Category: Teaching & Learning

When Elizabeth Davis became President of Furman University in 2014, she looked to promote what was most distinctive about the small liberal arts school in Greenville, South Carolina. Furman had its share of awards and recognitions but Davis was seeking to capture what her listening tour had convinced her was a very different college experience for students, faculty and staff.  

Engaged, student-centered learning was part of Furman’s culture as far back as the early 1930’s.  Internships and study away had been available since the late 1960’s and undergraduate students had been offered research opportunities for decades. The faculty-as-mentor concept had been embraced at Furman long before it was linked to life-long wellbeing but no one was really talking about it. It occurred to Davis that combining all of these elements provided an advantage waiting to be named at a time when student emotional and behavioral health was becoming a national concern. 

“I had become really interested in the Gallup Purdue work that identified the big six experiences that you need to have in college in order to thrive in life and work and it was clear to me that many of our students were getting all six,” she said.  “We had faculty and staff who were interested in creating that kind of environment for our students and I thought this was really a differentiator.” 

The problem, according to Davis and her team, was bigger than finding the right slogan. In order to make Furman’s engaged learning culture an institutional asset, and a true promise to its students, they needed to increase the percentage of them who were experiencing these high impact practices. That meant informing more students about what was available and reducing the barriers to participation for students who, for whatever reason, were not taking part. 

In October, 2016, Furman launched a new strategic plan called The Furman Advantage (TFA).  Equal parts pedagogy and programming, TFA is a four-year individualized educational experience that progresses developmentally, is guided by specially trained advisors and exposes all students to engaged learning experiences like undergraduate research, study away, and internships. Underpinning all of it is a commitment to reflection — urging students to consider questions such as “What am I good at?” “What do I most care about?” 

The journey begins with Pathways, a two-year, 4 credit class of 15 students, taught by a professor or trained staff member who becomes a student’s pre-major advisor. Its curriculum covers topics like study skills, time management, and academic integrity, while exploring concepts such as belonging, identity, and empathy. Once their major is declared in year two, students spend years three and four on engaged learning experiences, and career and post-graduate exploration and preparation.  

“All of the things that were part of the core from a liberal arts education are in there,” said Beth Pontari, Provost at Furman and one of the lead architects of TFA. “It was just sort of highlighting and amplifying the things we care deeply about and ensuring access for all students by providing a level playing field that is foundational.”

Nothing says “we care about you,” like a personalized, developmentally-appropriate pathway of curricular and co-curricular activities.

The Furman Advantage has its own significant advantage in that it was funded by an extraordinary gift from The Duke Endowment. Now celebrating its 100^th anniversary, the Duke Endowment was established by industrialist James B. Duke to continuously fund, among other pursuits, four schools in North and South Carolina: Duke University, Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University.  The unusual funding relationship allows the schools to experiment with concepts before they are proven.   

“We work really closely with the leaders of all four institutions to understand what their institutional priorities are and then determine how The Duke Endowment can best support them,”  said Kristi Walters, director of higher education at The Duke Endowment which funded the Furman Advantage in three large grants totaling around $75 million over several years.  “Our hope is that our support leads to high value education across all the schools.” 

At Furman, the Endowment’s backing fueled an institutional transformation that is difficult to achieve in higher education.  While The Furman Advantage is perceived as more of an iteration than a major change, making it the dominant nomenclature at the school took years of hard work that involved perennial challenges like getting faculty buy-in, aligning independent departments around common goals, and hoping the students would respond. 

Building the Advantage

Nothing says “we care about you” like a personalized, developmentally-appropriate pathway of curricular and co-curricular activities curated with the help of an engaged advisor. But the team at Furman does not want TFA to be confused with coddling students. In fact, when Elizabeth Davis was looking at Furman with fresh eyes, a group of administrators, faculty, researchers and practitioners were already participating in a multi-institutional effort to address what they saw as a lack of resilience among students.  

Early strategic discussions involving all Duke Endowment-funded schools concluded that student mental health was among each of their highest concerns. They agreed the best cumulative response was to focus on preventative strategies rather than service delivery only.  Hearing this, the Endowment agreed to fund a $3.4 million, five-year project called The Student Resilience and Well-Being Project with a mission “to better understand the challenges students face in college and to identify individual, interpersonal and institutional factors that promote and detract from student well-being in the face of challenge and stress.”  The aim was not to make things easier for students but to help them cope with the stresses of college and to develop the skills that would help them flourish in school and beyond. 

The project was launched in 2014 and involved nearly 20 faculty and administrators across the institutions focused on tracking the undergraduate class of 2018 through their entire collegiate experience.  It collected data on more than 6,600 variables across 11 waves of data collection from more than 2,000 students.  Some say the study itself did not reach its full potential due to pandemic-related disruptions, but the individual schools have benefited from the findings in a number of ways. 

By all accounts, Furman took the Resiliency Project, and the data it provided, very seriously.  Pontari says while academic rigor is expected at Furman, they were surprised to see that the level of academic stress reported by students, and continuing throughout their four years, was higher at Furman than at the other schools. Advising was another red flag. Furman had faculty advising only and as committed as many were to the practice, quality advising was reported to be inconsistent, leaving outcomes up to what they called “the advising lottery.”  

“When you see the data, you know what you’re dealing with and these were things we were not going to ignore,” said Pontari, who, through The Duke Endowment, hired Gallup to provide a baseline of knowledge about students’ experiences at Furman. For Davis, the Resiliency Project provided more material for the strategic initiative. Not only did the project identify key challenges that would make their way into TFA, it strengthened another one of Furman’s little known and unusual assets – the collaboration between academic and student affairs. In the Resiliency Project, Psychology professors found themselves working alongside mental health practitioners. Student affairs professionals and academic deans got to know and respect one another through years of working groups. 

