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.”
David McGhee has an interesting way of looking at the world. In talking with the Chief Executive Officer of the Steve Fund, it is clear he strives to see beyond popular narratives and predetermined judgements. In his new role, he hopes to bring together “unlikely allies and unusual suspects” to continue to address the issues to which he has dedicated his career – poverty, equity, and the flourishing of young people.
The Steve Fund is the nation’s leading organization focused on supporting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people of color. McGhee believes his previous work in government, community service, and philanthropy prepared him well for this work which he calls “the crisis of our time.” Since its founding in 2014, The Steve Fund has been a major influencer in higher education’s ability to understand better the determinants of mental health issues in young people of color and their unique help-seeking behaviors, with research and recommendations such as the Equity in Mental Health Framework, which they created with the Jed Foundation.
McGhee plans to strengthen the organization’s commitment to transformational change by focusing on outcomes as opposed to outputs, the former being the more sustainable result. To get there, he wants to expand the Steve Fund’s partnerships with people and organizations that he says need to be part of the conversation but may not have been invited in. He talks of enabling a set of conditions that make any strategy possible. It is an approach that McGhee learned early on as a young black man navigating poverty on his way to achieving his own personal outcomes.
David McGhee
Marjorie Malpiede: What was your career trajectory before coming to the Steve Fund?
David McGhee: My background is primarily in philanthropy. It really set the direction for the course of my career. After earning my undergraduate degree in public administration and public policy, I set out to work in the nonprofit and government sectors focusing on child wellbeing and also influencing public policy. Having come from concentrated poverty myself, I bring to this work a commitment to transformational change so that opportunity becomes systemic, not random or transactional. This is where my passion lies.
Early on, I was an intern in the executive office of Michigan’s first female governor, Jennifer Granholm. I had an opportunity to meet the governor, and we were in her office, and I remembered something she had on her wall. It was a receipt from a lawn care service she had employed when she was running for Governor and the lawn care provider had written on it, “Don’t forget the little people” and she framed it. I was just an intern, but I actually believed I had the most important job in the executive office. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM every single day my job was to open every piece of mail addressed to the governor, read it, either route it to their proper department or craft a response on behalf of the governor. That job helped me develop an understanding of rural poverty as opposed to urban poverty. I knew what urban poverty was. That was my lived experience. But this helped me understand residents’ concerns throughout the entire state, which in many ways is applicable across the country. Those things really stuck with me.
Following my internship, I was offered a job with the governor which I respectfully declined. Many people thought that I was crazy but I came back to my local community in Detroit to work at Big Brothers Big Sisters and I did that for seven years. In the neighborhood I grew up in, if you wanted out, you either played sports or you sold drugs. I had had the opportunity to go to college and it was important for young kids in my neighborhood to see that. From there I had an opportunity to work for a member of Congress and I learned a lot. I knew the amount of money that sat in the federal government and how hard it was to trickle down. I knew what nonprofits needed. And then I found my sweet spot in philanthropy. I worked seven and a half years in private foundations, and spent about a year and a half in family foundations, working for a high net-worth family in Seattle, Washington.
MM: Now that you are at the Steve Fund, what are your main priorities?
DM: The Steve Fund exists to promote the mental health and emotional wellbeing for our young people, and, in our case, young people of color. I’ve also layered in not only promoting, but really protecting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of this population. And we do so in three ways. One is by transforming environments. We know young people will occupy environments, whether it’s college campuses, or employer partners, or the community. How do we make sure that we can support the transformation of environments so young people feel as if they belong? Two, we provide resources and skill-building to ensure that families, caregivers, and young people themselves actually have the tools and resources to navigate this life at this moment. And then lastly, we shape the field by normalizing the conversation around mental health. How are we removing the stigma around it?
My job is to strengthen these assets by creating a set of enabling conditions that are really ensuring that there’s organizational efficiency and effectiveness. We are one organization in this entire ecosystem contributing to the overall mental health and emotional wellbeing. So how do I make sure that we can manage every aspect of our organization towards a unified whole and achieve the results through performance efforts? How do we commit to organizational learning and agility? We need to be flexible. We need to be nimble and responsive in this moment.
I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve?
