Category: Teaching & Learning

In some ways, this year’s opening days at the College of Charleston might have resembled those of the last 20—or even the last 200. At the 13th oldest college in the country, this fall’s convocation drew the perennial throng of new students who mingled with nervous excitement under the willowy live oak trees on the historic Cistern Yard.  

But this time, there was a notable addition. All around, students held, or waved, rally towels of different colors, printed with one of five encouragements: “Be Curious,” “Radically Collaborate,” “Take Action,” “Reframe,” and “Be Mindful.” 

These weren’t just typical words of wisdom for launching the year, or a college career. They are the core mindsets of Life Design, a life coaching model that CofC has decided to implement university-wide with a focus on first-year students. Over the last six years, Life Design’s expanding influence on campus has highlighted its potential to fortify students’ self-efficacy and optimism and, ideally, better position them for personal and professional success. Now leadership is on a mission to center these concepts in the student experience, introducing them early and often.   

Life Design, in essence, offers students a framework to plot multiple alternate futures for themselves and then encourages them to explore those options. The approach originated with two Stanford engineers who decided to apply their field’s design principles to regular life planning. For students, they asked, what would it look like to consider not one but three different majors, or extracurricular focuses, or career paths? Where would they take you, and would you be satisfied with each?

Kristen McMullen, the executive director of student success at CofC’s School of Business Student Success Center, was among the university’s first to embrace the practice. Her journey began in 2019 when, along with two colleagues, she flew out to Stanford for a Life Design training program. Over four days, they were immersed in the methodology and prepared to implement the work on their campus. Come the new academic year, they launched a one-credit Life Design course that drew about two dozen underclassmen in the fall and a similar cohort of upperclassmen in the spring. 

As they mapped their different life paths, they seemed freed from the pressure of fulfilling a single destiny and the fear of falling short.

An assessment of this first Life Design experiment affirmed McMullen’s budding faith in the practice. Compared to control groups, students in both her classes demonstrated an improved sense of hope for the future, greater self-efficacy, and reduced career anxiety. Anecdotally, McMullen said, she could sense the change in her students. As they mapped their different life paths, they seemed freed from the pressure of fulfilling a single destiny and the fear of falling short. “They were actually starting to believe that they could take control of their lives,” she said. “They could make decisions, it was in their hands, and they just felt better about themselves.” 

Over subsequent years, McMullen extended Life Design to new corners of campus, and others took notice. There were coaching sessions for individuals and then small groups of students, and the number of other staff trained to be coaches and classes featuring the content grew. Then, around two years ago, CoC President Andrew Hsu issued a directive for all students to receive some kind of life coaching. The provost approached McMullen about whether Life Design might be the way to go about it. “Do you think we could do this college-wide?” she remembered being asked. “That’s my dream,” she replied. 

Today McMullen finds herself updating a document she’s titled “My Ecosystem,” which charts all the different people and areas on campus where Life Design has made its way so far. The goal, she said, is to reach “every single department, office—everywhere we can.”  

Design Your Charleston

It was still fairly early in McMullen’s Life Design efforts when she started teaching an elective first-year seminar pulling in some of the key concepts. She was particularly impressed by just how far these very young students were able to progress in a short amount of time.

“I get goosebumps,” she said, describing how their final presentations would reflect their transformation into organized, forward-thinking, open-minded college students. They seemed to mature so quickly and fully, she added, that she would find herself thinking of them as graduating seniors, rather than rising sophomores. 

When she got the presidential green light to expand Life Design, McMullen set her sights on the First Year Experience program. As of this fall, she and Jessica Zuber, the senior director of student success and engaged learning, have launched what is perhaps the school’s most prominent Life Design effort yet: FYSS 101 Design Your Charleston, a weekly, required course for first-years combining an introduction to student life and resources with Life Design content. There are currently more than 100 sections of the class in progress, reaching a total of around 2,700 students, nearly the entire grade.

Every week, the students in Design Your Charleston receive information and complete exercises pertaining to different facets of college life. Week two on “Design Your Support System,” for example, provided an overview of various support offerings and tasked students with mapping out which they “would actually use,” according to the syllabus. Other weeks have homed in on “Design Your Community” or “Design Your Academic Path,” requiring more detailed plotting of events to attend, organizations to try out, fields of study that seem interesting, or advising questions to ask. Those five mindsets from the convocation towels —“Be Curious,” “Radically Collaborate,” etc.— are integrated continuously to give students a common language for navigating the first year, and beyond.

Another central element of Design Your Charleston is that it’s peer-facilitated. While McMullen and Zuber create the course lesson plans and PowerPoint slides for each week, older students bring the content to life in the classroom. “Not only are we growing professionals for the workforce past graduation, but also the students that they’re working with are receiving information from a peer,” Zuber said. “We find that students generally receive that information better than they do from adults just telling them what to do all the time.”

McMullen believes this information really can transform the student experience. “Design Your Charleston is to intentionally design the years—whether it’s three, four, five—that you’re at the college so that you’re getting every little thing out of the experience that you possibly can,” she said. She likes to think about the course as building a parachute for students made up of all the experiences and knowledge gained along the way. So by the time they’re jumping out of the college plane, dropping down into the real world feels like floating, rather than crashing. “This is great. I can see the view,” she hopes they are able to say. “I know where I want to go.”

A New Generation

Christopher Korey, the associate provost for student success at CofC, doesn’t subscribe to generational stereotyping. When he looks at his own children, for one, he doesn’t find the supposed Gen Z mold, which seems almost synonymous these days with some combination of fearfulness and fragility.

But Korey is willing to note that today’s college students, like many of all ages, appear to struggle with the task of taking the first step—putting themselves out there, trying something new, and risking failure in the process.

It was this recognition, in part, that Korey said inspired the request for universal student coaching in the first place. The high-level strategic vision, which Life Design helps deliver on, is for CofC to provide a truly holistic style of education: advising that goes beyond academics to help students grow as human beings, career preparation that goes beyond landing students jobs to developing their understanding of what they want to do and the skills they already have to help them succeed.

The CofC administration is currently eyeing an advancement campaign, of which one priority is boosting the university’s national prominence. Striving to become a leader in the student support and development space seems like a promising approach. “We’ll learn things that we can bring to a national audience about [how this work fits] into thinking more broadly about supporting students and this generation of students,” Korey said. 

Should its steady course of Life Design expansion continue, CofC just might become as famous for its work on student wellbeing as it is for its centuries-old oaks.

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

The University of Dayton and Sinclair Community College are just two miles away from one another, but in many ways, they are worlds apart. UD is a private Catholic university providing a four-year undergraduate experience. Sinclair, a public community college, offers the most affordable associate’s degree in the state of Ohio. And yet, when a group of educators from both institutions held a retreat to explore a partnership around character education, an infectious energy emerged. 

“It was like we fell in love with each other over three days,” said Nancy McHugh, the executive director of the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community at UD. “We went in as two separate groups and came out as one.” 

At the end of the retreat, they named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck. This eclectic group of educators are now the driving force behind an unusual partnership in higher education based on what unites them, not what sets them apart. Funded by the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) out of Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character, UD and Sinclair will now embed character instruction into curricular and co-curricular initiatives at both schools, with a particular focus on community-engaged learning. At the heart of the initiative is the UD-Sinclair Academy (UDSA), one of the country’s most promising examples of a two-year/four-year transfer collaboration.

They named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck.

Using character as the bridge, the team believes the work will produce a number of positive outcomes, including expanding the work of personal formation to all students, infusing belonging into the transfer pathway between the schools, and deepening each institution’s commitment to the community. In this sense, the UD/Sinclair character education initiative promises to be a national model for how institutions of different profiles and student populations can create beneficial relationships while deepening their respective missions. 

Breaking New Ground

The initial retreat that brought the team together was part of an ECI capacity building grant meant to help institutions do the groundwork for their character education aspirations. Oftentimes, these planning stages bring into focus existing assets, and in some cases barriers, that can be addressed through a larger effort. Always, it is the people behind the initiatives who ultimately shape how the work takes root.

The UD/Sinclair partnership is led by two academics who, their colleagues say, represent the best of each institution: UD’s Nancy McHugh and Sinclair’s Myra Bozeman. McHugh is a philosopher by training, though she calls herself a “weird one,” spending as much time outside the classroom working with students in the community as she does inside it. The Fitz Center, where she is director, is one of several centers at UD that focuses on community-engaged learning — a form of experiential education in which students apply what they are learning in class to the needs of the community. 

Bozeman said that while most faculty at four-year colleges have an expectation about research, the expectation at Sinclair is to be out doing work in the community. This mirrored UD’s Catholic Marianist mission, advanced by its current president, Eric Spina, who in 2017 declared UD the “university of the common good.”

A year earlier, Spina worked closely with Sinclair’s president Steven Johnson to create the UDSA, an affordable pathway for transfer students from Sinclair to UD. USDA students are representative of Sinclair’s population: Most are Pell-eligible, first generation, and/or students of color. For their first two years, USDA students pay Sinclair tuition (around $5,500 annually) rather than UD tuition (around $50,000), while gaining full access to UD’s campus experience and student organizations, as well as co-curricular opportunities at both institutions. When Sinclair students transfer to UD after receiving their associate’s degree, they get a deep discount on tuition. 

Realizing the program’s full potential involves educators from both schools continuing to learn about each other and reflecting on the perceptions they bring to the work. Fortunately, the trust and candor the dream team members built has enabled them to address issues head on. 

“UD is a fantastic institution, but they haven’t, in the past, been the most welcoming platform for students of color,” Bozeman said. “Many Blacks just didn’t feel like they belonged on that campus. I personally believed UD has wanted to welcome our students, but perhaps they didn’t understand how to do it. And now we can help figure that out.” 

UD’s 2024 Culturally Engaging Campus Environments survey revealed that UDSA students experience lower community connection and sense of belonging compared to traditional four-year UD students. However, UDSA students do experience strong educator support at UD and find they have abundant opportunities for positive regional contribution. The dream team sees this as an opportunity for growth and collaboration across institutions, with character-education tied to community-engaged learning as a vehicle to increase the sense of belonging for students in both their curricular and co-curricular lives. 

For McHugh, the belonging gap for the UDSA students sparked an “aha moment” that would lead to a larger inter-institutional effort funded by an ECI institutional impact grant of a little under a million dollars. She told the team, “Let’s use community-engaged learning as a vehicle for character education and then use that to create a common language for character for both institutions to drive forward this sense of belonging for all students.” 