Throughout the process, Pontari, who at the time was Associate Provost of Engaged Learning, worked hand in hand with Connie Carson, Furman’s Vice President of Student Affairs. Many, including Davis, consider their continued partnership to be one of the most important outcomes of the multi-year research project.

“The two domains of a student’s life – the in-class/out-of-class thing – they can either work well together or they can play against each other.”

“Beth and Connie developed a learning relationship that was so important to what we ended up doing,” she said. “The academic side got to learn what student life brings to the table.  It’s not all fun and games. It’s a real understanding of student development theory.” 

Carson sees the alignment as something that institutions can choose to value.   

“Higher education can be very competitive with lots of curiosity about who gets credit,” she said. “The two domains of a student’s life – the in-class/out-of-class thing – they can either work well together or they can play against each other.  Here, all we cared about was the impact on the student and so we said, ‘let’s make this an asset.’”

That asset is woven throughout The Furman Advantage, starting with Pathways, which involves both student affairs personnel and faculty as student advisors as well as teachers of a specially designed curriculum for first and second year students.  Based on a five year pilot that involved a student control group, Pathways is a best-practice boot camp of sorts where new students get exposed to college life, its stressors and opportunities, and build both academic and emotional skills. Students meet once a week for a 50 minute class led by their Pathways program advisor and a peer mentor who are trained to discuss issues like conflict resolution as easily as they are how to choose a major. Faculty and staff are compensated for their time, either through a stipend or by folding the course into their teaching load.  

 “The Furman Advantage concept was really thinking about – how do we engage in this developmental model and create it in a way where students will understand what they need to be doing and when in order to reach the goal of being prepared for work and life,” said Michelle Horhota, a psychologist and faculty member who is Furman’s first Associate Dean of Mentoring and Advising. “The Pathways program is the glue that holds it all together.”

Results from the Pathways pilot showed a 3% increase in first-year to sophomore retention, an 11% increase in first-year to sophomore retention in students of color; improvements in advising satisfaction among first-year students and increased utilization in services like career development and counseling. Surveys also showed a 9% increase in first-years’ sense of belonging; a 10% increase in feeling that they matter; and a 5% increase in first-years reporting they strongly agree that professors care about them as individuals. 

By design, Pathways exposes students to engaging learning experiences, but Pontari points out that “just because they know about them, doesn’t mean they will participate in them.” She says one of her most important roles at Furman has been to eliminate the barriers to participation, the most common of which are money and time. The school’s summer fellowship program began to include compensation for students who rely on summer income for undergraduate research and internships. It created a flexible study away program and on campus internships for athletes whose schedules did not allow for significant time away. 

Participation in Furman’s big three – study away, internships and undergraduate research — is now at around 95% which comes close to Davis’ original goal, though the cultural change is ongoing.  Not everyone on campus envisioned TFA as clearly as its leaders did and Davis says more work needs to be done to articulate the concept both internally and externally, particularly with faculty, many of whom voted against making Pathways a graduation requirement. 

Tim Fehler has been a history professor at Furman for nearly 30 years.  He said he “backed into” TFA by having been the Director of Undergraduate Research and Internships in the early 2000’s. He talks about his own “conversion” from the inside-the-classroom mindset to an understanding of how the intentionality of TFA might affect student development as well as the integrity of teaching at Furman. 

Fehler had been working with students on summer research projects for years, despite being in the humanities which didn’t naturally lend itself to the practice.   

“Doing research with me or in the chemistry department doesn’t mean you’re going to become a professor, in fact, most of our students will not,” he said. “But what they learn is just as valuable. Working in research helps you understand yourself and your abilities and your approach to problems. And it got me to see that students can do this kind of work and the effect it can have on them.”  

But despite leading these efforts and even joining The Furman Advantage committee, Fehler said even he had to be convinced about some of its components. 

“I understood research but when it came to internship applications, I was kind of like ‘who cares?’ – isn’t this just a job?” 

Fehler says it took reading the student’s reflections on their experiences with internships to understand that they were an opportunity to get students to think about who they are and who they will eventually become, not just another bullet point on a resume.  

Asked about faculty buy-in for TFA and the Pathways program in particular, Fehler said it was mixed with a fair amount of “eye rolling.” He says that while Furman was always a place that put teaching first, many saw Pathways as a separate duty that was placed on them and could distract them from what the university was really going to reward. For younger faculty, getting tenure is still the primary goal.  

“Some faculty still have that kind of expectation that this student-facing component is not quite what I went to graduate school for,” said Fehler.  “However, when faculty can witness the growth potential among students, we see how these activities can improve our work both in the classroom and professionally, plus the mentorship experiences can become deeper and richer.”

As Furman continues on its cultural journey, results from the Gallup study delivered good news. Furman alumni surpassed the national average in Gallup’s “Big Six” college experiences. The survey also found that Furman students are 3.4 times more likely to be engaged at work and 2.9 times more likely to be thriving in wellbeing.

Folks at Furman now call TFA an educational philosophy, as opposed to an initiative. “It’s just the way we do things now,” said Davis. Those in higher education who hope to follow Furman’s example might ask “Would Furman’s success with TFA be possible without its deep history of engaged learning? or the significant financial support of the Duke Endowment?”   