And then importantly, how are we catalyzing and supporting strategic partnerships? How are we bringing together unusual suspects and unlikely allies? How do we establish, encourage, and engage in partnerships that build continuity, otherwise unattainable on our own? And this to me means being willing to go into places other organizations may not be willing to go, to have conversations other organizations may not be willing to have, and to have those conversations with different audiences that some people may shy away from.
MM: What, in your opinion, are some of the things young people of color need in order to thrive in these environments?
DM: What do I believe young people need? If there was a magic wand that I had, then I could identify a handful of things that would contribute to better outcomes – but I might start with agency, readiness and connection. I think young people would benefit from agency to be able to make decisions on their own to feel empowered. I think they need to be prepared to take advantage of opportunities presented to them, and I also think that the environments they go into need to be ready. I fundamentally believe that when we want to work towards the power of achieving outcomes, they’re achieved in one of five ways. Either change behavior, shift attitudes, create better conditions, improve knowledge, or equip people with more skills. If a young person enters an environment that has prioritized these things, at least some of these things, I think that they are set up for success.
To really understand this better, we are continuing to rely on one of our strengths – and that is to use survey research to examine the attitudes of both students and families. We think it’s an important time to ask these questions coming out of the pandemic and the post affirmative action decision. It also allows us to explore different issues within different population groups that maybe we hadn’t thought of before. For example, I’ve become fascinated by the lack of data – or at least what I’ve been exposed to – around student athletes. Have we thought through what it might mean for a young person whose skills and gifts and talents have earned them a college scholarship, but they now find themselves in a campus environment that’s totally different from the environment that they were reared in? What does it mean for an inner city Chicago student to now be at the University of North Dakota? Just using that as an example, or vice versa. What does it mean for a standout high school student in Iowa to find themselves in New York City? Some of it is different by race for sure, but some of it is also situational.
Another area that’s rarely explored is the different generational issues among students of color. There’s some first-generation college students whose families see this as such a phenomenal opportunity that a lot of the skills and the resources and support they have are beyond measure, right? However, depending on your environment, there’s a level of stress and anxiety for non-first generation college students. What if I’m a fifth generation college student and everyone in my family had a history of performing at Yale and then I’m here and my experience is not quite the same?
I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation.
MM: You strike me as someone who looks beyond the obvious or the commonly accepted. Would you say that’s true?
DM: Yes, though it is not to suggest that I’m right, but I actually think it comes from my experience: one, having to navigate poverty, because I always had to find another way. I just naturally had to find another way. But then it also came from my decade or so in philanthropy. Many philanthropic organizations throughout history were complicit or had simply gone along with current conditions. But many of our nation’s wealthiest foundations and their respective namesakes built their wealth by defying the odds — by not going with the status quo. Henry Ford said, “Many, many moons ago, if I would’ve asked the people what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.”
How do we strike the right balance between, “yep, this is what’s presented. This is the status quo” to have we thought about, have we considered, there’s also a layer beneath that? If we don’t dig, we run the risk of not getting the full story. I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation.
MM: Are you hopeful we can bring different viewpoints together in these polarizing times?
DM: One of the best leaders that I’ve ever known and worked for, a woman by the name of Tanya Allen, would often give this analogy around 70, 20, 10, especially when it came to coalition building and alliances. It was this notion of 70% of the things that we want for children, even if we’re on a different perspective or different side of the aisle, we can agree on. There may be 20%, depending on the day or the context, that we’ll never agree on, right? And there may be 10% that’s negotiable depending on what the conditions are. The problem is – oftentimes we start at the 20% as opposed to starting at the 70%.
MM: Issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) obviously impact the mental health of young people of color. What is your opinion on the way this is being debated in higher ed today?
DM: I actually don’t think it’s a diversity issue that we need to solve. I actually think it’s a disparities issue, because the minority today could be the new majority tomorrow. I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve? In a college environment that exists to provide a high quality education, is there any population here that suffers from some type of disparity in their ability to receive that? And can we get to a place where we agree on minimizing those conditions?
To learn more about the Steve Fund, visit stevefund.org
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?”