Understanding and communicating what that looks like is an ongoing conversation, both within regular meetings of the dream team and at brainstorming sessions called “charettes.” The project materials describe character as a set of dispositions, or virtuous habits, that shape how we think, feel, and act. The overlay of community-engaged learning means that these habits are shaped by community participation and geared toward the benefit of the community. 

“For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller.”

While the benefits of experiential learning are well established, leaders advocate that when implemented with intentional attention to character education, these benefits compound, as student gain not just knowledge and skills but the moral and epistemic dispositions to use them wisely in service to others. In creating a common language and commitment to these principles, the project is guided by nine virtues: joyfulness, curiosity, resilience, hope, integrity, mindfulness, empathy, justice, and community belonging. 

While the foundation of the initiative is rather philosophical, the proposed plan is a tangible list of specific initiatives with deliverables, including work within the community-facing centers and in co-curricular activities for students on both campuses. Much of the energy and resources are pointed inside the classroom. Among the project’s goals are to strengthen cross-institutional collaboration and to empower educators at both institutions to implement character education into their courses. This is happening on many levels, starting with faculty who now teach or guest lecture on both campuses, with many planning to infuse character into their coursework. 

A newly launched faculty fellows program will train 10 new faculty a year from both institutions to use a character pedagogical framework, resulting in a cohort of 70 or so over time. These will include senior character fellows who will act as mentors to other faculty members. 

To improve the UDSA experience for students, “all of Sinclair and all of UD would need to be involved,” McHugh said. “We need to know that when a UDSA student goes into a class in engineering, they will feel a sense of belonging because those educators will have the same sort of language.” Many Sinclair professors, who were unaware of even having UDSA students in their classrooms, are learning how to use a character framework to get to know them.

Dair Arnold, a professor of English at Sinclair, is now running a character pilot in her first-year composition course. While keeping with her standard syllabus, she now adds a character lens to each of her units. In the introduction to writing section, the theme is “know yourself.” Instead of one week of introductory work before the first assignment, Arnold took two weeks where she talked about what character means for students. 

The character “cheat sheet” she gives her students defines it as “who you are becoming and how we choose to act — especially when situations are difficult, uncertain or require us to think beyond ourselves.” 

Arnold said the students are embracing the revised format and feel excited to be a part of something intentional and different. “For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller, and giving them the skills so they can make informed choices that are good for them, as well as large groups of people.” 

Helping Sinclair students explore their personal growth through character education is a big part of the effort to increase belonging. “I think this project is going to enable the two-year students, and their faculty, to have opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise,” said Katherine Rowell, a retired full faculty member at Sinclair who has moved her office down the street to UD and is now heading up faculty development and assessment on the character education initiative. 

Rowell believes the character education will help counterbalance the national narrative about the purpose of community college which has been skewed almost exclusively towards workforce development. “We need both. You can’t do workforce development without also talking about integrity and ethics and resilience,” she said. “Community college students need the opportunity to work on these things, not just students at elite liberal arts colleges.” 

The commitment UD has made to partner with Sinclair on formative education has Rowell hopeful and excited about the work ahead. “I think just the conversations — the faculty from both institutions talking about these things and making sure students are cared for — it is good to be a part of. In all my time working in community college settings, I have never had a four-year institution reach out or make any overture until now.” 

Another dream team member, Danielle Boone, reiterates the importance of character education to the regional workforce missions of both schools, particularly Sinclair. Boone is a UD staff member who runs a program called Professional and Applied Learning (PAL) that supports UDSA students. She is also an adjunct faculty member at UD and Sinclair in psychology and is building character education into these courses.

Much of her work is aimed at preparing students for jobs in the community — one of the goals within the community-engaged learning framework of the initiative. Of the UDSA graduates from 2023 to 2024, 80 percent of those who are employed, have jobs in the Dayton region. Boone sees a through line from the UD/Sinclair character initiative and the needs of the regional workforce. She calls the work “employer-informed character.” 

“This is about making sure our students show up at work as whole people and have the skills they need to persist through adversity and be successful,” she said. “That to me is character. And if we are going to argue about the relevancy of higher education than this is what we’ve got to do.” 

Given UD and Sinclair’s shared commitment to personal growth and community, the dream team’s character initiative may well come full circle, reinforcing what the two institutions had always had in common, yet might not have known. Bozeman recalled an epiphany she had early on in the first dream team retreat: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is going to change our community. This is going to change it all.’” 

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

At the University of Vermont last spring, a business undergraduate student took a hiatus from the classroom and stepped into a full-time job at BETA Technologies, an electric aviation company based near Burlington. The placement was part of the first cohort of a new co-op program at U.V.M.’s Grossman School of Business. At first, the student wasn’t confident, or even sure this was the kind of work he wanted to do. But over several months in financial planning and analysis at BETA, he began leading projects, making presentations, and eventually even training other employees. Now back at U.V.M. for his senior year, the placement was such a success that he continues to work 10 to 20 hours a week for the company.

UVM’s new program is one example of a larger rethinking of where workforce experience meets undergraduate education. Internships and co-ops are not new to higher ed. But today’s A.I.-disrupted workforce gives them new gravity. As employers increasingly look for evidence that applicants are work-ready — and as student families eye R.O.I. — more colleges are expanding internships, co-ops, and apprenticeships to show results with more direct on-ramps into careers. 

Some higher-education thinkers are imagining more fundamental changes, with aspirational models that envision students looping repeatedly between classrooms and the working world, making experiential learning part of the architecture of college rather than one of its offerings. 

Beyond the undergraduate years lies an even bigger question about lifelong learning. Will technological and workforce changes require workers to learn and relearn throughout increasingly long careers? If ongoing retraining is in the cards, should colleges be preparing students to move back and forth between work and ongoing education for life?

Shrinking the Experience Gap

The question of whether new graduates are adequately prepared to join the workforce has become more urgent as the entry-level labor market changes. A.I. can increasingly perform tasks once assigned to junior employees, while employers are asking new hires to arrive with skills — and experience — that previous generations would acquire on the job. 

Dan Hatch is a professor of web design and user experience at Utah Valley University who spent about 25 years in the field before entering academia. Yet for seven summers, he has returned to technology companies as a faculty “extern,” brushing up on industry skills and learning firsthand what his students will need to break into the field. This past summer, he went back with a particular question: How is A.I. changing what students will need to know and removing the entry-level work through which they traditionally gain experience?

Entry-level employees have traditionally gotten their start doing the kinds of basic tasks that allow them to accumulate experience and judgment. Now, Hatch told Inside Higher Ed, “A.I. can eat that stuff for breakfast.” The dilemma he sees is how students break into the business if some junior-level work disappears. 

“What if you could get the skills you needed and then seamlessly re-enter the workforce highway — if you could enter and exit as needed?”

The familiar complaint is that college graduates aren’t prepared for work, but the picture is more nuanced than that. In the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook 2026 survey, 71 percent of employers considered new graduates somewhat well prepared, but only 22 percent considered them very well prepared. Similarly, 42 percent said graduates’ skills were very closely aligned with their hiring needs, while 56 percent called them only partially aligned. Communication, professionalism, and critical thinking remained particular areas for improvement. But in teamwork and technology, students’ experience aligned well with employer expectations.

Ryan Craig, author of “Apprentice Nation,” sees a shift in expectations from the employer side. As managing director of Achieve Partners, he connects young adults with early-career apprenticeships in technology, healthcare, and other industries, and has a front-row seat on the experience gap. “Colleges are doing as good a job as they’ve ever done at equipping students with the cognitive skills and critical thinking skills and communication skills and durable skills,” Craig said. “The problem is that the goalposts have moved.”

Craig calls one of those changes “experience inflation:” Employers increasingly expect applicants for entry-level positions to arrive with relevant work experience. His preferred solution is paid apprenticeships, often as an alternative pathway to traditional higher education, and his firm invests in companies that build such pathways in fields that benefit from a staffing pipeline.

For colleges, that model presents a direct challenge to remain relevant. Could more of that on-the-job experience be built into higher education itself? And what should it look like? 

Putting Work Directly into the Degree

Cooperative education has been doing some version of work-integrated learning for more than a century. The University of Cincinnati pioneered co-op in 1906; Northeastern followed soon afterward, and Drexel and Rochester Institute of Technology developed major programs of their own. 

At established co-op universities, students can move repeatedly between substantial stretches of academic study and professional work, and new programs suggest fresh interest in the structure. U.V.M.’s Grossman School sent its first business co-op students to employers in early 2026. The University at Albany’s Massry School of Business also launched a program this year, built around four-to-five-month paid, full-time placements during an academic semester, after which students return to classes. Rowan University in New Jersey is expanding engineering co-ops that can span six to nine months and earn academic credit. The scale varies dramatically, but the core idea is similar: Give students enough time in a workplace to move beyond observation and begin doing consequential work.

That distinction matters to Stephanie Meunier, director of the Grossman Co-op. U.V.M.’s optional placements run four to six months, rather than the eight or ten weeks typical of many summer internships. In that time, she said, students can get through onboarding, become independent, and take ownership of projects.

Yet U.V.M. also demonstrates how awkwardly substantial work experiences can fit inside a degree still structured primarily around semesters spent in classrooms. Grossman students currently receive a notation on their transcript but no academic credit for the co-op, despite stepping away from classes for the placement. Staying on a four-year path may require students to arrive with A.P. or dual-enrollment credits, carry heavier course loads, or take summer classes. Meunier wants that to change. Her longer-term goal is to integrate co-op into the curriculum and eventually make it a requirement of the business degree.

That raises a strategic question: If students are learning important things while working, how should colleges recognize that learning?

Connie Yowell, the executive director of Northeastern’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Work, has spent much of her career examining that recognition. In earlier work on digital credentials and the learning network LRNG, she challenged a system in which, as she explained in a 2017 Education Week interview, “the only learning that counts is what happens in school.” Education, she said, instead needs to “allow learning to happen in a variety of places, and for it to count.”

Her work on digital badges — a proposed way to document skills learned outside traditional coursework — grew partly from that problem. If learning occurs at an employer or somewhere else outside a classroom, learners need ways to make what they know visible and portable. Imagine the scouting mindset for careers, minus the sash: This student has achieved this skill through this experience. It could also mean redesigning the relationship between education and work, rather than simply adding a better internship program to a conventional degree.

The Cloverleaf University

Michelle Weise, author of “Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet,” has spent much of her career studying the intersection of postsecondary education and work. Her fundamental question is how an education system built largely around learning first and working afterward can serve people facing repeated job and career transitions over much longer working lives. 