Davis says changing the philosophy around the co-dependence of activities inside and outside of the classroom remains the biggest lift even for a school that was ready for it.  In regards to funding, she acknowledges that it allowed them to accomplish a great deal quickly but encourages other schools to look at what Furman has already paid for. “We spent years having faculty and staff develop Pathways,” she said. “Now it exists.” 

Asked if she thinks The Furman Advantage is an even bigger advantage at a time when the value of higher education is in question, Davis is cautiously optimistic.  

“There is perceived value – rankings and acceptance rates and whatever you see on the web site – and then there is real value,” she said. “We can influence perceived value to some degree, but we really have to keep working on what the real value is – being able to sustain the promises we make to prospective students.” 

In his UF Quest course “Soccer Explains the World,” Professor Quinn Hansen brings first-year students through the history of the game, from its origins as a gentlemen’s sport in British public schools to its emergence as a vessel for fervent patriotism to its current status as a multi-billion-dollar business. Hansen says what starts as an engaging exploration of a popular and relatable topic becomes a series of thought-provoking discussions about a host of issues ranging from equity in education and child labor laws to gender politics, nationalism, and what it feels like to be a player bought and sold like a commodity. 

“It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch,” said Hansen, a linguist who also teaches Portuguese. “The topic is what excites the students, and when everybody is excited, great things happen in the classroom.”  

If Hansen’s class feels like a typical small-group elective offered at a liberal arts college, it is meant to. It was designed specifically for UF Quest, part of the general education curriculum at the University of Florida, recrafted over the past several years to create intimate, interactive learning communities within the large land-grant university in Gainesville. The intent behind UF Quest is to provide students, particularly FTICs (first time in college), an opportunity to learn how to learn from faculty who know their names before settling into the more impersonal tracks dictated by their declared major.  These classes typically involve critical thinking and robust debate about some of the world’s biggest problems, a process the web site describes as “engaging students in questions that are difficult to answer but impossible to ignore.” 

“With Quest, students begin a journey to understand what their potential roles are in answering some of these questions, whether it’s obvious to them or not” said Angela Lindner, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs, who has led the development of Quest since her arrival at UF in 2015.  She is the first to admit it has been a hard-won endeavor.  At “Quest Day” in November, which commemorated the program’s 5-year anniversary, Lindner told an enthusiastic crowd, “My colleagues throughout the country repeatedly say to me ‘how in the world did you pull this off?’” 

Getting to Quest

Lindner is an engineer by training with a PhD from the University of Michigan and fond memories of her liberal arts undergraduate experience, which included strong relationships with her professors.  She was drawn to the school because of its student-centered culture and its early adherence to a core shared curriculum. In scouring historic catalogues (the university graduated its first class in 1857), she took as inspiration an adage that aligned with her philosophy on the developing student. “The choice of professional work is postponed until the student knows better his capacity and disposition to undertake work that will be profitable to himself and society…avoiding the handicap of narrow specialization,” it read.  

Lindner’s own adage was to “leave them alone” in their first two years as they transition from the black-and-white of high school to the gray abstract of the university.  This, and the belief that liberal arts-like experiences can happen anywhere, drove her to create the vision for what would eventually become UF Quest. 

But general education reform is not easy anywhere, and certainly not in public universities in Florida where the legislature weighs in on curriculum. The trend toward vocationalism in education and away from the humanities as the foundation for learning has been hurtling along for the past decade, accelerated by the great recession of 2008 and 9. Predictable barriers such as faculty push-back, turf wars, and the pace of committee decision-making, all made the eventual release of UF Quest in 2018 seem miraculous. Lindner says they had to redesign the UF Quest logo three times.  

Fortunately, long before Lindner’s arrival, the UF Task Force on Undergraduate Education of 2010 paved the way for Quest in calling for the creation of signature experiences for first-time in college students that are themed: an increase in academic experiential learning, service learning, and civic engagement opportunities. Its most notable change was the addition of the required course “The Good Life,” which gave FTIC’s exposure to great book philosophers and the Socratic method.  While the course itself is largely considered disappointing, the breakthrough of establishing a shared, core curricula for 6,500 incoming students provided a platform that could be revised. 

After countless hours of expansive consensus-building on campus, and the solid but intentionally understated support of then President Kent Fuchs, Lindner and a multi-disciplinary team of faculty, staff and academic administrators unveiled the first version of UF Quest in 2017, centered on “the exploration of grand challenges” (hence the name) in the Humanities, Natural and Social Sciences. The content of UF Quest 1 courses reflect one of five themes representing grand challenges in the Humanities – the Examined Life, Identities, Justice and Power, Nature and Culture, War and Peace.  

Quest 2 courses, also required, focus on what Lindner calls the “wicked questions” of the natural or social sciences. Quest 3 and 4, which are currently electives, rely more heavily on experiential learning components to send students into the world to try on for size what they have learned in the classroom. Quest 4 is a discipline rooted faculty-driven capstone course that allows them to synthesize their learning and hear from voices outside of higher education.  

Unlike other courses in the general education curriculum, UF Quest has a number of “non-negotiables” reflecting its mission. Every Quest course has to have small classes, faculty have to engage closely with students – they are expected to know every student’s name; they have to include reflection assignments and some element of experiential learning. In addition, every course has to pose an essential question. For example, in the anthropology course “Indigenous Values,” the instructor asks, “How can indigenous values about the relationship between nature and culture help us address the challenge of climate change, food insecurity, and public health?”