In May of this year, Dr. Zainab Okolo became Senior Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Government Relations at the Jed Foundation, the nation’s leading nonprofit that protects emotional health and prevents suicide for teens and young adults. It was not just a new job for Okolo, who had previously led the Lumina Foundation’s work in student mental health, it was an inaugural position for the Jed Foundation which has moved from being a memorial initiative for a beloved son to the leading suicide prevention program in college mental health, to a national and international advocate for wellbeing strategies that support young people. The arrival of Okolo signals both the rising importance of external policies in youth mental health and college mental health, and the organization’s own expansion into public affairs.
When Okolo, Ed.D., LCMFT, who is a licensed therapist, led Lumina’s student mental health portfolio as a strategy officer, she designed and established the foundation’s mental health partnerships and investments while advising key stakeholders, including the U.S. Department of Education (ED), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), the American Council on Education (ACE), and the Steve Fund.
She will now lead JED’s growing Advocacy and Government Relations function, leveraging key relationships with external networks to strengthen the organization’s national and state-level presence in advocating for new federal, state, and local support for a comprehensive approach to mental health and suicide prevention. Okolo led the Jed Foundation’s first policy national summit in October of this year which resulted in the foundation’s new Youth Mental Health Policy Strategies.
LW: This was a big move both for you and JED. How do you feel several months into the job?
ZO: Oh, it feels full circle. I feel very fortunate as a marriage and family therapist for over a decade and having worked in higher education and those finding those two passions intersecting – — I feel very lucky. I’ve only been with Jed now for six months and we’ve made some incredible strides, but as I tell my team, I’m building on 20 plus years of just fantastic work that JED has done with institutions, with high schools, with other private sector entities so I’m building on a very solid foundation and I feel very fortunate to have this ground to build on. I also feel really energized that there’s a constant sense of urgency when it comes to mental health work and advocacy; when you’re watching the data, when you’re watching the news, when you’re specifically focused on youth, there’s always a sense of urgency. There’s always a drive to create the solve sooner rather than later. Because what our suicide trends and rates are telling us is that there is an urgent need. And for me, for as long as my career and time will allow, my goal is to create impact and change to bring suicide to zero. And I’m glad that I work at an organization that also has that as its North Star mission.
LW: The new position signals an expansion of JED’s work. Do you feel this was a natural evolution?
ZO: I do think that the pivot towards having an inaugural position focused specifically on policy, advocacy and government relations was really just a nod to the time that Jed found itself in within the national landscape. As you know, Jed Foundation has been a mental health advocacy organization that has been around for two decades now, focused on youth mental health and suicide prevention. And a lot of the work that Jed did was specifically targeted at ensuring colleges and universities had the appropriate programming and supports to serve youth mental health, resources and needs.
Jed has since expanded into working within high schools, and it’s done a lot of work to inform the ways mental health services are provided even in elementary schools, so across the K-20 pipeline. But Jed did all of this under the then existing stigma around mental health. So again, think 20 years ago when this started, when the Satow family unfortunately lost their son Jed to suicide, this was at the height of us turning a blind eye to what we already knew were challenges around youth mental health and the conversations that we just weren’t willing to have as a nation. Now, fast-forward to the pandemic exacerbating a lot of those preexisting needs and demanding that we have systemic approaches in which we are strategically looking at ways to scale programs like Jed Campus. It only made sense for Jed to bring someone in that could help them think through some of that planning and engage state and federal level actors and make considerations for what it looks like to appropriately inform policy. Before I came on, we had what as “a coalition of the willing,” that took on some of this work, but having a separate portfolio for it I think was just about timing and again, watching what the nation really needed.
“I think we take for granted the job that stigma did on our college campuses on the topics of mental health and suicide prevention.”
LW: In what ways will the organization work on policy and with what stakeholders?
ZO: I might start with funding. From my work at Lumina, and now at Jed, the question is where does investment in mental health go? And where will that investment make impact in the larger work in terms of increasing access to mental health resources or helping to solve for the rising rates of suicide amongst younger and younger citizens? One of the things that we have to make consideration for is how we sustain programming nationally. We’ve had conversations with Department of Education, we’ve had conversations with the Department of Health and Human Services. Beyond that, we’ve also thought about research. What are the indicators that we’re looking for to determine success within mental health programming and implementation? We’ve had conversations with SAMHSA, we’ve had conversations with the CDC, we’ve also had conversations with state level folks so when I think about policy, I think not only about federal policy and the national landscape, I think about our, our many little countries, AKA our states.