“When I wrote the book, I was struck by the idea of needing to learn for changing jobs going on indefinitely. Early boomers were having 12 job changes by the time they retired. So with all of these technological advancements, we could easily imagine having to do 20 or 30,” Weise said. “How in the world are we going to somehow keep up with this many transitions over a lifetime? We need the university to adjust to this with a new approach. What if you could get the skills you needed and then seamlessly re-enter the workforce highway — if you could enter and exit as needed?”

She has developed those ideas into a model she calls the Cloverleaf University. A learner leaves the workforce on an exit ramp into education, gains knowledge or skills, and then takes an on-ramp back into work. Later, the learner may exit again. Repeated over time, those looping ramps begin to resemble a highway cloverleaf, or a series of them. 

For undergraduates, the concept could mean multiple loops between school and work rather than one transition at graduation or one summer internship near the end of college. Students might study, spend substantial time working, and then return to school with a better understanding of what they know and don’t know, and go out again.

Weise’s Cloverleaf idea is broader than an expanded co-op program. It combines several strands of her thinking: work-based experiences; interdisciplinary learning, organized around complex real-world problems; and a university capable of serving learners not only at 18 or 22 but repeatedly across their working lives.

One reason work experiences matter, she argues, is that they develop something difficult to acquire from instruction alone: practical judgment. With A.I. increasingly capable of performing some technical and entry-level tasks, Weise worries about what happens if young workers lose opportunities to develop judgment by doing the kinds of work beginners have traditionally done. She invokes the Aristotelian concept of phronesis: practical wisdom, or the ability to weigh competing considerations and decide what to do when a problem doesn’t have a tidy answer. That involves technical knowledge but also what are sometimes called soft skills — what Weise prefers to call human skills — developed in the real world and given expansive context by looping in and out of a liberal education. 

“It’s not simply about the technical skills,” Weise said. Students confronting a real problem have to weigh different kinds of information and consider the second-, third- and fourth-order consequences of their decisions. “All of that is the liberal arts. It’s just that it’s in context of a real problem to be solved.”

Opening the Loop

More than a decade ago, designers at Stanford University asked a question that Weise found inspiring: Why should a university education be consumed all at once in sequential classes on campus? In 2013 and 2014, amid the growth of online learning as a disrupter of residential-based education, a Stanford d.school team spent a year imagining possible futures for the university, called Stanford 2025. 

Kelly Schmutte, now the director of undergraduate studies in design at Stanford’s d.school, worked on Stanford 2025 and said the resulting project was intentionally speculative, creating models designed to be thought-provoking — not literally implemented. 

“The project suggested that it would be much more effective to have these periods of learning on campus interspersed with loops of learning that happens out in the world, whether doing research or apprenticing or working,” Schmutte said. “Those perspectives and experiences inform how you approach your education and make you more intentional.”

One proposal was called Open Loop University. Instead of four consecutive undergraduate years followed by graduation, Open Loop imagined students receiving six years of access to Stanford residential learning that could be distributed over a much longer period. Students might study, leave for work or research, return, leave again — and potentially reserve some of that university experience for much later in life.

Schmutte still sees value in that movement. There is value, she said, in “getting off the track and out of your bubble and comfort zone.” Being in a different environment, among different people and ways of working, can “wake up” students, she said, helping them bring better questions back to their education. A loop can focus a student more sharply on an existing interest — or send that student somewhere unexpected.

Another part of Open Loop seems more relevant than ever: lifelong learning. When the concept was developed, its designers could not have anticipated today’s generative A.I. boom. Now, Schmutte said, she can imagine the value of saving a year or two of one’s educational allotment for one’s 50s or 60s, when the technology — and what a worker needs to know — could look dramatically different. Being able to dip back into one’s educational pool would be especially useful at critical junctures of personal flux and industry change. 

Who Builds the Ramps, and When Do You Hang the Degree?

It is easy to draw loops on a diagram. It is considerably harder and more disruptive to redesign a university around them. U.V.M.’s modest new co-op program already encounters questions involving credits, housing, scheduling, and degree completion. A Cloverleaf or Open Loop model would challenge assumptions embedded much more deeply in accreditation, financial aid, university finances, and academic departments, not to mention the question of when, exactly, one’s “education” is considered “earned.”

Existing apprenticeships offer opportunities from diverse arrangements, including many well outside of university degree programs. The number of registered apprenticeships grew by 65 percent between 2014 and 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, to nearly 680,000, but expanding them requires infrastructure that can be expensive and labor-intensive. Employers must provide training and supervision; learners may need advising and other support; and intermediaries are often needed to connect employers, programs, and students. 

Then there is a surprisingly basic problem: What happens if a loop works too well? If a student leaves college for a work experience, fits in effectively, and is offered a good job, what draws that student back to campus to finish the degree? A desirable job on the table now is quite a bird in the hand. At Roger Williams University, for example, the well-connected degree program in Construction Management proves so effective at linking students with workforce experiences that the school boasts a nearly 100 percent graduate employment track record. One administrator at the school jokes that their challenge is luring students back on campus and completion after a lucrative junior summer spent in the field.

For Stanford’s Schmutte, the onus is on colleges to make what happens on campus compelling enough to merit the return. Universities need to help students recognize that they are acquiring more than “discrete pockets of knowledge,” she said. They are acquiring broader capacities and ways of thinking that can transfer across many kinds of work.

Weise responds to the question a bit differently. Perhaps students don’t always need to return immediately. “Why do we need them to get it all on the front end of their work lives?” she asked. A young person might leave, work for several years, and discover both what they like and the ceiling imposed by what they don’t yet know. That moment — recognizing the gap between what you can do and what you want to do — could itself become the reason to return to education. But that only works if returning is worth it.

“The only incentive for someone to come back is to really believe that that learning experience has the signal power that an employer wants,” Weise said. Universities cannot design these systems alone. Employers have to walk the talk that they value the additional learning and allow people to learn without sacrificing income and stature. “There also has to be an implicit promise on the part of employers that if you leave and get ‘trained up,’ they’re going to value that and be open to hiring people who’ve been out of the workforce to pursue that.”

The complexity helps explain why century-old co-op programs aren’t ubiquitous. They also put today’s smaller experiments in perspective. What they demonstrate is that repeated crossing of the boundary between academic and professional life can become part of the structure of a degree. But it requires sophisticated, savvy planning, employer buy-in, and university willingness to step away from the traditional, established way of doing things. 

When it works, it can be revolutionary. “A higher education institution might have a separate arm that is functioning as an intermediary with the employer, saying, ‘What is the unmet need in your company? Let’s backward map from there to what you need, and I’m going to build you that talent pipeline to be able to do your work,’” Weise said. “This has been going on for a long time. It’s just not been very nimble and requires a different way of thinking about partnering with employers, and employers have to have skin in the game.”

Mirroring the Real World

What these models share is an increasing open-mindedness to seeking work experiences early and often, a resourcefulness of where to turn for ongoing learning, and resilience to pivot when things don’t go as planned. This is perhaps a key part of the experiential learning that can be foundational in higher education. U.V.M.’s Meunier believes a meaningful co-op doesn’t have to end with a career commitment to be successful. “One of the biggest learning outcomes could be finding out what you don’t want to do, and what a great way to do it within your academic setting,” she said. “You have the safety of returning to your degree and then trying out something else.” 

In the big picture, a successful work experience is one that allows a student to communicate professionally, exercise judgment, solve problems, and demonstrate how they have used those abilities in the field under the tutelage of a real-world employer. 

For undergraduates like U.V.M.’s student at BETA Technologies, that has already happened on a small scale. When he graduates, he won’t have to convince a prospective employer that he might be able to do that kind of work. To some extent, he already has.

As a first-year student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Lamont Johnson decided to take a chance on a class called The Art and Science of Human Flourishing. He thought the elective might be an interesting, if not particularly relevant, addition to his coursework in the Wisconsin School of Business. Now in his senior year, Johnson credits the class with providing the scaffolding he needed to make it through college. 

“I was an 18-year-old kid who had just arrived on a campus of 50,000 students,” he said. “The skills I gained in that class helped me navigate every aspect of college life over these past years including creating and fostering relationships with my peers, my professors, even the co-workers at my internship.” 

The Art and Science of Human Flourishing (A.S.H.F) is an interdisciplinary, credit-bearing course that combines science, philosophy, contemplative practices, and experiential learning to teach students how to flourish. It was developed at U.W.’s Center for Healthy Minds, a neuroscience research center that is world-renowned for its examination of wellbeing. The course grew out of the work of the center’s founder, Richard Davidson, and John Dunne, along with colleagues David Germano of the University of Virginia and Robert Roeser and Mark Greenberg, who were at the University of Pennsylvania. (Roeser is now at Emory University.)

The scientists and scholars developed the course in the mid-2010s in response to the rising rates of mental health issues students were reporting and colleges and universities were struggling to treat. The theory was that by bringing evidence and practices on the concept of flourishing directly to the students, all would benefit, including those that had either preventable or typical problems. 

What began as an antidote to a national mental health problem has become somewhat of a phenomenon in teaching and learning. The course at U.W. was launched as a pilot in 2017 with around 50 students and has grown into a lecture-style class with a cap of 300. But it’s not just the students who are clamoring to participate. Faculty from throughout the university, and throughout the country, have consistently reached out to the center hoping to learn how to teach it. 

What began as an antidote to a national mental health problem has become somewhat of a phenomenon in teaching and learning.

After four years of hosting in-person “train-the-trainer” workshops, the Center for Healthy Minds has recently made the course available on edX, an online learning platform that provides university-level courses and programs. The 14-week course called The Art and Science of Human Flourishing: Essentials for Educators mirrors the student-facing curriculum in an effort to give educators anywhere a digital front-row seat to how transformative the program can be. The course’s growth from laboratory to universal learning platform reflects the fact that when high demand meets good science, anything is possible. 

“What they were doing in Madison was really quite extraordinary,” said Kate Mondloch, a professor of art history at the University of Oregon. 

Scaling flourishing

The A.S.H.F. course at U.W. may have remained limited to a small, curious cohort had it not been for Susan Huber. In 2019, Huber was hired by the Center for Healthy Minds to be the program manager for what was then the pilot version. Her job was to bring the course through the campus process that would allow it to become permanent. By 2020, it was offered by design to first-year students as a credit-bearing elective. 

Huber said the A.S.H.F. course’s enduring appeal is the science and evidence-based practices within — what its architects call the psychological wellbeing framework. The acronym is A.C.I.P. — awareness, connection, insight and purpose — reflecting the four, core dimensions of human flourishing the center determined can be cultivated. 

