true for peer academic advisors, orientation leaders, and any students who serve as mentors and advisors to entering students.
The development of communities that are self-governed and guided by principles of inclusion, care, and forgiveness. Again, residential campuses have a great opportunity to accomplish this through residence hall models that foster small and frequent gatherings. The science of space[1] can inform how best to create physical spaces that foster these exact conditions. Non-residential campuses can accomplish the same through learning cohorts, clubs and organizations, study groups, and other facilitated group gatherings.
Adjudication practices that are less punitive and more educational with a focus on self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-compassion. Early intervention at the point of modest miscues can offer opportunities to prevent irrecoverable disasters.
Well-being coaches who can work with teams of students on nutritional guidance, fitness plans, stress avoidance, relief tools and more.
Faculty development programs that inform faculty about the science of self-control, encourage the development of effective time management skills for students and advise them how to respond to early indications of procrastination and incomplete assignments.
As may be obvious, moving the needle on a culture of self-control requires campus-wide coordination and consistency. Messaging about institutional values and norms regarding student behaviors must begin with enrollment recruitment messaging, continue through onboarding processes, and extend through academic and co-curricular student engagement. Healthy behaviors need to be modeled by peer and professional staff, by faculty and by deans. Even alumni who might signal historical patterns of behaviors perhaps previously tolerated but now recognized as inappropriate must be ‘re-educated.’ For campuses with significant graduate and professional students in attendance, customized versions of this approach may be useful as well. This is especially true where graduate students represent a significant part of the instructional staff.
With a new crop of students arriving each year, socialized by mass media, ill-informed peers, and romantic historians (their parents), the process of acculturation to healthy norms and of reinforcing the positive attributed of self-control is ongoing. Measures of changing patterns of behavior are available and should be part of a campus analysis of movement towards good community health and well-being.
Academic Engagement
Our study, unsurprisingly, found that students who were most excited and most engaged by their studies were also among the healthiest of our students. Being academically engaged doesn’t mean having the highest grades (though engaged students do tend to score above average). These students, in the words of one of our researchers, have a ‘gusto’ for their studies. They love what they’re learning and can’t wait to get back to it. For faculty, in particular, having a classroom full of engaged students is the holy grail!
Recent research by Gallup-Purdue University offers insights into practices which stimulate academic engagement and post-graduate career and personal success.
The findings highlight the importance of faculty who are great teachers, who actually get to know their students, and who provide opportunities for project work, in collaboration with others, for more than a brief period of time. Guided immersion into some intellectual effort is key.
In addition to caring and engaged faculty, students benefit from a variety of mentors which can include alumni, campus administrators, and volunteers from the local community. The development of practical skills through apprenticeships and internships is also critical as is leadership and followership opportunities through campus clubs and organizations.
“Sometimes you have to break a model to build a better model.”
This study focused on the power and influence of engagement in the academic realm, but in my experience, engagement across the campus environment is equally advantageous. The students whom I knew to be deeply involved in athletics, campus newspapers, community service, campus social groups, and more always seemed to me to be among the healthiest. Of course, there are outliers…I know plenty of students who were highly functioning alcoholics. But it was always quite clear to me and my colleagues that disaffected students struggled the most while engaged students thrived.
The broad literature on ‘belongingness’ (space limitations prohibit from a full treatment in this article) reinforces the findings on academic (and non-academic) engagement. The stronger the sense of belongingness at and to an institution, the greater the likelihood of engagement and well-being.
Self-Compassion
Being resilient doesn’t mean never failing. In fact, I imagine that healthier people are more self-confident and are prone to taking calculated risks. On campus, self-confident students pursue leadership roles, try out for lead roles in campus stage productions, take more challenging courses and take greater advantage of all the opportunities available to them. But self-confidence doesn’t always equal self-compassion, and inevitable failures, especially among the most ambitious students, can result in extremely debilitating consequences.
Our study showed that students who scored highest on self-compassionate scores also scored highest on our overall well-being indices. This means that healthy students accepted their failures but didn’t wallow in them. They learned from their mistakes, gave themselves grace for their missteps and moved on. If only we were all so kind to ourselves!
Can self-compassion be taught to all students? Absolutely! There’s considerable evidence of the relationship between mindfulness practices and self-compassion reinforcing the value of mindfulness training for all students as a campus-wide practice. In my time at Duke University, members of our counseling staff developed a program called Koru Mindfulness (now The Mindfulness Institute) which was promoted widely among first-year students. For other students, faith-based practices and engagements offer support for self-kindness and compassion. Athletics teams have begun to adopt self-compassion awareness to assist with recovery from losses and academic advisors are increasingly being trained to assist students with recovery from exam and course underperformance.
Relationships
What’s better than good friends? And I don’t mean all those Facebook or other social media friends! When it comes to the power of friends as stimulant for health, it’s not about the numbers. Having even one or two really good friends—friends who will look out for you, forgive your missteps, and celebrate/grieve with you unconditionally—makes a huge difference, according to our study. This may seem pretty obvious to all of us, but institutional efforts to promote friendships aren’t quite so simple.
Sometimes you have to break a model to build a better model. For example, at Duke, I discovered through our ongoing assessments that every year, more and more incoming students were pre-selecting a roommate rather than letting one be assigned to them randomly. Digging into the data, I discovered that most who chose this option were white students and mostly from wealthy families. This wasn’t too surprising as these students had the social capital to meet other students at summer camps or from their high schools and chose to room with one another rather than risk assignment with someone perceived to be ‘less compatible.” The problem, in addition to the self-segregation outcome, was that these roommates rarely actually became friends. The superficial characteristics they had in common rarely served as the foundation for a good friendship so, in time, these relationships drifted apart.
Given what we learned, we made a change. With the support of institutional leaders, we prohibited the pre-selection of roommates and mandated random assignments of all students (with some exceptions among varsity athletes). I also enlisted the support of a faculty member who had previously conducted research around roommates, friendships and diversity of relationships who agreed to track the consequences of the random assignments. It was gratifying to learn that random assignments lead to longer-lasting friendships and greater appreciation of differences among students from varying identities and cultures.
Residential campuses have ample opportunities to sponsor options for exposure to potential friends and non-residential campuses can do so through various student clubs and organizations. The point is to be deliberate about connecting students in pairs, teams, and communities. The student projects mentioned in the academic engagement foundation can also help forge friendships. The quality of a campus environment can also encourage friendship development. One of my first projects at Duke was to convert a passageway that promoted unengaged movement into a beautiful plaza where students (and others) preferred to stop, relax, and converse with those around them. I’m a huge proponent of campus architecture, both indoors and outside, that foster connections and engagement.
The four foundations I’ve noted are proven elements that promote students’ well-being. I’ve shared a few practices that align with the principles embedded in each foundation, but every campus will have their own approaches. If your campus has uniquely addressed one or more of these foundations, I’d love to hear about it!
[1]Strange CC, Banning JH. Designing for Learning : Creating Campus Environments for Student Success. Second ed. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass; 2015.