I say that because there is huge variation in how states invest in mental health and what they choose to invest in. Some states have done a lot of work around increasing programmatic functions and presence like Jed on college campuses and within institutions, while others have leaned heavily into bringing in teletherapy supports to their campuses where it made sense, like in New Jersey, for example.
It feels like a moment of opportunity where it is all hands on deck and everyone has a role to play in making sure that the way we look at mental health is from a collective bargaining approach and that it is seamless in its implementation.
LW: Regarding COVID funds, is there a sense that there’s an appetite for making sure that whatever we invested in mental health, particularly on big state institution campuses, will continue in some fashion? Is this a concern?
ZO: I think that that’s an opportunity. I think there’s an opportunity for there to be additional investments in mental health, particularly within states. And not just limited to state institutions, but also private institutions, community colleges especially, and even minority serving institutions. I do think though that the funding that’s coming from governors who have had a chance to call out separate budgets for mental health, that’s what we’re really watching closely and seeing how those budgets within states have made impact and driven forward some of the mental health initiatives by state. Because of those investments, JED has collaborated with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) to create a mental health learning community whereby states figure out how to go about investing that funding, how to make impact within their state, how to read and then interpret the data around the needs of youth within their state and what partnerships were appropriate to make now that they had some additional funding to support that work that they’re doing. That partnership in particular that we have with SHEEO will help us inform future investments. So my biggest priority is making sure that when we do have funding, that we know what to do with it and we know what’s working within the nation. Otherwise, we run the threat of not being able to appropriately defend what we’re investing in and how impactful those dollars really can be.
LW: Drawing on all of the work you’ve done in mental health, what would you say are the most important things we need to work on?
ZO: I think first about two things. One is messaging and the other is representation. Messaging first. I think we take for granted the job that stigma did on our college campuses on the topics of mental health and suicide prevention. It stopped a lot of work that could have been going on before we had a real crisis on our hands. And so what I never want to ever see happen again to us as a nation is where we get silent about our very basic human needs, which include mental health. It was almost like we were daring to say to each other at one point that the pandemic happened, get over it, let’s move forward. And we know what the data told us about the enrollment crisis, and we knew about what youth were saying about not wanting to return to business as usual. The CDC’s release of data that had suicide rates as low as 10 years old and the second leading cause of death for 10 year olds in 2022 – what that taught us was that we can’t afford to not have these conversations consistently and invariably. We can’t afford to talk student success or student persistence or completion without first considering mental health and the necessary supports.
I think that then we can start to talk about sustainability and implementation. If I had a magic wand, both financial and otherwise, I would double or triple the current practitioner workforce right now. There is such a shortage when it comes to ensuring that there are enough practitioners to meet the demand that we’re now finally tuning our ears to hear. And then within that demand, ensuring that there’s appropriate representation, not only representation in terms of diversity, equitable representation of diverse, racially diverse practitioners on all college campuses, but also diversity in modality. A psychiatrist versus a therapist versus a social worker have very different functions in the same way that if you broke your leg, you wouldn’t just go to CVS. You would want a specialist to help you with perhaps your very unique challenge.
I think the other piece that we can expand on as well is how we go about training non-mental health practitioners to recognize when students or youth need help, making training the trainer models more consistent. And we have a few frameworks that exist in the ether, but making sure that they’re consistently available across college campuses is critical because what we’re hearing from faculty and staff alike is that not only do they want to be able to help students, they want to be able to serve them appropriately, but they need the appropriate training and they need to know where to go themselves when they need help. So those are some of the issues we need to invest time and money in.
LW: Fundamental to JED’s work has been equity and access topped by the Equity in Mental Health Framework. Where does that work stand now?
ZO: Back in 2000 when JED was established, one of the first priorities was to ensure that the work that we were doing was equitable and accessible to all students. In 2017, building upon our existing comprehensive approach, we developed the equity and mental health framework in partnership with the Steve Fund, which provides recommendations and implementation strategies to colleges and universities to better support the mental health of students of color. And the way this shows up in the work that we do every day with college campuses is we do pre and post assessments. And within the pre-assessment work that we do, we always ask schools specific things, such as what representation looks like on their campus, how they feel best poised to serve students of color and students with intersecting identities including LGTQIA students, for example, what does it look like in terms of leadership and advocacy? Is there diversity there and how does that play into the mental health of students of color?