“It’s really an academic approach to supporting student mental health so students can understand the science behind their own wellbeing,” Huber said. 

The course itself is a combination of didactic and procedural learning — both listening to lectures and participating in experiential exercises. These include meditative and contemplative practices, journal writing, and activities like “the values exercise,” where students narrow down a list of 100 or so values until they choose the one or ones that most resonate for them. 

In participating in the activity, Nicholas Shashko, now a senior at U.W., chose integrity. “I learned something about myself in that 10-minute exercise,” he said. “When I figured out my value, it changed how I acted the rest of that first year — who I made friends with, the clubs I wanted to join. It shaped my whole college experience, and I don’t think I can say that about a lot of courses.” 

Shashko, and Lamont Johnson, are student ambassadors at the Center for Healthy Minds and work with Huber and others in promoting the course on campus and beyond. Anecdotes directly from students on how they were impacted by the course may be the best qualitative evidence the center can provide. Student testimonial videos are included in the new edX course, not so much to pitch the program but to illustrate the different ways it influences students’ development. 

Both Shashko and Johnson said they appreciated the fact that instructors established early on that flourishing would mean something different for every student who participated. “It is not like they say, ‘Here’s what flourishing is — go do this,’” Shashko said. “It is more of a guide for you to find your own definition, to find your own place on campus. They give you the tools and the skills to discover your own community.” 

Johnson recalled how during one lesson on resilience, the instructor introduced a new term, “transilience,” which means a state of becoming or moving forward. “He told us we need to recognize that not everyone comes from a background of flourishing and that many people have significant roadblocks. I was struck by that because it showed me they were looking at this from an equity perspective.” 

Johnson, who is African American, had come to U.W. from a high school with fewer resources and less rigorous curricula, adding a layer of both emotional and academic challenges. “There were times when I felt as though I didn’t belong here,” he said. “The course really helped me navigate all of that, and here I am a senior. I never thought I would make it.” 

Asked whether he thinks of A.S.H.F. as a mental health course, Shashko said, “I generally don’t use the word mental health in describing it because it’s meant to be about flourishing, which is more about finding yourself. But when you go through that process, you gain a lot of skills that might prevent mental health problems.” 

“That research report showed that you could teach this course at three different institutions with different instructors, and the results were consistent. After that, things really started to explode.”

While the students might not identify the program as a mental health intervention, research conducted on the course provides evidence of its efficacy in that realm. A 2022 multi-university study published in Mindfulness showed that A.S.H.F. participants reported improved mental health, flourishing, attention, social-emotional skills, and pro-social attitudes compared to the control group. 

“That research report showed that you could teach this course at three different institutions with different instructors, and the results were consistent,” Huber said. “After that, things really started to explode.” 

By 2023, Huber and her team were bombarded with requests from schools throughout the country hoping to bring the course to their campuses. They decided early on not to make an online version of the student-facing course so as not to restrict its community-building element. Instead, they chose to scale the faculty training — first by opening it up to anyone who could come to U.W.–Madison to take the faculty workshop, and then, this year, by making it available on edX. 

After four years of experimentation at U.W. and other schools, Huber and her team are confident the course is universally adaptable. Faculty can either teach A.S.H.F. as is or incorporate its elements into existing courses, as many faculty have done. Katie Pavek, a professor of nursing at U.W., took the faculty workshop to learn how to help her students adjust to the stressors of the profession — something she, as a nurse, had been challenged with. 

“Because it is based on science and had been developed at the Center for Healthy Minds, I was immediately sold,” she said. “They gave us tangible tools and resources to take back to our classrooms and adapt to our own disciplines.” Pavek took the building blocks — the modules, units and concepts — and developed a course called U-Flourish designed specifically for health sciences students. 

Like Pavek, University of Oregon’s Kate Mondloch participated in the faculty workshop to understand how to support her students who she observed to be increasingly despondent, particularly after the pandemic. Mondloch then decided to teach A.S.H.F. as a first-year elective satisfying the Introduction to the Liberal Arts requirement. Where A.S.H.F. is held in a large lecture hall at U.W., Mondloch teaches it as a small seminar of 20 or so students. 

“I really know my students well,” she said. “They are really hungry to talk about issues that matter, like how to be human in today’s world.”

Huber sees The Art and Science of Human Flourishing: Essentials for Educators edX course as a critical juncture in the center’s effort to help students anywhere thrive in an increasingly complex world. But the choice to offer it online, and the year-long effort it took to develop that option, did not come easily, particularly for advocates of human interaction and community connection. 

Huber’s response was to make the course as true to the actual experience of students and faculty as possible. “We have seven or eight modules, and we essentially mirror the student-facing course with topics like what does it mean to be part of a community — giving them examples, live events with experts, and lots of opportunity to talk with instructors and each other.” 

Elizabeth Morse, the director of interprofessional flourishing and an associate professor of nursing at Belmont University in Nashville, has just finished the course’s first offering. She said she was struck by how interpersonal and authentic it felt. 

“It was like we got back-stage passes to everything they had done, including what worked well and what didn’t,” she said. “We got to experience the content through multiple different faculty and student perspectives and were repeatedly encouraged to infuse our own voice, perspective, and experience to the students in our unique contexts — to keep it authentic and impactful for students. This was empowering.”

In explaining what she liked most about the course, Morse identified a benefit even its original designers may not have anticipated. “The community that emerged through this course was unexpectedly impactful. Engaging with creative and dedicated educators from across the country reminded me why I entered academic healthcare in the first place. The experience brought fresh energy, inspiration, and purpose to my work in healthcare education ”

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

At the opening ceremony of Emory University’s ADVANCE program, students are asked to write down two things: something they want to gain from the experience and something they want to leave behind. After taking what is called “a walk of intentionality” at the camp where the program is held, students dispose of thing two — literally, by throwing the paper away — while sharing thing one aloud with their peers. And thus begins their five-day adventure in learning to live purposefully. 

The ADVANCE program is part of the Emory Purpose Project, which, in turn, is a major component of Emory’s Student Flourishing Initiative, one of higher education’s most explicit efforts to graduate students who thrive personally as well as academically. At Emory, the initiative is as transparent about what it discourages as what it promotes. For a highly selective university where a significant portion of the students choose “pre-health” majors, the Student Flourishing Initiative encourages students to see their college experience as more than just a credentialing exercise. 

“The initiative was a recognition that college shouldn’t only be about gaining knowledge, but also gaining wisdom,” said Ira Bedzow, the executive director of the Emory Purpose Project and one of the original creators of the Student Flourishing Initiative. “This involves having an understanding of who you are, who you want to be, and how you can achieve those possible selves in a way where success is internally measured as opposed to being based on societal or external expectations.”

Launched in 2021 under then-President Gregory Fenves, the Student Flourishing Initiative became a university-wide imperative as well as the flagship effort of a capital campaign of the same name. Spearheaded by then-Provost Ravi Balakanda (now president of Ohio State University), it was a demonstration of Emory’s commitment to undergraduate education at a time when college students nationally were reporting high levels of mental health struggles. 

“A lot of students will engage with the Emory Purpose Project because they are starting to feel that itch of ‘Okay, I’m doing everything right, but this success doesn’t feel good.’”

Wellbeing remains a strong component of the initiative, but it was designed to be much broader than a response to mental health. In embedding flourishing into all facets of the university, including academics, Emory’s Student Flourishing Initiative is an ambitious experiment in institutional change and one that challenges many of higher education’s longstanding practices. Now in its fifth year under a new administration, leaders hope that the many individual gains that have been made within the initiative will compound to create lasting change. 

The flourishing foundation

According to Bedzow, the first task in launching the Student Flourishing Initiative was to describe and communicate what flourishing means at Emory and then make something with “top-down recognition” a “bottom-up creation.” 

“In order to get students to reflect on who they are becoming, we needed to understand how we are teaching,” he said. “What does the culture and the ethos on campus look like? How are students taking care of themselves –— mind, body, and soul? And how do we look at this from both inside and outside of the classroom?”

The initiative’s leadership team explored frameworks for flourishing, including from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham which describes flourishing as not simply feeling happy but fulfilling one’s potential. They arrived at four components of university life that would from then on include an intentional focus on flourishing. Together, they covered curricular and co-curricular elements such as academics, career development, experiential learning, and health and personal growth. They called them: The Academic Experience, Professional Pathways, Purpose and Meaning and Community and Well-Being. 

Within each of these umbrellas there are numerous efforts underway including student flourishing fellows who receive training in active listening, empathy, dialogue and relationship-building and act as campus ambassadors; and wellbeing coaches who provide non-clinical support on emotional and physical health. 

The Purpose and Meaning pillar of the initiative provides its philosophical foundation and is best represented by the Emory Purpose Project. According to its web site, “the project encourages students to examine their beliefs, values, goals, identity, and motivations — and then connect those reflections to their academic, personal, and professional choices.” Bedzow said it calls on students to reframe purpose as a practice, not just an outcome.

Bedzow, who is an ethicist and teaches in the Goizueta Business School, helps students discover their “why,” getting them to explore the reasons behind their goals so that they might better align with who they are or who they want to be. It is in many ways a response to what he sees as misaligned or externally driven influences, in which feelings of inauthenticity can limit wellbeing.

“A lot of students will engage with the Emory Purpose Project because they are starting to feel that itch of ‘Okay, I’m doing everything right, but this success doesn’t feel good,’” he said. 

The ADVANCE program (named to be the opposite of a retreat) is the flagship initiative within the Emory Purpose Project. It is described as a chosen interruption for students to think of themselves beyond productivity, achievement, or future outcomes. The latter half of the five-day retreat includes “stories we tell ourselves,” which Bedzow described as a way to understand how we create or limit how we grow based on the identities we form. 

Some of the exercises may be a little unorthodox for students who are used to controlling their environments, but Bedzow said straying outside of their comfort zone is actually the point. The program’s demand reflects the fact that a fair number of students are willing to try. 

One component of the Student Flourishing Initiative that crosses the purpose and academic domains is the Purposeful Teaching Fellowship, a cohort of self-selecting faculty who are learning how to develop a course that promotes student flourishing. Bedzow said he and others turned to the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence to workshop the idea, hoping to create a “contagion of desire” for professors who see the value of student-centered learning. 

Coincidentally, one of the instructors, Liesl Wuest, who is the director of learning design and leadership at the Center, had already been thinking about how to design a course based on elements of flourishing. Her faculty partners included professionals from different departments within the university, including Wesley Longhofer, who is the center’s director and Emory’s assistant vice provost for faculty affairs. 