Faculty Expertise, Student Choice

It is clear that the role of the faculty in the development and execution of UF Quest cannot be overstated, both in terms of their buy-in and ownership of the program and in the way it has allowed them to teach.  UF Quest’s excerpt is “Faculty Expertise, Student Choice” which speaks volumes about the essential elements of the program.  “The only way this was going to work was to have faculty backing it,” said Quinn Hansen, who was introduced to UF Quest by a faculty colleague who thought he would be a good fit. “And the best way to get faculty bought in is to say to them ‘talk about what you like and what you’re passionate about.’  It’s all about proposing your own adventure.” 

Lindner believes Quest has influenced teaching generally at UF with professors reporting they now teach their other courses as they do their Quest courses – with a much stronger connection to their students. “I can’t tell you how many times I hear the word ‘love,’ from faculty,” she said. “They love their students, they are excited to get back to their ‘first love’ – teaching.” 

So how does all this feel for the students themselves, nearly all of whom are unaware of the general-ed revisions that were made on their behalf?  

Claire is a senior on full scholarship at UF. She is double majoring in biology and Japanese and is on her way to veterinarian school. Her UF Quest journey was not so much about discovering what she wanted to major in as it was about experiencing a different side to what she had already chosen to pursue. For her Quest course, Claire chose “The Anatomy of a Story,” mostly, she said, because it had anatomy in the name. The instructor used several media sources – books like When Breath Becomes Air and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as well as documentaries, poetry, and artwork – to convey the experience of either the patient or the practitioner. With humanities-related topics weaved throughout, the class was largely discussion-based, and students submitted a final essay interpreting one of the media sources they chose. 

“I can’t tell you how many times I hear the word ‘love,’ from faculty. They love their students, they are excited to get back to their ‘first love’ – teaching.”

“Being a biology major, a lot of what I do is listen to lectures and regurgitate information so having a discussion-based class where you hear other people’s opinions, that’s what I found most valuable about Quest,” she said. Claire’s experience included forging a close relationship with her professor. “She made a big impact on me because of how passionate she was about the material,” Claire said. “She has been a phenomenal mentor to me.”

Andrew, a third-year engineering major at UF, was also impressed with the energy and commitment faculty put into their Quest courses.  He took the “Good Life” in Quest 1 and while he was “meh” about the course, he said the instructor impressed him. “The professor made it way more than just about the material itself,” he said.  “He was a passionate musician, and he brought his music into different points of the course and gave us his own personal view.  He was also very interested in what we had to say.”  

Like Claire, Andrew viewed his Quest requirement as a respite from the load he was taking in engineering where he is studying digital arts and sciences. “As a student in a Quest course, you’re embracing a very different way of thinking than your major probably tracks you into,” he said. For Quest 2, Andrew chose “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” which he described as exploring what love, sex and romance actually mean.  “Each week we did readings that we would discuss, and we talked about how they made us feel, how this pertained to our own lives, and I think we all grew as people as a result,” he said.

In discussing the level of faculty engagement within his Quest courses, Andrew offered an astute observation even Lindner may not have anticipated. “The Quest instructors have more freedom and can arrange the curriculum with more fluidity in a way that’s productive and engaging and that tends to produce a higher quality of instruction.”

The Quest Forward

17,849 students have now successfully completed their Quest 1 requirement and 8,800 students have completed Quest 2 courses. Over 200 faculty from 69 units have developed and offered UF Quest courses and the qualitative and quantitative data have been positive. But UF Quest still faces a number of internal and external challenges that will determine just how much a change agent it proves to be for the university. 

Marketing the program wasn’t included in “getting it over the finish line” and there is a long way to go before students move from checking the box on their required Quest courses to promoting them as transformative experiences on TikTok. A related problem is getting traction on Quest 3 and 4. As important as it would seem to bring students through the full Quest trajectory, it is a tougher lift for third- and fourth-year students who are fully ensconced in their majors. In many ways, the challenge in implementing Quest’s later stages bumps up against the problem the program was created to address: students are worried they won’t have the time or the credit latitude for courses outside of their area of study. As excited as Andrew was to have participated in UF Quest, he was unsure if he would pursue Quest 2 and 3 when asked about it.  “As an engineering major, I have a lot of other big stones to step on.” 

Perhaps Quest’s biggest challenge is the chilling effect reported on college campuses in states, like Florida, with active legislation that restricts content of courses, combined with the increasing drumbeats calling for a return to prescribed classical education in core curriculum (both at odds with Quest’s excerpt of “Faculty Expertise and Student Choice” to encourage freedom of exploration, discovery, and meaning-making). Today, despite its tangible, transformative successes, this uncertainty leads to the question of whether Quest will be allowed to reach its full potential now that it has indeed hit its stride.  

Angela Lindner has recently retired from her position as Associate Provost, something she said she planned in anticipation of a research-based sabbatical that will lead to a teaching position in the engineering department. As proud as she is of the signature work she led with UF Quest, she said her greatest satisfaction came when people, particularly faculty, started calling it their own. 

When Hannah Herrera entered college, she thought she wanted to be an athletic trainer and physical therapist. In high school she’d been on the cross-country, track, and dance teams, and had a strong inclination towards helping student athletes.

At Tulane University, she took a class in life design principles, and gained some insights into her own motivations and goals. The first was that she didn’t love science classes. The second was that she wasn’t actually passionate about working with athletes, per se—she just really wanted to help young people. A third and pivotal bit of self-awareness was a greater appreciation of herself as a first-generation college student, and how it shaped her ambitions.

“There’s a strong sense of imposter syndrome among first-generation students, and a need to do well and make money so we can pay our families back. And that’s completely valid. But after taking these life design courses, I came to feel that I didn’t have to make the salary of someone in medicine to make a difference,” she said.