We’ve made this a priority because of what we know from the data. Students of color are disproportionately impacted when it comes to mental health because of some of the systemic barriers that they already face outside of the college campus such asbeing more likely to be first generation students and not having a plethora of firsthand role modeling on their college campuses unless they choose to go to an HBCU or another MSI. And so we wanted to make sure that when we thought about the work that we’re doing, that this was baked into all of it and if we remain that thoughtful, then all students benefit from those strategies. And it has definitely remained a key part and a key focus of our work. The other thing that I’ll mention is more recently we’ve had to double down on that commitment given some of the challenges that we’ve seen play out over the last year or so, the SCOTUS decision and the striking down of affirmative action, looking at certain Senate bills within Texas and Florida, for example, that struck down DEI initiatives, some of which directly impact the programs and the folks that we work with on campuses. So we are waving a flag that the journey towards equity and equality across a couple of different facets is not over. And when it comes to mental health, we have to be bringing that to the forefront and calling it out if we are serious about serving all students with equity and fidelity.
When your house is burning, it feels like the whole world is on fire. That is how one student described her experience since October 7, when the heated protests and divisive debates over the war in Gaza erupted on her campus and on campuses across the country. For many students like her, the conflict is personal, it is political, and it is tangled up in all the things she is already struggling with: finding her identity, navigating friendships, and striving to retain intellectual curiosity while also feeling really angry.
For higher education, the Israel-Hamas war has rocked its own foundation, exposing not just elephants in the room but real wooly mammoths like the definition of free speech, the role of the presidential pulpit in geopolitical events, and the degree to which institutions tolerate or enable extreme political views. All of these issues relate to the overall wellbeing of students and of campus communities, issues that have emerged as important priorities for colleges and universities given the rates of anxiety and depression students, and faculty and staff, have been reporting.
It would seem there would be no better time for campuses to be working on those elements that we know help humans flourish, such as empathy, civility, community and self-awareness. But very little of that is cutting through the vitriol, blame, and anger that are unavoidably replayed on non-silenced screens. How can higher education use this moment in time, and others before it, to understand some of what is happening and to begin to heal through the power of its own resources and assets? LearningWell asked a number of people what they think. Here is our first guest interview.
Gene Beresin, MD, MA, is executive director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a full professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and senior educator in child and adolescent psychiatry at MGH.
LW: What is your reaction to the way the conflict in the Middle East is playing out on college campuses?
GB: Colleges are places that can raise issues that are highly controversial, that involve conflict, that generate high levels of emotion and that require civil conversations. We want college campuses to be places where students feel safe enough to speak their minds, to disagree in ways that are interesting, that engage them. The problem in this particular instance with the war between Israel and Hamas is that I don’t think that there has been sufficient attention given to how to deal with conflict.
We try to teach our younger kids social emotional learning, principles of wellbeing, controlling our own emotions such as rage, shame, humiliation, passion, and in ways which are helpful. But what’s happened here in my view is that lines are being drawn in the sand. The students have been taking sides. And even though the leadership of many colleges have said, “we want this to be a safe place, and that there’s no room for terrorism or hatred or brutal behavior,” I have not heard much at all about principles of conflict resolution. It seems to me that students on both sides of the issue need to understand that there’s tremendous power to resolving conflict and dealing with conflict. And there are principles, for example, of noting the appreciation of differences, of acceptance, of tolerance, and the ability to love and respect each other despite our disagreements. But that does not seem to be happening. I’ve heard a lot about free speech. I’ve heard a lot about the right to express your own opinions. I’ve heard a lot of platitudes, but I have not heard anything about principles.
LW: How would these principles apply on college campuses today where disagreement appears to be the only thing people are focused on?
GB: We need to hold open conversations and active listening to both points of view. If we take a pedantic view of this and we look at history, both the Palestinians and the Jewish people in that region, both groups of people have been conquered, oppressed, displaced and brutalized by outside influences. If you look at it, there’s a lot in common between the Palestinian people and the Jewish people and we should take a step back and appreciate both points of view.
“I’ve heard a lot about free speech. I’ve heard a lot about the right to express your own opinions. I’ve heard a lot of platitudes, but I have not heard anything about principles.”