“We were really curious about how to design a course that supports student agency — that helps them build confidence and supports their wellbeing,” Longhofer said. 

In doing her research, Wuest developed the Purposeful Course Design Model that includes course alignment, design for learning, and design for flourishing. The design for flourishing branch is based on self-determination theory which is predicated on three principles: student autonomy, readiness, and competence. 

Now in its fourth semester, the fellowship is taught over six weeks, every Friday morning for two to three hours. While the fellows receive a stipend, Wuest believes their time is more of a commodity and a better indication of their commitment. Because the course guides faculty fellows in incorporating elements of self-determination theory into their existing courses, it was critical it be flexible enough to appeal to faculty of all disciplines. 

“Some classes have a lot of space to give students choice in what they read or how they participate or how they are assessed whereas others, like the professional schools, have a very tight curriculum,” Wuest said. “Supporting autonomy might look more like empathizing with students or being transparent about how decisions are made” 

Wuest described one class where a language instructor gave students ample opportunities to work together while she set high expectations and gave rigorous assignments. The focus group with students at the end of the course revealed some surprising perspectives. 

“A lot of the students said it was the hardest class they took at Emory, but because they felt like they were in it together, where there was no competition, it made a big difference in their learning experience,” she said. “What really came through was how they had made friends.”

While some of the programs within the Student Flourishing Initiative were new to Emory, others had either existed or were emerging alongside the initiative. One notable innovation was the Emory College Pathways Center, founded in 2022.

“The Student Flourishing Initiative took advantage of very organic grassroots efforts that were happening at the university that needed some coherence and infrastructure around them,” said Branden Grimmett, the inaugural vice provost and associate dean overseeing the Pathways Center. 

The Pathways Center is both a concept and a building predicated on making career development at Emory a student-centered, holistic experience. Its very existence speaks to the university’s effort to help students navigate the many components of their career readiness so they may focus on their education.

“One of the things we do here is reduce the navigational energy that students have to use by putting everything in one place — things like internships, undergraduate research, advising around pre-professional directions, thinking about post-graduate fellowships like Fulbright, Marshall and Rhodes,” Grimmett said. “It is all here, including funding for these opportunities.” 

“For me, education has never been transactional. It’s always been about who our students are becoming, not what they are doing.”

The Center is also curricular in that it offers practical courses on internships or how to conduct research. It is aligned with a required 13-week first-year seminar that helps students develop their college identities and to begin thinking about the world of work. All of this supports Emory’s experiential learning requirement that can be fulfilled through internships, research, study abroad, community-engaged learning, or the applied arts. 

The Pathways Center strives to humanize the student career journey, encouraging students to connect with alumni not just for networking purposes but to gain real-world wisdom. As part of the second-year Sophomore Summit, students from the Atlanta and Oxford campuses (45 minutes away from each other) spend 24 hours together at a camp site where they hear stories of resilience and overcoming obstacles. The experiences are shared by alumni just five years out of school, upper class students, and faculty. One professor talked of the responsibility of becoming a caregiver at 12 years old to an epileptic parent. Another spoke of the challenges of establishing herself in academia as a young Black woman. 

While not seeming so on the surface, these attempts at understanding faculty and classmates as people are all part of preparing for life after college, Grimmett said. He himself is a classically trained pianist and has been a producer on Broadway. He believes non-linear pathways are more effective in preparing students for the twists and turns of the real world. “For me, education has never been transactional,” he said. “It’s always been about who our students are becoming, not what they are doing.”

Five years into the initiative, leaders of different programs within it have collected some data on outcomes, though understanding if this grand experiment really worked is hard to know. The efforts within the Student Flourishing Initiative are meant to build on one another, creating a cumulative effect that is strong but subtle. Bedzow said even the students themselves may not recognize they are participating in something bigger. 

“If we made flourishing so explicit for students, then it becomes a shiny object as opposed to the waters they are swimming in,” he said. 

The question that remains is knowing if these efforts have grown deep enough roots to withstand leadership transitions or priority shifts. This is a particular dilemma in higher education where flashy campaigns can quickly fizzle out with new administrations. At Emory, many of the original leaders of the initiative have moved on to other positions or institutions, though the hope is their original work will continue to bear fruit. 

Asked if he sees or feels a difference on campus since the initiative was launched, Bedzow shared the following: “I wake up every day excited to meet with students, faculty, and staff because I experience firsthand how inspiring and motivating it can be to work intentionally toward creating environments in which people can thrive. Most of all, I am excited by students who are developing the language and practices they need to become the people they choose to be.”

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

On the last day of the Summer Studio at Olin College of Engineering, four teams of faculty from around the world reflected on their experiences. They had spent the previous week pursuing a framework that would lead to engineering education improvements in their home countries. As the facilitator moved from table to table, it became clear the participants had succeeded in what they came to learn: how to apply what a start-up engineering college in Massachusetts did to transform engineering education. 

“We had heard of the Olin pedagogy, and it had many synergies to our own,” said Uday Roopavath, an assistant professor of bioscience and bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Jammu. “Before coming to the Summer Studio, I had a vision of what I wanted to do with my students, but I wasn’t able to define it. Now I can.” 

For over two decades, Olin College of Engineering has not only practiced a groundbreaking way of teaching within its own institution but also shared its methods with the rest of higher education, both domestically and globally. The effort is more than just an example of best practice sharing. The theory is that by instigating changes within institutions, a cumulative effect will occur to alter the field of engineering education and the types of engineers it produces. 

“A big part of our mission is to transform engineering education,” said Olin President May Lee. “The Summer Studio is the flagship program for allowing us to do that, and it’s more important than ever. Olin provides the scaffolding for students to understand what it means to learn — not just take tests and get the right answer. This way of learning leads to a kind of agency within our students that is essential, particularly with the onset of A.I.” 

Lee’s commitment to Olin’s role in influencing engineering education comes from the fact she has seen it first-hand. When Lee was the chief strategy officer for institutional impact at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), her colleague there, Professor Shayla Armand, participated in one of the Olin summer programs and came back promoting an entirely new way of thinking about research and teaching. Before she left R.P.I. for Olin, Lee incorporated much of that transformation into R.P.I.’s current strategic plan. She then brought Armand to Olin as provost, and the two leaders continue working together to extend Olin’s impact on the field. 

May is the third president of Olin College, succeeding the five-year tenure of Gilda Barabino and the 21-year tenure of founding president, Richard Miller. The school was chartered in 1997 by the F. W. Olin Foundation with a directive for Miller to operationalize what the engineering community believed to be much-needed changes in how engineers had traditionally been trained. The prevailing sentiment was that a reliance on technical skills-based learning alone would not be sufficient to address the major changes brought on by a more integrated global economy and the launch of the internet. Engineers would need to have business and entrepreneurship skills, teamwork, creativity, and a broader understanding of the societal contexts of engineering. 

Olin was created to become a form of privately funded national laboratory for engineering education redesign. What the college lacked in size — the highly selective school enrolls about 400 students — it more than made up for in innovation. From the beginning, Miller and his team did things differently, rejecting a number of deeply held convictions in higher education, such as academic departments and tenured faculty. 

“We were given a rare opportunity — and responsibility — to rethink what it means to be educated in the 21st century and what it means to be an engineer,” Miller said. “The expectations were extremely high.” While the campus was still being built, 30 students spent the first year living in construction trailers and acting as partners in designing pedagogy.“ The student ‘partners,’ together with the founding faculty and leadership team, developed a new paradigm for engineering education based on human-centered design and intrinsic motivation,” Miller said. 

Olin students develop a sense of identity and agency early on, many acquiring patents and starting enterprises before they even graduate.

The concept of students as co-creators continues today. Olin is perhaps best known for its student-centered, project-based learning whereby students frequently work in teams, building real solutions to real-world problems. The faculty, who team-teach across disciplines, still apply human-centered engineering to their teaching — an approach that combines technical expertise with empathy, design thinking, communication, and an understanding of human needs. 

As a result, Olin students develop a sense of identity and agency early on, many acquiring patents and starting enterprises before they even graduate. Not surprisingly, they tend toward emerging technologies. Olin alumni Evan Morikawa and Andy Barry founded Generalist, the leading A.I. research and product driven company building general intelligence for the physical world, a.k.a. “robots.”  

By the late 2010s, Olin was earning a global reputation as the producer of the new kind of engineer — one that creates solutions, not just products. In 2018, M.I.T., in its global state of the art in engineering education report, named Olin first among 10 universities cited as current global leaders in engineering. M.I.T., which came in second, used the Olin model when revising its own engineering curriculum. 

Learning by doing 

As satisfying as it may have been to be an example to the standard bearer down the street, having a superlative pedagogy was only the first metric of success in Olin’s founding mission. 

“If Olin only graduates good engineers than we have failed because we have not changed engineering education,” said Chris Lee, the interim dean of research and strategic partnerships at Olin. 

Dean Lee leads Olin’s efforts to share with the world what the college itself has built. This transfer of knowledge has taken many forms over the years. Since the college’s inception, visitors have come to campus to sit in on classes and converse with faculty and students, all hoping to see what the engineering education incubator was all about. Miller said that in his last 10 years at Olin, he hosted leaders of 800 universities from 65 countries who journeyed to Olin to see for themselves how the learning model works.

In 2009, Olin started the Collaboratory, which included more formal workshops for visitors who not only would observe Olin’s methods but could learn how to apply them to their own institutions. This eventually led to Olin’s residential summer program. Now called the Summer Studio, the on-campus program aims to help institutions accelerate their institutional initiatives related to teaching and learning. The Summer Studio is an intensive project-based professional development experience for the teams of educators that come to drive these projects forward. Teams of up to six participants pay $35,000 to attend. 

Participation in the Summer Studio has shifted over time from pre-Covid levels of 10 to 12 teams and over 80 participants to this year’s smaller group of four teams, all from outside the United States. In July, the campus hosted teams from Saudi Arabia, India, Bolivia, and Korea. Like Roopavath, most of the team members arrive with a specific problem they want to solve. But if they come looking for Olin’s secret sauce, Dean Lee tells them there isn’t one, or at least there isn’t one that could be universally applied. 

“We don’t give them the answers; we give them a process,” he said. “Every institution is different. You tell us what you want to do and what your culture is like, and we’ll adapt to it.” 

President Lee underscores the point.  “We would never be so presumptuous as to think that what we do ought to be copied exactly someplace else,” she said. “There are disciplinary and curricular considerations. Each institution has their own traditions, their own accreditation concerns; and there are, of course, size differences.”