Hannah graduated last year and is now working as a wellness support coordinator in Residential Life. Her tentative plan is to get a master’s degree in a wellness field. “I can work with students who were like me four years ago, and if I can help a couple of students realize their dreams, I feel like that’s very much worth it. But I don’t have to decide. I just have to be headed in a direction that feels right.”

The life design classes were offerings in Tulane’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. The center was founded in 2014, and in the years since, has evolved to include an intentional approach to career and life planning. Around the same time, on the other side of the country, Stanford University’s Bill Burnett was expanding the Life Design Lab he’d co-founded. The book he wrote applying the principles and class exercises to the general public would shoot those concepts into the motivational stratosphere. Designing Your Life became a #1 New York Times bestseller, shaping the public dialogue on building a career and life that is meaningful and productive. But it would also boomerang the conversation back to higher education, where Burnett and his team would have to manage a floodgate of inquiries from educators interested in bringing the work to their campuses.

At its core, life design is about curiosity, a desire to see what might be possible rather than coasting on autopilot to the next expected thing. At a time when the public dialogue (and every cash-strapped family) is asking about the value of a degree, schools applying design thinking to career development are providing students with a new way of thinking about not just their careers, but themselves.

Stanford’s Life Design Studio—and thanks to COVID, the Virtual Life Design Studio—has brought hundreds of schools like Tulane into the conversation. From Bowdoin to Berkeley, Northeastern to Northwestern, Harvard to Harvey Mudd—and across Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia—faculty and administrators in the workshops learn to guide students through envisioning many directions their lives might take based on their interests, aptitudes, and values. And because of this, increasing numbers of students are learning that their options are both more mappable and limitless than they’d ever imagined.

“After I took that class, I was able to identify the things that really mattered to me, the things I wanted from my career,” Hannah said. “It opened my mind to the possibilities that are out there by allowing yourself to try things out and see what sticks.”

For all its impact, Stanford’s Life Design Lab doesn’t have its own building, and isn’t a department students can major in. It’s a modest teaching lab that consists of four full-time staff lecturers tucked within the mechanical engineering department, simply because that’s where Burnett already taught product design. Classes are available to students whether they dream of being doctors, dancers, or data crunchers. The Lab team wants them to approach their goals by thinking like a designer, by which they mean, creating a methodology for creative problem-solving. It involves reframing challenges to generate out-of-the-box solutions, prototyping new ideas, and testing these prototypes with real users to create successful products. It’s called design thinking because you are actually designing your options the way you would a house, or a suite of software.

“After I took that class, I was able to identify the things that really mattered to me, the things I wanted from my career,” Hannah said. “It opened my mind to the possibilities that are out there by allowing yourself to try things out and see what sticks.”

Conceptually, Designing Your Life applies the process to adults in a range of life stages—early, mid, late career, or retirement (the “encore”)—and offers approaches to the various ways people get stuck. First, the individual needs to define what problem it is they’re actually solving—is it income, experience, time, connections, geography?—and take stock of the obstacles. The methodology is both mental, and visual; a new way of seeing things is called a successful reframing. And much of the language is tangible and evocative. People might be facing obstacles that are unfightable, which are “gravity problems” (essentially unchangeable), or merely “anchor problems” (you’re held back, but not by the immutable laws of physics). The process involves getting rid of dysfunctional beliefs to generate fresh ideas, then using the better ones to build experiments, or prototypes.

For students, prototyping might include trying out internships. Some tools take the form of exercises. Writing in a Good Time Journal involves listing your activities over the course of several weeks, and keeping track of which ones you find most engaging—quite literally, catching yourself in the act of having a good time. Mind Mapping uses a free association of words building outward from a core idea, making secondary connections quickly to bypass your inner censor. (For example, your censor might rule out “music” on the Mind Map, because you’d been told that karaoke performance wasn’t your finest hour.)

Tools can also be marching orders, activities to increase your knowledge base and test your hunches. An assignment to, say, simply go talk to people who do what you’re curious about doing.

“You wouldn’t think that would be life-changing. But for many people, it actually is. Because once you’re in conversations with people about things you’re curious about, then opportunities start to happen. Doors open,” said Kathy Davies, the managing director and studio lead for Stanford’s Life Design Lab. “But it’s no small step for a lot of people. Just getting in the practice of talking to people, especially post-Covid, frankly, can be hard to do.”

This way of thinking and the habits formed to solve problems have lasting effects for students stressed about their place in the workforce after graduation.

“What we hear from students over and over is:  ‘This is a place I get to have conversations that I don’t have anywhere else.’ And, ‘This gave me the tools to figure things out,’” said Davies. “When we’re looking at efficacy, we have data that show it reduces career anxiety, increases career agency, and increases people’s ability to be creative and diverge in their thinking before they convert.”

Big Thinking on the Ground  

Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has one of most extensive interpretations of Stanford’s life design programs in the country, applying the principles from the admissions process all the way through alumni relations. Life Design at BGSU began as a small pilot program in 2019. In 2020, 60 faculty and staff members from different departments participated in Bill Burnett’s three-day training, a collaborative examination of the key aspects of life design and how to apply them to shape student experience. Thanks to a $13.5 million alumni gift, the Geoffrey H. Radbill Center for College and Life Design, (along with the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Hub for Career Design and Connections) was built to be a comprehensive dual-focused program addressing students’ journeys through the school, and then their career visions.