Principle two is avoid being judgmental. When one is a subject of criticism or rage or a personal affront from a mental health standpoint, there’s the risk of feeling blamed, devalued, shamed, humiliated. When on the defensive, the impulse is to counterattack. It basically fires up the amygdala and the fight or flight response, and it doesn’t generate oxytocin, which is the kind of neurochemical that brings us together.
Another principle is having frequent conversations that are under control. Many of the protests that I’ve seen have not been well controlled. They’ve been people screaming at each other. We’re not going to get anywhere by screaming at each other. We’re not going to resolve conflict. Another principle is learning to apologize. If I’ve offended you, if you’ve offended me, there’s tremendous power in apologizing for lashing out, for attacking another point of view. And what do you have to lose? Nothing really. You have a lot to gain by seeing what’s in common and by making one’s own reparations. I think that’s another principle of conflict resolution that I have not seen much of at all.
Violence should, in every case, not be tolerated. Not tolerated in the Middle East, not tolerated in the United States, not tolerated on college campuses. And violence, I mean in word as well as in deed. Name-calling, attacking personally, ruthless behavior should be unacceptable.
I think another principle is that the solution to this problem is not going to be easy, and it’s not one side giving into another or one side being right or one side being wrong. It’s complicated, it’s nuanced. It requires accountability. You don’t resolve a conflict like this by a win or a loss. You resolve it in a way that leaves some things unresolved by demonstration of empathy, putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. I have not heard much at all from anyone including administrations or studentprotesters, about empathically understanding what the other side has endured. I can’t stress it enough. If the students can’t empathize with the impact of these horrifying events, if they can’t see that the trauma that’s happened to virtually everyone is extraordinarily traumatic, extraordinarily sad, extraordinarily dehumanizing, then we’re not going to get anywhere.
We want our kids from toddlerhood through young adulthood and beyond to understand principles of having civil conversations. And for the most part, these have not been civilized. So is there demonstration of respect? When you’re all fired up, you don’t demonstrate respect. And when you don’t demonstrate respect, you foster trauma, you foster distrust, dishonesty in some sense, and saying things that are hurtful and traumatic to other people. We should be able to respect differences. We try to teach our young children to take turns, to use the golden rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don’t see much of that. I’m getting back to basics here. Basics that are psychological principles and principles of conversation and understanding that we want to teach kids from toddlerhood through adulthood.
Another principle of civil conversations is telling stories. What we’ve learned from all of our major scriptures, whether it’s the Quran or the Torah or the Bible, is that every scripture in the world lives through narratives and I think people can really begin to listen to each other through stories and through narratives. One of the reasons why all the scriptures have been built upon narratives is because narratives generate not only emotions, but questions about trajectories, about lives, about family, about loss, about trauma.
LW: What do you think about this from a mental health perspective?
GB: The bottom line is that this insoluble situation, this inflammatory situation is not only traumatizing, but breeds depression, anxiety, stress, and in some cases, hopelessness, loneliness, and suicidal thinking. I mean, it has all the elements of inflaming the mental health crisis that our college students are already undergoing.
Stages of rage and trauma and high levels of emotion are not good for physical, emotional, or mental health. They fire up the immune system. They affect our sleep. They change our hormonal systems. They suppress the releases of oxytocin that makes us feel together and connected. So they have physiological effects that are dangerous. They have mental health effects that are dangerous, and they foster social disconnection, which I think is very detrimental for students on college campuses. So neurophysiologically, emotionally, and behaviorally and psychologically, these kinds of vitriolic demonstrations are not conducive to mental health. One can still express one’s point of view in a powerful way and not take a beating physically, mentally, emotionally, behaviorally.
Look, anger is a normal response. Anger prepares us for fight or flight. It’s a normal emotion. But when anger is extreme, when anger becomes laced with rage and hate, it is uncontrollable, and it clouds our cognition. It clouds our thinking. It clouds our ability to engage with others, and it puts us in an attack mode. So I think one of the other things that I would welcome is for not just students, but everyone involved in this very difficult and traumatic situation, is to use principles of anger management. If we can cool our jets, we’re in a much better place to actually talkwith each other and have civil conversations and have some kind of conflict resolution. And what this means is knowing when you’re angry and knowing when you’re coming from a place of anger rather than a more neutral emotional state.