The teams are each assigned two coaches, Olin faculty members, who meets with them before, during, and after the one-week engagement. During the week, the teams utilize design principles to work through an interactive loop of goal setting, constructive feedback, reflection, and re-engineering — just as they would in an Olin classroom. “We tell them at the very beginning: ‘You are going to experience what we do here. You are going to be the students,’” Dean Lee said.

“We tell them at the very beginning: ‘You are going to experience what we do here. You are going to be the students.’”

A primary educational framework they learn is called GAPA — goals, assessments, products and activities — which Olin uses with its students. At the Summer Studio, the process is introduced as a tool that can be applied to anything from a desire to increase attendance to redesigning first-year curriculum to starting an institution from scratch. “We tell them, ‘If this is your goal, what activities will you do? What products will you develop to show those activities are successful? How do you assess what you’ve done?’” Dean Lee said.

GAPA is only one of many takeaways of the Summer Studio. Educators from around the world share common goals, despite their different cultures and perspectives. Those that attend the Summer Studio are both receptive to new ideas and generous with their own body of knowledge. This makes for high-quality collegial relationships, even life-long friendships. 

For Olin College, the learning is bidirectional. “A critical piece of Olin’s DNA is that we are constantly learning,” President Lee said. “We are learning from the institutions who come as participants — observing how they might interpret what we say and listening with intention to their feedback. For me, that’s an important outcome of the Summer Studio.” 

With an opportunity to make her own mark on Olin, President Lee believes the Olin model, now well established, can be applied to a range of non-engineering institutions, from liberal arts colleges to state schools and historically Black colleges and universities — “all in service of extending our impact and transforming higher education.” 

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

At a recent talk at Villanova University, the author and commentator David Brooks told students, “Know what you want. Want it well and want the things that are truly worth wanting.” The advice was not original to Brooks but rather to St. Augustine, who believed that knowing what you’re passionate about is critical in a world where human beings are driven more by desire than by reasoning.  

Interpreting the wisdom of St. Augustine is, in many ways, the raison d’être of Villanova. The Catholic university in Pennsylvania is considered the world’s premier institution for Augustinian scholarship. Pope Leo XIV is among its graduates. But while Villanova’s Augustinian roots run deep, one might ask: What does the work of the late fourth century Christian theologian really mean to a modern university with 21st century students? 

This is the underlying question behind a new character education initiative at Villanova called Pilgrim Virtues. The name refers to a central pillar in Augustine’s work — that human life is a pilgrimage. The program seeks to highlight what is distinctly Augustinian about character education at Villanova and share that with the campus community as well as others working in this field.  

“I think the character movement has really tapped into something real, something essential in higher education, and we wanted to become a part of that from our own distinct tradition.”

The initiative began two years ago with a Capacity-Building Grant from the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) at Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character. In 2025, Villanova received an Institutional Impact Grant of $822,258 from Wake Forest to build out an institution-wide series of character education programs, aligned with Augustinian teaching, both curricular and co-curricular. The idea was to coordinate, catalyze and accelerate the many character education activities that were taking place within three areas at the university: the Department of the Humanities, the Honors Program, and the Augustinian Institute. 

“I think the character movement has really tapped into something real, something essential in higher education, and we wanted to become a part of that from our own distinct tradition,” said Anna Moreland, who heads the Honors Program. 

Moreland and her colleague Michael Tomko, the chair of the Humanities Department, are the driving force and guiding spirit behind Pilgrim Virtues. Moreland’s sought-after “Shaping Initiative” course series (“Shaping a College Life,” “Shaping a Work Life,” and “Shaping an Adult Life”) helps students transition to college and walk through the experience intentionally, thinking deeply about their professional callings and their life beyond campus. 

Courses in the Department of Humanities study the questions that matter most for living a good and deeply human life.  Indeed, much of the work Moreland and Tomko were doing in their classrooms already bore the imprint of both Augustine’s teaching and the character education movement. They were curious about how to connect the two and scale the work so that it touched everyone on campus. But the challenge included engaging an audience that may only be tangentially aware of, or influenced by, the saint himself. First year students are required to read Augustine’s seminal work, “Confessions,” but for many, that will be their only exposure. And while Villanova is a Catholic university, a good percentage of the students are not, or are not practicing. 

To explore all of these considerations more deeply, Moreland did something unusual in higher education: She looked outside her university for partners. There, she “stumbled” upon the E.C.I. “We work in our silos so effectively that sometimes we reinvent the wheel,” she said. “But through the E.C.I., I realized there are all these good people around the country who are doing similar work. What we needed to do was get to know one another.” 

Moreland and Tomko drew on the expertise of the E.C.I. to examine other character education customs, including the more recognized Aristotelian tradition. In doing so, they quickly realized they had something to offer as well as to gain. “Through our work with the E.C.I., we were able to bring the Augustinian framework — those insights and experiences — to the broader field of character education,” Tomko said. 

The leaders believed that the examination of what Villanova had to offer required introspection and input from a wide cross-section of the university. Fortunately, the Capacity-Building Grant Villanova received covered a faculty and staff workshop pilot that would be the first foray into bringing diverse voices together on campus to revitalize Augustine’s teachings in a meaningful and visible way. The method they used was emblematic of the tradition they were reawakening.  

“We were drawing on the knowledge and inspiration of this group we had assembled,” Tomko said. “We not only had ideas but also the practical experience of how to live well in community.” Moreland said coming together to understand what it meant to teach character at an institution like Villanova was the most profound experience she had had at the university. “We brought our whole selves to those conversations,” she said. 

An important voice in the discussions was Paul Camacho, the associate director of the Augustinian Institute at Villanova and an associate professor of philosophy in the Humanities Department. The institute exists to promote the study of Augustine and his legacy within the pedagogy at the university. As an Augustinian scholar, Camacho helped clarify the distinctions within traditions. 

“A lot of what has emerged in character education is based on Greek philosophy, which sometimes presents a list of virtues that could be somehow obtained like credentials, as Benjamin Franklin famously attempted in his virtues checklist,” Camacho said. “Augustine reminds us that virtue is not something that you acquire but rather is a dramatic and dialogical narrative unfolding across the whole of your life.” 

St. Augustine of Hippo was a Late Antique philosopher, theologian, and bishop known for his insights into the human condition and one’s relationship with God. He argued that human beings are fundamentally desiring rather than reasoning creatures and that we are shaped by what we love. Augustine’s pilgrimage through life, his self-examination and conversion as captured in the “Confessions,” is perhaps his defining characteristic. 

“Augustine believed the good that we are striving for is always something that’s in process, always on the move, and always in relationship with other people,” Camacho said. “The task of being human is never really accomplished.” 

It was this journey through life that resonated most with the Villanova community and its students navigating their own education and personal growth. In identifying the pilgrimage theme, the initiative’s leaders explored what virtues would be critical for students traveling this road. If, for Augustine, love is the beginning and the end, what do you need along the way? 

“Augustine believed the good that we are striving for is always something that’s in process, always on the move, and always in relationship with other people.”

The five virtues they arrived on are: humility, forgiveness, patience, wonder, and conviviality. While the first three are more easily understood, wonder and conviviality, as seen through an Augustinian lens, merit definitions. Wonder, for Augustine, was an impassioned search for beauty “so ancient and so new,” as written in “Confessions.” Conviviality, from the Latin term con-vivere or ‘to live together’ binds its members in a common project, toward a shared goal.

The Journey Continues 

As the early work of the initiative laid the philosophical groundwork for the pilgrim virtues, the Institutional Impact Grant is bringing theory to practice. The new grant covers a series of programs, courses, lectures, and fellowships that are all ultimately student-facing. This fall, a new course called “Augustine the Pilgrim,” to be led by Camacho, will follow the footsteps of Augustine’s life, culminating in an actual pilgrimage to Italy. 

The faculty and staff workshop pilot is now an established program with a waiting list. The year-long workshop supports professors and practitioners in incorporating the virtue framework into classrooms and co-curricular activities. In bringing together diverse professionals from all areas of the university, the workshops have yielded positive results, both intended and unintended.  

Sunny Gaye Hallowell, a professor in Villanova’s nursing school, often wondered what the world was like for her colleagues in the humanities. She felt her students, while proficient at the scientific material, had limited opportunities to connect the meaning of nursing practice to who they were becoming as adults. When she heard of the Pilgrim Virtues workshop, she was the first to sign up.

“In my discipline, we teach to competency-based learning objectives. We give students challenging questions and case studies, so they can develop necessary skills to become amazing nurses,” Hallowell said. “But what are we doing in the classroom to cultivate a human being? I wanted to blend art and science to help students explore the human experience of health and healthcare through the eyes of both patients and providers, and to help them form a professional identity.” 

Hallowell said attending the workshop and learning the virtues gave her the language and structure to do that. Exposure to colleagues across multiple disciplines was an added benefit. “The chance to cultivate a classroom where we can walk through the virtues to think and engage independent of our own disciplines has been transformative,” she said. “It has given us a point of connection as faculty, and it has introduced me to colleagues and friends that reinforced the presence of an academic community I belong to.”

An important goal of the initiative is the direct engagement of students, both through the classroom and through programs like Augustinian Ambassadors, which was introduced through the Capacity Building Grant. Modeled after the faculty and staff workshops, the Augustinian Ambassadors program brings together interested students to deepen their understanding of Augustine’s teachings through texts and reflection. 

Kate DiLella was one of the first Ambassadors and will continue in the program this upcoming year. The rising senior was originally drawn to the Ambassador role because of her Catholic faith and interest in deepening her understanding of Augustinian character, and she believes the program has the potential to benefit anyone on campus. “Many of the students in the program seem to have a similar idea of what we are striving for, but through studying St. Augustine, we are reminded that life is a pilgrimage and part of the beauty is that we can’t foresee all the bumps that will come along the way.”

Once they have become reintroduced to Augustinian virtues, Ambassadors are expected to encourage their peers to participate in numerous ways. The well-attended David Brooks lecture was one option. The hope in offering these character-building onramps is that students may be particularly receptive to them at this point in their lives. 

Camacho has a theory on the subject based on what he sees as most prevalent in today’s students: a desire for security. “The culture, their parents, the job market are all telling them, ‘Everything is precarious out there.’ So the decisions they are making are based on fear,” he said. “But when you do that, you become smaller. You are no longer curious, and your relationships with other people become temporary.” 

Camacho said the pilgrim virtues offer another way of relating to the unknown. “These virtues tell us we are all on this journey together. If we are willing to grant that we fall short and that other people fall short and have the humility to accept that, we can loosen up a bit. Character formation isn’t another checklist of perfection but instead this wonderful opportunity to expand our attention to become curious about the world and what we love.” 