Adrienne Ausdenmoore, executive director of the Radbill Center, had already been engrossed in life design concepts when she attended Stanford’s first studio workshop for educators in 2017. Bowling Green’s President Rodney Rogers had been in the process of creating a strategic plan to redefine student success when he picked up Designing Your Life on a trip and was so motivated by the concepts and curriculum that he asked Burnett’s team to lead a workshop on campus.

“The team at Stanford has built a really incredible global learning community that’s valuable from a professional development standpoint, as well as a global movement perspective,” said Ausdenmoore. “There are hundreds of schools that have participated in the workshops. Some come away and end up offering it in the form of one small workshop, and then you have universities doing it on a very large scale. We’re definitely one of those.”

“Students are trained to just ‘get through this,’ and they’ll come out with something at the other end. They’ve just been in linear thinking for so long, seeing their life as a progression of climbing the ladder.”

What does this look like for students experiencing the existential angst of what to do with their lives?  In the Radbill Center, there are collaborative workspaces strategically built around the perimeter, primarily used for one-on-one sessions with their assigned coaches. Most first-year students begin their initial semester at Bowling Green with a life design seminar that meets for an hour a week.  By the time they are seniors, they will have incorporated life design programming into their academic experience as well as career readiness needs.

Bowling Green also offers a life design track dedicated to addressing the unique needs of student athletes, in partnership with the athletic department. The goal, says Bryan Mestre, assistant director for student-athlete development, is to introduce them to design thinking skills to navigate challenges and discover solutions while partnering them with career mentors to explore career possibilities in addition to, or beyond, their sports. Thinking about their wellbeing is an added dimension. 

“The Life Design program empowers student athletes to champion their mental health, transforming challenges into opportunities through empathy, innovation, and resilience,” said Mestre, who co-teaches the class with a Life Design coach. One of his exercises walks student athletes through designing a “dashboard” to consider different dimensions of their lives—Academics, Career, Purpose, Well-Being, and Connections—and gauge how well-balanced they are.

Like Bowling Green, Tulane also has life design classes for freshmen, and for student athletes. Because of the city’s devastating legacy of Hurricane Katrina, Tulane has a strong focus on service and equity. It’s no accident that the life design program is anchored in the Phyllis M. Taylor Center, founded in 2014 to help students identify their path in making change. Tulane further extends its focus on equity by offering a life design course to its Bridge Program, geared toward students who benefit from added academic supports.

“Our unique lens is to help students hone in on a social or environmental challenge that they care about, and then use that as a portal to understand the ecosystem of people that are working to address that challenge,” said Dr. Julia Lang, the associate director of Career Education and Life Design, and the first staff member at the Taylor Center. “New Orleans is such a hotbed for so many of the social and environmental challenges that we see in the world, and it’s also a hotbed of innovation. Phyllis Taylor’s vision was to create a one-stop-shop kind of hub for students interested in changemaking while learning about design thinking, with the tools and methodologies that could help them be creative problem solvers.”

Recent graduate Zach Rubin is one example of Tulane’s integration of innovation and changemaking. When he arrived at Tulane, he knew he wanted to study business, and assumed he’d go into finance, maybe work in an investment bank. Once he delved into really exploring his interests and aptitudes, he zeroed in on architecture and urban planning, and wrote his honors thesis on sustainable design. He won Tulane’s change-maker Catalyst Award and Spark Innovation Award, which he used to travel to Singapore and continue his honors research.  He just graduated and is working in venture capital at the intersection of real estate development and community enrichment.

“I’m a very community-oriented person, so I’m looking to create change on issues that require a lot of deep domain expertise and knowledge,” he said. “So, I’m doing the hard work upfront, and [I’ll] pivot down the road to what I eventually want it to become.”

The applications of life design are as individual as the schools that conceive of them, and Stanford’s website has a page of clickable school logos to learn about the directions different institutions have taken. At Johns Hopkins, some faculty members set out to use design thinking to reframe the traditional annual performance review process with an annual self-review. Smith College created Designing Your Life for Women. Trinity College wanted to create a solution to a particular retention challenge: high achieving students who were not deeply engaged and disposed to thinking about transferring to other colleges. At Northwestern, the career center for the Kellogg School of Management decided to roll out a series of life design workshops for its alumni. And in remote western Australia, Curtin University applied a grant it received to focus on the region’s rural women by creating a life design program geared toward their economic empowerment and career sustainability. The options are as unlimited as a mind map.

Whatever the application, Life Design fills a self-examination gap for college students often constrained by externally imposed “tracks.” 

“We’re always considering the questions, ‘What do I want to do with the rest of my life?’ And ‘How do I get there?’ None of my friends from home, from high school, are doing something like this,” said Madeline Loiacono, a senior in the Nursing program at Bowling Green. “None of them have the same directionality and the same drive that life design has given me. I think when you give vocabulary to such a profound problem-solving process, and you give vocabulary to the growth mindset, and you really pick apart the way you think, it provides a new direction for what it means to think about your career.”

Dr. Lang finds it “mind-blowing” that students can spend a decade in school and thousands of dollars in tuition, but never be given the help to develop a thoughtful plan.

“Students are trained to just ‘get through this,’ and they’ll come out with something at the other end. They’ve just been in linear thinking for so long, seeing their life as a progression of climbing the ladder,” she said. “But if you don’t choose where and why you’re climbing, then all of a sudden you’re 40 and you go to open up this treasure that’s supposed to be hanging up at the top in front of you, and you realize there’s nothing actually there.