Identifying your triggers for anger is really important. We all know road rage – the car that cuts us off, we want to just kind of slam into it. But we don’t do it. It’s okay to have impulses and angry impulses, but it’s not okay to act out on it. And one has toidentify one’s triggers. A lot of times the triggers here are identification with one’s cultural heritage, but that doesn’t necessarily mean attacking the other person. And a third principle of anger management is controlling your thoughts. Yes, we’re feeling angry. Yes, we’re feeling hateful. Yes, we’re feeling that we’ve got to do something, but it’s like one of my favorite supervisors said to me once, “A lot of times when you’re doing therapy, don’t just do something, sit there.” And I don’t see people just sitting there. I don’t see people sitting there and taking things in and processing it without impulsively blurting things out.
LW: How do you think colleges and universities should react?
GB: I think the role of the leadership should be to provide and empower different segments on campus to actually promote these principles, so we need faculty and student training in conflict resolution, civil conversations, and anger management. Secondly, this is not a “one-off.” As a child, you learn things in places of worship, in the boys and girls club, in the community, in the home, on the playground. We need stakeholders on campus to communicate these principles in reinforcing ways. The dorm leaders, the heads of our student mental health service, the dean of wellbeing, our clubs, our athletic teams, our coaches to all engage in some way in modeling civilized behavior because what we are seeing now is not civilized.
It’s not as though we need to have an assembly or a meeting at the student center and have a debate and then we’re done. No, it’s not one and done. These are ongoing conversations that need to occur with dignity and with respect and with thoughtfulness and kindness and compassion and empathy in multiple different forums so that they can reinforce each other. The leadership of colleges can say, “Look, there are no simple solutions.” Not many presidents have said this. “There are no simple solutions. But let’s try to turn things around.”
Let’s not let rage and hate lead to what we’re seeing in the Middle East with tragedy and loss of life. Let’s try to make our campus a model of civility. Let’s have multiple places in which we can communicate with each other respectfully in a calm fashion, present opposing points of view, agree to disagree, bring in history, bring in culture, bring in personal narratives, bring in spiritual narratives. And let’s do it differently. Do we want to replicate this? Do we want to perpetuate a stalemate, or do we want to do something that actually brings us to a higher level of empathy and understanding?
Loren Muwonge has lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin all her life. A senior in high school, Loren’s passion for the future of her city is as striking as her résumé. In addition to being a star student in the top percentile of her graduating class, Loren is the district 2 representative for the Milwaukee County Youth Commission, where she promotes civic engagement and provides a student perspective to policymakers charged with advancing educational and racial equity among Milwaukee youth. She is also a member of the Student Enrichment Program for Underrepresented Professions (StEP-UP) at the Medical College of Wisconsin; a Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America (LEDA) scholar at Princeton; and an active volunteer for her church’s community outreach programs. In October, she spoke at a national policy summit on young adult mental health sponsored by the Jed Foundation.
When Loren speaks about what compelled her to advocate for education reform, equity and inclusion, and mental wellbeing on the national stage, she emphasizes the local roots of her activism. A 2018 study by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program found that Milwaukee had the highest “black-white segregation” of any American metropolitan area. This modern reality is largely due to decades of redlining, the discriminatory practice of denying loans and services to certain neighborhoods classified as “hazardous” to investment—the effects of which Loren has personally witnessed. As a Youth Commissioner, her initiatives include addressing and repairing the harm wrought by redlining in Milwaukee, as well as education reform, equitable resource distribution, and mental and behavioral healthcare access for low-income youth and students of color.
During her Youth Commission’s swearing-in ceremony, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who himself served on the county’s first-ever youth commission, remarked of the initiative, “Too often young voices go unheard; their problems, they go unaddressed, and a vicious cycle of disengagement and neglect perpetuates the problems that we see each day.”
In hearing her story, it is clear that Loren’s voice, and those she amplifies, will not go unheard.
LearningWell had the privilege to interview Loren Muwonge, and the following is a summary of our conversation.
LearningWell: What would you like LearningWell readers to know about your background and how you began your advocacy journey?