Asked if she believes that exploring the kinds of questions that lead to character development is unusual for students of her generation, Kate DiLella said, “I think questions about life and purpose and who we are and who we are called to be are likely on more students’ minds than it may seem, and through Educating Augustinian Character, students are guided in how to think about these bigger questions in life.”

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

This spring, a few months after starting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jane Laurence deleted all her social media accounts.

For years, she’d tried different strategies to limit her screen time, including taking intermittent breaks from various apps. But her habits continued to be consuming and compulsive. When she finally managed to wipe the slate clean, she was stunned by the amount of time freed up on the other side. “It felt,” she said, “like quitting a part-time job.”

It’s no secret that college students around the country are struggling to reclaim their time from technologies powered by the ability to capture and retain people’s attention. What’s less clear is how or whether institutions might be able to intervene in this slippery “attention economy,” which appears to be threatening engagement not only in the classroom but, well, everywhere.

At U.N.C., a new initiative called Educating for the Virtues of Attention (EVA) has set out to be that intervention. Unlike typical digital detoxes, EVA is less about eliminating the distraction than it is centering what’s truly worthy of our attention. The goal is to help students reflect on their habits of attention and build more intentional ones through opportunities for deep in-person engagement across campus. 

Funded by a nearly $800,000 grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, which supports character education efforts at colleges and universities nationwide, EVA is rooted in the idea that the ability to pay attention is a critical character virtue and one in need of cultivating now more than ever. 

An inconvenient virtue

Today, conversations about attention tend to center ideas about technology and productivity. But long before the invention of the smartphones or concerns about short-form media content, philosophers were thinking about human attention as a character virtue.

Long before the invention of the smartphones or concerns about short-form media content, philosophers were thinking about human attention as a character virtue.

Michael Vazquez is a teaching assistant professor in U.N.C.’s philosophy department and has been one of the leaders of EVA since its launch a year ago. He explained how the understandings of attention promoted by two particular 20th century philosophers, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, underpin EVA’s guiding principles.

“I think one way to put it is they [Weil and Murdoch] both think there’s a reality and a world that’s much bigger than us, and attending is a matter of seeing that reality as it really is — the reality of other people, the reality of the world, the natural world, and so on,” Vazquez said. 

In other words, to attend is to be more active participants in the world outside ourselves. And the more we attend, the more likely we are to become people who understand and care about that existence beyond us. 

Of course, the fickle thing about virtues is that they’re famously difficult to acquire, not to mention maintain. That pattern holds true when it comes to developing attentional habits, which requires leaving the safety of our controlled internal reality to confront a far less predictable and potentially less pleasant one beyond. 

“They’re comfortable illusions, they’re self-reinforcing, and they tend to be convenient,” Vazquez said of our inward tendencies. “It is awfully inconvenient to build attentional habits that make you susceptible to the reality of other people because that challenges your assumptions, your desires, your projects.”

Still, there’s a silver lining. Attending may demand more work than not, but the payoff can be quite satisfying for those who manage it, especially young people less accustomed to trying.

“It turns out if you just put the phones away and you have analog experiences with other people, whether you’re looking at art together or reading a book, you tend to feel pretty good about it,” Vazquez said. 

Perhaps a single in-person experience isn’t enough to make us virtuous right away, Vazquez added, but there are reassuring signs that it’s still the way to deeper feelings of purpose and meaning. That attending can improve not only the lives of others but our own is what he called “the icing on the cake.” 

Campus arteries

Vazquez described EVA programming as having three pillars: faculty and staff programming, student curricular programming, and student extracurricular programming. 

For faculty and staff, the main activity is communities of practice. These are opportunities for educators who apply to come together and discuss, as Vazquez put it, “the place of attention in the classroom.”

While the parameters of these conversations are left purposely broad, Vazquez said faculty veer towards using the forum to talk about how they’re seeing students struggle attentionally, as well as to workshop possible interventions.

“Does it seem like students are more distracted?” Vazquez said professors ask each other. “Does it seem like these technologies are not enabling or facilitating but actually inhibiting what happens in the classroom? Longform reading, is it on the decline?” 

One particular community of practice is designated for the instructors of a class called College Thriving. All first-years at U.N.C. are required to take this one-credit, intro-to-college course, which offers resources and strategies for academic success and, especially, personal wellbeing.

College Thriving is also the junction where EVA’s work with faculty and staff bleeds into efforts to impact student curricula. A major goal of the instructors’ community of practice is to think about ways to incorporate lessons and exercises around attentional habits into the course content. 

Devon Almond, a U.N.C. advisor and College Thriving instructor, helps lead the community of practice for his colleagues. He said there’s no single, standardized way the instructors are meant to bring attention-minded content into their class, nor is any staff member who teaches the course forced to be part of the discussion group.

But attention practices are important to Almond, who came to U.N.C. after working in an alternative college setting that focused on contemplative practices like meditation. That background has made him attuned to the prevailing culture at Chapel Hill that prizes constant movement and pressure to be productive. 

“There’s all of this noise and activity and socialization and competitive scarcity that comes at the expense of recognizing the stillness, the silence, the solitude, and the slowness that gives rise to a steadfastness,” Almond said.

The buzz of a college campus can be exciting, Almond added, but he likes to use College Thriving as an opportunity to encourage students to slow down. He often hosts sessions outside the typical classroom, like at the campus museum or planetarium, where students can observe new spaces with time and intentionality that are rare for their packed daily schedules. “The campus is our canvas,” he said. 

Attending may demand more work than not, but the payoff can be quite satisfying for those who manage it, especially young people less accustomed to trying.

Other class activities include a deep listening exercise for students to do in pairs, where one talks for four minutes straight and the other cannot interrupt or contribute in any way — just listen. And at the start of every class, students place a tented card in front of them that lists not only their name but their hometown and a few of the class themes and larger world causes they care about most. 

“It’s attending — it’s caring — to who and what is in front of you as well as what’s within you and the environments and the settings that create that,” Almond said.

The most focal component of EVA, though, is the extracurricular one. This involves both creating and incentivizing opportunities across campus for students to engage deeply with each other and new spaces and activities. 

At this point, EVA has forged partnerships with most of the “major arteries” on campus, Vazquez said. Last year, the events ranged from a professional Shakespeare production at the performing arts center to a guided exhibition tour at the art museum to a reflective exercise in the botanical garden. 

The point isn’t just to get students to participate in activities. Each event also features what Vazquez calls additional “scaffolding” to ensure the students understand exactly how they’re practicing attentional habits and why they’re important.

“Because you can go to the orchestra and you can have an intentional experience and you may even grow in your attentional capacities in some way or other, but you might not be able to name it yet,” Vazquez said. “You might not be able to think of attention as a skill that you can develop until you’re given a vocabulary.”

As for getting students to show up, EVA has cultivated a few strategies. For one, EVA events are accredited with a program called Campus Life Experiences. These include a variety of events, from resume writing workshops at the career center to open mic nights with the music department, of which all new U.N.C. students need to complete a certain number each semester. 

In terms of more intrinsic incentives, Vazquez said the most important is ensuring the main EVA activity is fundamentally interesting to students. That appeal, he added, requires that events are always free of cost and, of course, involve some kind of food. 

Carolina Unplugged

Now coming up on its second year, EVA will continue to run the main programming it started in the first, as well as build out some additional projects.

One of these additions will be Carolina Unplugged, another community of practice-style forum that will bring together groups of students to try out or reflect on different attentional efforts that counter time on their phones. 

Right now, Vazquez plans for one cohort of students to agree to use Bricks, which are physical devices that attach to smartphones to block distracting apps, throughout the semester and meet weekly to discuss the impact.

Another group he has in mind would similarly gather weekly but instead engage in in-person activities, like cooking or reading, that simply allow them to be present in each other’s company.

Jane Laurence, the soon-to-be-sophomore who recently deleted all her social media apps, is looking forward to being involved in Carolina Unplugged and EVA broadly as a research associate. She will assist Vazquez and the larger EVA data collection team working to both determine the program’s impact on students who participate and analyze general trends in how people approach and build attentional habits.

“I don’t think that these platforms are going away, so how can we develop better relationships around them? What types of people can or can’t?” Laurence said of her research interests. “What’s the impact of a community that’s trying to have different types of conversations about social media usage?” 

Another student, Diya Kayaleh, is a rising junior who will help coordinate the Carolina Unplugged groups. She, too, is especially excited to see how even smaller cohort-based work can influence the larger student body.

“Okay, there’s this group of people on campus doing something with attention,” she imagines even uninvolved students will begin to think. “What kind of reflection does that call within me?”

Often, Kayaleh added, she thinks there’s a tendency to underestimate the value young people place on in-person experiences and their desire to be active and offline.

“We want to collect those experiences, and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t,” she said. “It’s not that we’re so fundamentally broken or far gone that we can’t. We absolutely can.”

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

In the spring of 2019, word reached the inmates at M.C.I.-Shirley, a medium security men’s prison in Shirley, Mass., that Boston College was starting a bachelor’s degree program inside the facility. 

The prospect seemed unlikely to Nurudeen Alabi, who had been incarcerated for more than a decade, beginning when he was 17. He was first acquainted with the carceral system even earlier as a child, and felt fairly confident he understood how it worked at this point. A bachelor’s degree, and certainly one from the likes of B.C., prestigious by any standards, was not in the cards for guys like him.

“Being somebody that’s incarcerated, you have limitations,” Alabi said. “You’re limited to what you’re capable of doing, even though you could possibly do more. Just being in that mindset, I never thought college was anywhere near my future.”

It’s this very narrative that B.C. aims to break down. The B.C. Prison Education Program (BCPEP) is designed to provide incarcerated people a second, or sometimes first, chance at recognizing and cultivating the value they still have to offer the world. Grounded in the university’s most central principles, Jesuit values, the initiative has quickly distinguished itself based on just how far it’s willing to go to affirm the humanity of those others would prefer to ignore. 

Degrees earned through BCPEP come with no asterisk. The students are considered B.C. students in full and promised the same level of rigor as their traditional peers. They take many of the same classes, taught by the same longstanding professors. What’s more, any students who complete their prison sentence before their studies are guaranteed to be able to continue their program, post-release, on B.C.’s main campus in Chestnut Hill, Mass. 

“By Boston College just going in there, offering not a certificate but a real degree, helping them to realize that they matter, we are taking care of the whole person,” said Sister Jeanmarie Gribaudo, a B.C. faculty member whom one colleague described as the “den mother” of BCPEP. “I think that this is like hand in glove with the Jesuit mission.” 