In 2005, Georgetown professor Joan Riley was walking across campus when she had an epiphany that would change the way she thought about teaching.  Riley has just been to an evening meeting of the “Friends” group—an intradepartmental team of administrators, students, and faculty members who were working together on harm reduction strategies to combat student alcohol misuse.  The silo-crossing activity was unusual for higher ed and got Riley thinking from a different perspective.

“I remember stopping in the middle of campus and asking myself, ‘What can I, as a professor, do to help address this problem?” The next day, she told the undergraduate students in her Health Promotion and Disease Prevention course to throw away their syllabi. For the rest of the semester, they studied the effects of alcohol throughout one’s lifetime, from the metabolic breakdown of alcohol, to familial alcohol patterns, to binge drinking, all in a way that engaged students both academically and personally.

“When you bring topics like these into the academic setting and use evidence to describe them, students listen in a way they don’t with other interventions,” said Riley.  “I started asking, ‘Why aren’t we talking about these subjects inside the classroom?’”

Riley’s seemingly simple question would lead to a precedent-setting initiative in curriculum infusion called the Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning. Launched in 2005, out of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), the Engelhard Project engages faculty in making connections between students’ academic studies and their broader life experiences, especially in the areas of well-being, flourishing, and mental health. You don’t have to be in health studies or psychology to teach an “Engelhard course,” as it is not so much about the topic as it is about the technique of combining learning with personal growth. While this approach is often touted, it is reluctantly applied in higher education, even at schools like Georgetown that seek to teach to the whole person.

“The tradition of academe, especially in highly competitive settings, was the radical mind-body split,” said Randy Bass, who led the creation of Engelhard as executive director of CNDLS and now oversees an education innovation unit at the school. “Classrooms were places for your head and the rest of the campus was the place for your body and soul.”

Building the Bridge

For Georgetown, the Engelhard Project’s effort to fuse these personal dimensions has been a steady progression, starting shortly after Riley’s course shake-up, and continuing to this day with the full weight of the president’s office behind it.  Georgetown President John J. DeGioia sees the project as the embodiment of the Jesuit school’s mission and is quick to thank the other woman who made it possible. Sally Engelhard Pingree funded CNDLS’ first proposal to infuse wellbeing into the classroom through Bringing Theory to Practice (BT2P), a fund she launched with Don Harward, who was, at the time, president of Bates College. Motivated by the personal experiences of Pingree’s daughter when she was a student at Bates, BT2P seeded campuses with the support to craft programs that focus on the intersection of student well-being, engaged learning, and civic engagement.

At an early BT2P conference, Riley met a faculty colleague in the Department of Philosophy named Alisa Carse and learned that she, too, was doing similar integration. Together with a student and the head of the counseling center, the Georgetown team began to explore how to make curriculum infusion its own program.  Under the leadership of Professor Randy Bass and Todd Olson, who was then vice president of Student Affairs, and others, Georgetown sought and received two rounds of multi-year funding to establish the framework, staff, and criteria for the new inter-disciplinary program. They named the program the Engelhard Faculty Fellows, with a nod to the professors who were recruited to mold the classes to their own design and comfort level. In 2010, they received an endowment gift from Pingree for what is now called The Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning.

“The tradition of academe, especially in highly competitive settings, was the radical mind-body split. Classrooms were places for your head and the rest of the campus was the place for your body and soul.”

“I wanted students to be healthier and supported and Georgetown was a perfect fit as a campus already dedicated to looking at the whole person,” said Pingree. “I feel very lucky to be included and able to interact with faculty and staff doing this work in the Engelhard community of practice and to witness the positive impacts on faculty and the Georgetown community.”

“Georgetown leaned into something that was deeply connected to their mission and then went about engaging faculty in ways that honored their time and seeded ownership,” said Ashley Finley, who was a national evaluator for BT2P and is now vice president for research and senior advisor to the president for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).  In addition to the “faculty first” mentality, Finley said the intra-departmental nature of the work, led by an advisory committee of faculty, staff, and administrators, created a unique and powerful learning community.  

What began as five original classes has grown to over 500 courses in a wide variety of disciplines, with a combined student enrollment of 25,000 and the involvement of over 150 faculty members. Joselyn Lewis was a graduate associate at Georgetown when Engelhard first launched and she now leads the project as part of her education development work for faculty and graduate students at CNDLS.

Lewis is responsible for a large portion of faculty coming into the program and is adept at identifying the “sweet spot” that might get them engaged in designing or redesigning their course to integrate an element of student wellbeing.  Part of the recruitment involves reassuring faculty members who worry they will cross a boundary by bringing personal issues into the classroom or will “screw up” the unfamiliar approach.  Lewis addresses this by offering a robust orientation session and continued support along the way.  Monthly meetings and social gatherings for all Engelhard participants, past and present, are another level of security and offer friendships with colleagues one might not otherwise get to know. 

Part of reducing the barrier to entry is the program’s intentionally simple criteria. Faculty are asked to choose a wellbeing topic that connects to the course they teach. For one course meeting, they bring in a partner from a student-facing service area. This can be a clinician from Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), an expert in healthy eating, a Title IX coordinator, a DEI officer, even a financial aid advisor.  They then ask students to do a reflective writing piece about the experience.  

What does this look like for students? Lewis said most are unaware that they are in an Engelhard course as the wellbeing topics are so well integrated into the subject matter. They may study mental health within Foundations of Biology; examine sexual assault as part of Introduction to Ethics; or discuss anxiety in The Physics of Climate Change. The difference, whether they know it or not, is that the courses are designed to make connections that build relationships with their professors and with each other. 