Muwonge: I come from a redlined area in Wisconsin, one of the most segregated places in the nation. So, it’s really obvious and sometimes discouraging to see how that segregation manifests in my community, where some neighborhoods look better than others, and the areas that look worse and have fewer opportunities are the ones that are predominantly populated by minorities and people of color. That has led a lot of my advocacy work—seeing how redlining affects quality of life for residents, such as low-income communities having worse air quality than their suburban counterparts.
LearningWell: How did your advocacy work begin to include student mental health?
Muwonge: I’m very inspired by Fred Hampton [of the Black Panther Party]. I was impressed and inspired by Hampton’s efforts to improve the success of his community by creating a free breakfast program for school children. I looked at my community, my peers, and their needs and I began to identify that my community can’t truly thrive without accounting for the mental health of the students. And for me, it really just became a matter of, okay, right now there is a need to improve mental health, especially in my district, in relation to the pandemic and the rising crime that we’re seeing with school shootings. I realized the best way that I could help was accounting for the mental health of my community by directly listening to the concerns of my peers.
LearningWell: Why is it important for education policymakers, administrators, and faculty to hear student perspectives on mental health and wellbeing?
“While everyone who pursues higher education has worked hard to be there, not everybody has been adequately supported to thrive in that place.”
Muwonge: We are the people directly affected by education policy, and while professionals may be able to look at data to assess trends—they might even spend time in the classroom, proctoring, observing—they can’t experience it firsthand. The data doesn’t replace the firsthand experience of being a student at this moment in time. We live in an evolving nation, with new factors affecting education, such as A.I., the rise in school shootings, and the student experience during the pandemic. It would be to their benefit if policymakers would talk to those directly affected, since we can provide feedback, voice our concerns, and give a human perspective that the data can’t.
LearningWell: Based on your K-12 experience, do you believe that student wellbeing is a priority in American education?
Muwonge: I do not believe that student wellbeing is a priority in American public schools. There are many aspects to that issue, including the hours that teachers are working. I believe that teachers in America are undervalued, and they’re not given adequate support, whether it be for school supplies, resources, or fair pay. And I think that truly seeps into the education that students receive, because teachers don’t have enough time to account for factors such as wellbeing, especially since there are many parameters set in place that make it difficult for teachers to help and intervene. And then there are limits on their time; they have so much curricular content to get through, and they’re not being adequately supported themselves.
LearningWell: Much of LearningWell’s audience is involved in higher education. What would you like them to know about the student experience? As you prepare to head to college, what do you hope to see on campus in terms of mental health, equity and inclusion, or student wellbeing?
Muwonge: I’d like them to account for the fact that while everyone who pursues higher education has worked hard to be there, not everybody has been adequately supported to thrive in that place. And it’s important to consider the fact that many people may not have the necessary K-12 education that they need to succeed in higher education. They may not have the financial support that they need to thrive, whether they struggle with tuition costs or just being able to afford groceries, transportation, or visiting family back home if they attend college out of state. Again, everybody’s worked hard to be there, but not everybody’s being adequately supported to thrive. What I hope to see when I get to college is financial freedom, financial security for myself and my peers. I’d like to see universities place an emphasis on requiring all students to pursue an internship or some sort of professional experience within their college education, because analyzing the statistics of our nation right now, a college education in most cases isn’t enough. Many colleges do have access to different internship opportunities, but not all students utilize them or even know about those programs. If colleges were encouraging or even requiring students to gain exposure in their fields, I believe it would help set their students up for success.
LearningWell: You’re now a high school senior in the midst of the college application process. Do you anticipate that institutions’ mental health programs and resources will have any bearing on your college decision?
Muwonge: A lack of mental health services would be extremely deterring. I’ve done some research into wellbeing resources, and it has weeded out certain colleges. If I find that they aren’t able to adequately support and account for my and my peers’ mental health, especially when you’re considering out-of-state colleges where you won’t have in-state insurance, or you won’t have family close by, it affects the decision. If you are low-income, it may not be as easy to afford mental health services, and it’s important for me to go to a university that will accommodate that. If I’m investing into this university for my education, I’d like to see that what I invest is going to serve me and my peers.
LearningWell: Do you plan on continuing your advocacy work when you go to college?
Muwonge: I’m intentional about making a home somewhere that has convenient transportation and is a walkable city. That way I’m able to contribute to different communities and local organizations, so that I can continue serving in a way that is bigger than myself and bigger than my college campus.