Today, BCPEP is the largest provider of higher education in prison in Massachusetts. Since Alabi’s cohort, another five have followed, and the admissions process for a seventh is now underway. To apply, students must have a high school diploma or its equivalent, in addition to writing a personal essay, taking a reading analysis test, and completing an interview. This past semester, for the first time, the program expanded to a medium security women’s prison, M.C.I.-Framingham, in Framingham, Mass. 

Of the 110 total students BCPEP has admitted so far, both men and women, around 20 have been released and moved over to the Chestnut Hill campus to continue (or complete) their degrees. In 2022, after 15 years in prison, Alabi became the first BCPEP student to go free. In 2025, he was the first to walk at commencement on the outside. This spring, he started a new job at the New England Board of Higher Education advocating for prison education expansion across the region. 

Granting opportunity

The road of prison education in America has been far from linear. Policy, like public perception, has had a tendency to flip flop on the question of whether education, and especially higher education, is a right or a luxury, as well as who is deserving of either. Is incarceration for punishment or rehabilitation? 

In the early 70s, incarcerated people became eligible for Basic Educational Opportunities Grants, now known as Pell Grants, for the first time. They could receive federal financial aid to put towards a higher education without taking out a loan or risking debt. And as students found a way to pay, the number of prisons with degree-granting programs shot up, from 237 in 1976 to 772 in 1990.

The boom didn’t last long. By 1994, President Clinton was ushering in a new period of restriction, eliminating Pell-eligibility for the incarcerated once again. Then, like now, many wondered why criminals should receive for free the kind of education many more lawful, middle-class folk couldn’t afford themselves. Rehabilitation for those who have committed heinous offenses can be a hard pill to swallow, especially for victims and their families. Programs started to shutter, like in New York, where nearly 1,100 incarcerated people earned a college degree in 1991, compared to 141 in 2011. 

At the same time, evidence was mounting for the most prevalently cited justification for prison education: reduced recidivism (and, thus, saved tax dollars). In 2013, the RAND Corporation published the definitive study on the matter, estimating those who participate in education programs to be 43 percent less likely to recidivate. By 2016, an Obama-era pilot effort had reinstated Pell grants for the incarcerated enrolled in certain partner colleges, or “experimental sites.” Those partnerships expanded under Trump, and in 2023, the Biden administration oversaw the return of Pell-eligibility for inmates across the board.  

As BCPEP wasn’t among the Pell-supported “experimental sites” when it began in 2019, it relied on other funding. The primary donors were an anonymous couple, who had ties to B.C. and were already supporting the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) out of Bard College, a longtime leader in the prison education space. The couple helped engineer a relationship between B.C. and BPI, still affiliated today, which gave way to the original launch of BCPEP. 

As it stands, support for BCPEP continues to come from a mix of sources, including the anonymous donors who started it all, along with other individual contributors, private grants, and state and federal funding. Though more difficult, being forced to be self-sustaining from the beginning may have ultimately been a blessing. Even now, federal support is helpful but not the difference between the program’s survival and collapse. 

Patrick Conway, the BCPEP director, offered another benefit of more involved fundraising: It requires a greater investment of time and resources from the university, which in turn reinforces its value for the initiative. That buy-in, he said, keeps BCPEP from “being perceived as a very peripheral program, rather than part of the core mission.”

‘They read everything’

On the walls of the classroom at M.C.I.-Shirley hang all manner of B.C. swag. Photos of campus are posted beside pennants beside a picture one BCPEP student drew of the B.C. eagle. 

“I told them the first day that this was like an embassy,” said Susan Roberts, a veteran of the B.C. English department now dedicated to teaching at BCPEP in her retirement. “In this room, this is Boston College.” 

At the embassy, students all pursue an applied liberal arts degree, which involves two key components: a traditional liberal arts curriculum, with classic subjects like English, history, philosophy, and theology; and a “professional core,” spanning courses in entrepreneurship, design thinking, and strategic leadership, to map the liberal arts skills onto modern work environments. There are also non-academic offerings, including an annual 5K, reflective retreat, and classical music concert series. Soon, for the first time in Massachusetts, BCPEP will facilitate paid internships, with salaries of $25 per hour, for two students to work for the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison from inside M.C.I.-Shirley.

To ease the transition to college, students tend to take two classes their first term. From there, they’re guaranteed at least three per semester. In total, nine to 11 courses run usually any given fall or spring, Conway said, along with another three to five over the summer. Though pacing varies, the typical time to graduate sits around four and a half years, he added.

As advertised, the courses at BCPEP closely resemble those offered on the main B.C. campus. In the past, Roberts has taught Studies in Poetry and Apocalypse Narratives. She, like other colleagues, described basing the content on classes she’d taught in Chestnut Hill, while making adjustments to appeal more to potential interests of an incarcerated population.

Many BCPEP teachers reported being nervous, or at least uncertain, to be teaching in a prison for the first time. In the end, they were universally impressed with what they found. Intellectually, they said, the BCPEP students are on par with their traditional peers. In terms of their eagerness, the inmates tend to be legions beyond the reference point.

“They read everything. Everything you give them, they read,” said Brian Harrington, a B.C. alumnus and the former chief marketing officer of Zipcar. Now teaching entrepreneurship at BCPEP, he often brings guests into class to talk about their successful careers. Uniformly, he said, they tell him his students are the most engaged of any they’ve addressed.

Part of the students’ dedication to their education, Harington imagines, stems from their having the time for it. At the very least, prison is boring, BCPEP teachers and students agree. The hunger to learn is wrapped up in a desire, and a need, for engagement and stimulation of any kind.

“I believe my class gives them agency in a place where hopes and dreams are crushed most days.”

Of course, there’s something deeper going on, too. “I believe my class gives them agency in a place where hopes and dreams are crushed most days,” Harrington said. Especially given the practical aspect of his course, where students develop their own idea for a business, they might begin to imagine the possibilities for a future after prison. 

Anthony Baye graduated from BCPEP this spring and was released from M.C.I.-Shirley a few weeks later. Despite being free now, he spoke to a universal way the program, and particularly its professors, lift up students, no matter the length of their sentence.

“It’s just the level of care and respect that we get from faculty that matters most to me,” Baye said. “In prison, you feel like nothing you really have to say matters; you’re always going to be a second-class person. But when you’re in B.C., they treat you no different.”

It will come as no surprise to know there are still plenty of challenges with teaching and learning in prison. When BCPEP began, students had no access to technology and handwrote all their assignments. While there are now laptops that include Microsoft apps and a modified version of JSTOR, basic gaps in digital tools or knowledge remain a barrier. It’s difficult, Harrington said for instance, to teach modern marketing to students who have never seen or used Google Reviews. 

Susan Roberts added that students’ lives outside the classroom may impede their academic progress. One of hers was recently forced to withdraw after a prolonged period in solitary confinement. Others have missed class or been pulled out early because their lawyers came to visit. A few weeks ago, she submitted final grades for two students who never handed in the last assignment; she didn’t know why not. “There’s a whole infrastructure of the prison that we have no access to, and no interaction with, that can be very interruptive,” she said.

Tensions between the inmates can present another point of concern. In the early days of BCPEP, Baye said, those not involved or admitted could seem resentful of those who were and accuse them of thinking they were above the rest. In general, Nurudeen Alabi said being a BCPEP student made him feel vulnerable among the other incarcerated because they knew he needed to stay out of trouble. He didn’t want to be perceived as weak; he also couldn’t do anything to risk his spot in the program.

Over time, though, both Baye and Alabi reported feeling like BCPEP spurred a broad culture shift at M.C.I.-Shirley for the better. For one, as Alabi mentioned, wanting to be or remain in the program encouraged good behavior. For another, as the program grew, more and more students brought their education outside the classroom, continuing those conversations, and sharing content with others. 

“It went from guys talking about selling drugs or doing dumb stuff to, ‘Yo, what did you get on that paper? Oh, I’m so excited to talk about X, Y, and Z next week,’” Baye said. “It just changed the conversation and the tone and the mood around camp.” 

“Guys were talking about doing the right things — positive stuff — as opposed to all the B.S. that got guys there in the first place.”

Eagles Bridging the Gap

When Alabi was released in 2022, he was free but not unburdened.

He struggled in the transition back to a life on the outside that had changed drastically since he’d last known it as a teenager. He needed to find employment and housing. He needed to learn to drive and figure out how to afford a car and then insure it. He needed to learn how to pay taxes. He needed to learn how to use Google. “That Google helped a lot,” he recalled, with a laugh.

When it came to his education, a whole other host of specific changes and challenges emerged. He was still discovering Google, let alone mastering the whirlwind of online tools commonly used in college classes today. He needed to create an email address. He needed to know how to submit assignments through Canvas and post on discussion boards and take online classes and tests and search for library books. 

As the first of BCPEP’s students to make it onto the Chestnut Hill campus, Alabi navigated reentry largely on his own. B.C. had yet to build much in the way of infrastructure to support students’ transition, so he enrolled in a program at nearby Tufts University specializing in just that. 

Alabi recalled his hesitance to take full advantage of B.C. opportunities, even as Conway encouraged him to do so. “He’d always say, ‘This is your campus, too. This is your campus, too,’” Alabi said. “And I never understood why he’s saying [that]. In my head, I’m like, ‘This is not my campus. I’m just a visitor. I’m lucky to be here.’”

The arrival of one more student from M.C.I.-Shirley opened up Alabi’s experience. With a partner by his side, he felt more at ease using various resources, like the dining hall or the library. He started attending B.C. events, likes sports matches. “If it’s interesting, I’m gonna go and be part of the program, be part of the school,” he said.

As more BCPEP students have made their way over to Chestnut Hill, the structures and community of support have grown as well. Alabi serves as a mentor and guide to other formerly incarcerated students. There is a course dedicated in part to easing their transition, along with a team of BCPEP staff organized to look out for the students and ensure they’re on track. “I honestly think that what we do on campus is just as transformative as what we’re doing on the inside,” Conway said.

Deepening relationships between BCPEP and traditional B.C. students has been a particular focus of late. Alabi is one of the founders of a student group called Eagles Bridging the Gap, designed to connect the two groups. He said it’s been gratifying to see others seek to broaden their understanding of what the formerly incarcerated are really like.

Sister Jeanmarie Gribaudo described how having insight into the incarcerated experience will help all B.C. students help the world. “The kids from Boston College, they’re extraordinarily academically gifted, and they need to know about these issues because they’re going to be the ones in boardrooms and everything else, where they can speak up and make a difference,” she said. 

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