Lewis said while the student affairs professionals appreciate the effectiveness of sharing important information inside the classroom, the program’s effects on teaching and learning at Georgetown have been profound. She said some faculty choose to do just the basics which allows students to make a connection between the content they are learning and their own wellbeing. Others do “All Engelhard, all the time,” embracing a full pedagogical shift that welcomes students’ interior lives into the learning process.

“I have faculty say to me ‘Engelhard gives me permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to,” said Lewis. “I just didn’t know that it would be valued.’”

Just Breathe

Jennifer Woolard was one of the first faculty members to teach an Engelhard course at Georgetown and continues to do so today. As a psychology professor, she was eager to find a way to humanize mental health topics and found that forging a partnership with a professional from CAPS was a powerful statement that said, “Mental health is part of life.”  She begins every class with a breathing exercise as a way to ground students and ask that they pause and be present. For high achieving “perfectionists” like many of those who attend Georgetown, taking a moment like this can mean a lot.

“For me, Engelhard is about modeling,” said Woolard. “Taking the time out of class to discuss these issues, to invite colleagues from other departments in to join me, says to my students that I care about their wellbeing.”  Woolard said that the student reflections confirm this. One student reported, “I felt cared for—like the professor was genuinely interested in our wellbeing rather than us just churning out good grades.”

“I think the most powerful thing about being an Engelhard faculty member is that it allows you to communicate to your students that you care about them as people,” said Bass.

“I have faculty say to me, ‘Engelhard gives me permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to,’” said Lewis.  “‘I just didn’t know that it would be valued.’”

In the near two decades since Engelhard was launched, rates of anxiety and depression reported by college students have nearly doubled.  During the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, a near 50% increase from 2013, according to the Healthy Minds Study.  The stress and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these issues.  A 2021 survey of over 1,000 faculty across 12 diverse institutions by the Mary Christie Institute, the Boston University School of Public Health and the Healthy Minds Network found a strong majority (87%) believed that student mental health had “worsened” or “significantly worsened” during COVID-19. Almost 80% had one-on-one phone, video, or email conversations with students about their mental health. 

“There isn’t a faculty member in this country that doesn’t see that our students are struggling,” said Riley, pointing to a list over her door of the mental health issues she asked her students to identify having experienced. Loneliness topped the list.

“At the beginning, we didn’t talk a lot about addressing mental health issues in recruiting professors,” said Lewis. “They were really concerned about crossing that line into counseling, which is why our early work focused more on awareness of the campus safety net and referring students to CAPS.” Now, she said, faculty are becoming more comfortable with discussing mental health with their students; many open up about their own struggles. “A lot of our faculty say, ‘If I’m asking my students to come as whole people, I have to be able to model that.’”

While many professors value the Engelhard Project’s role in prioritizing mental health issues amidst alarming prevalence numbers, others resonate with decades of strong evidence on the impact of relationship-based learning on a range of positive student outcomes.  In their book, Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert cite ample evidence of this, including Mathew Mayhew’s book How College Affects Students, and write, “Students’ interactions with peers, faculty, and staff positively influence the breadth and depth of student learning, retention and graduation rates, and a wide range of other outcomes, including critical thinking, identity development, communication skills, and leadership abilities.”

Lewis said referencing literature on the strength of the pedagogy has convinced many professors to join the Engelhard Project and is one reason its appeal has crossed over into numerous departments.  While the faculty representation skews heavily female, the program has a good ratio of humanities and STEM courses.  One neuroscience professor told Lewis, “It’s not my job to know who my students are, but I am open to doing this because I believe it will make them better scientists.”  

Randy Bass said that some of the places the Engelhard Project has worked the best are those that are the least obvious, like in the sciences.  “If you ask students to examine the biological basis of any mental health issue,” as they do in a long-running Engelhard course taught by Heidi Elmendorf, “they will choose topics such as their mother’s alcoholism, their brother’s autism, their own eating disorder, or someone they know who was suicidal.  These are unbelievably personal connections that deepen their knowledge and appreciation of what it means to study biology.”

Can this Idea be Scaled?

Engelhard leaders are not aware of the existence of another wellbeing curriculum infusion program, to this degree, on any other US campus. They receive a fair amount of requests for information from other schools and try to respond among limited time and information. Outcomes for the project are largely anecdotal, but they have begun a check list for other schools on what needs to be in place for a program like this to gain traction, starting with a multi-stakeholder leadership team, an academic orientation, and the availability of willing student affairs professionals. This last category can be a problem for schools with fewer resources, but for the most part, the project is low cost, particularly when compared to more direct mental health interventions.  It is an important equity consideration as advocates like Felton and Lambert argue that high-impact practices, like those within the Engelhard Project, are particularly beneficial for first-generation, low-income students, and students of color.

At Georgetown, enrollment in the project has stayed about the same for several years despite a growing acknowledgement of its many benefits. Part of the plateau may be a continued reluctance, on the part of some faculty, to embrace the personal side of students. While this appears to be changing, Woolard says professors who view Engelhard as too “touchy feely” should probably sit out.  “There may be some faculty members for whom this is not a good option,” she said. 

Riley, who also recruits for the Engelhard Project, said professors are worried the project will take time away from their many responsibilities.  “The irony is the Engelhard method makes you a better teacher—like exercising over time—and that works in your favor when it comes to managing multiple roles.”

Another theory is that the Engelhard Project may still be ahead of its time. “I think what education will become about is the development of the inner self in relationship to the capacity to do external work, what we’ve called “the inner/outer” problem,” said Bass.  “That’s the next frontier in higher education, but most of higher education doesn’t know that yet.”