Month: March 2025
Purposeful Information
For more than a decade, colleges and universities have been relying on the Healthy Minds Study to help them understand the mental health of their students and those at other schools throughout the country. Indeed, this annual indicator and benchmark has become the bellwether for the state of college student mental health, capturing the dramatic increase in the prevalence of mental health issues among college students beginning around 2014.
But as important as this survey data continues to be, the Healthy Minds Network’s principal investigators, Drs. Sarah Lipson and Daniel Eisenberg, stress that surveillance is only the start of a larger public health approach to helping every student on campus thrive. This mindset has led to strong partnerships with institutions and non-profits working to understand how mental health data can be interpreted and applied, particularly when it comes to policy changes and institutional investments.
The latest example of this research-to-practice approach is a new report by the Healthy Minds Network, UNCF (United Negro College Fund), and the Steve Fund on the mental health and wellbeing of students at Historically Black Colleges and Univeristities (HBCUs) and Predominently Black Institutions (PBIs). Released earlier this month, the report, “Flourishing: Bolstering the Mental Health of Students at HBCUs and PBIs,” ties Black students at HBCUs to better mental health outcomes than both Black students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and a national sample of students of all races.
Akilah Patterson, the study’s project manager and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said she was unsurprised by the results. Citing the strong sense of community HBCUs foster as a reason for students’ apparent wellbeing, she said, “nothing can really replace that.”
The concept and funding for the study came from UNCF, a major advocate and donor to HBCUs and their students. It partnered with the Healthy Minds Network to lead data collection and assessment, while the Steve Fund, a nonprofit promoting mental health among young people of color, contributed expertise.
Between spring and fall 2023, more than 2,500 students from 18 different HBCUs responded to a tailored version of the Healthy Minds Study. They answered questions from the standard Healthy Minds Study, along with a “Black College Mental Health Module,” added to provide insight into the Black college student experience.
The results suggest relatively better wellbeing among HBCU students across a number of scales. HBCU students report to be flourishing more (45% compared to 38% of Black students at PWIs and 36% of students nationally) and experiencing more campus belonging (83% compared to 72% of Black students at PWIs and 73% of students nationally).
The results suggest relatively better wellbeing among HBCU students across a number of scales.
While loneliness is endemic among students everywhere, significantly fewer students at HBCUs (56%) are experiencing “high loneliness” than Black students at PWIs (58%). Students at HBCUs are also less likely to keep negative feelings to themselves (74%) than Black students at PWIs (86%) or students nationally (83%).
Patterson said the wellbeing of HBCU students is an understudied area. “It’s not that it hasn’t been studied at all,” she explained, “but it hadn’t been studied in this way, on such a large scale, and also using some of the measures we chose to use.”
In addition to insight into how HBCU students are already thriving, Patterson’s study suggests their institutions have room to improve support. Financial anxiety, for example, is the most reported stress factor among students at HBCUs. Twenty-three percent of HBCU students, compared to 18% of students nationally, say their financial situation is “always stressful”—an indicator correlated with greater risk of having one or more mental health problems.
Students’ financial struggles can be difficult for their institutions to tackle, Patterson said. But she hopes research like hers, and other projects going forward, encourage the kind of investment in HBCUs that, in turn, provides relief for the students. Empirically, she added, she believes the research “speaks for itself.”
“We’ve been doing the work. HBCUs have been very committed for decades to the success and excellence of their students, and that’s not going to change.”
The Flourishing Factor
The spirit of this latest report from the Health Minds Network reflects an evolution of sorts for the data leader, along with many of its peers in the mental health research community. Their stronger focus on “flourishing” allows for greater examination of the many determinants that comprise mental health, such as financial wellbeing.
In its 2023-2024 report, the Healthy Minds Network made headlines with news of slight improvements in student mental health, which had been trending negatively for several years. Lipson was particularly inspired by the 6% increase in student flourishing for several reasons, including the fact it is an outcome colleges mayhave some level of control over.
“The web of causation for flourishing is much wider and often within an institution’s control,” she said. “When we think about what goes into flourishing—a sense of belonging, decreases in isolation, maximizing our built environment—there are levers here that institutions can pull, maybe not all of them, but more so than depression or anxiety.”
Flourishing has many definitions but is most often associated with healthy growth in a variety of domains. So anyone can flourish, with or without a mental health diagnosis. Additionally, while anxiety and depression are still alarmingly prevalent, not all students will experience either. From a public health perspective, flourishing is an outcome that is relevant to the entire population.
Lipson said what is important about this measure, and indeed all of this research, is it helps administrators understand where to spend time and money based on what the evidence suggests is the best investment. To this end, the Healthy Minds Network has launched the creation of a best practices repository. While still a work in progress, the repository will provide that advice for a number of campus interventions.
What is important about this research is it helps administrators understand where to spend time and money based on what the evidence suggests is the best investment.
“What we should be investing in from a population, public health approach is a really difficult question given what little data currently exists,” Lipson said. “With the data repository, you can go to a publicly available resource and consider, ‘What are my options? What does the evidence look like? What schools have implemented this successfully, and who could I talk to there?’”
Leading with Wellbeing at NYU
Rooted in New York City and distinguished by a global network of campuses across 15 other cities, New York University is a composite of the world itself. Its president, Linda G. Mills, is charged with leading this cosmopolitan learning community at a time when many of the world’s problems are reverberating on campus. A therapist by training who is also a lawyer, filmmaker, social scientist, and restorative justice champion, Mills draws from her own diverse background to center wellbeing amidst unrelenting change and uncertainty.
Before becoming the school’s first woman and first Jewish president, Mills spent many years at NYU, building a mental health infrastructure that has become a national model. In this interview for LearningWell, she is joined by VP of Student Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing, Zoe Ragouzeos, to talk about why that is only one aspect of a larger strategy to make individual and collective wellbeing a part of every student’s experience. In the current climate, that means helping those who come to NYU with mostly homogeneous past experiences thrive in a pluralist society.
LW: How is the uncertainty in the political world today, including on college campuses, affecting the wellbeing of your community?
Mills: When I think about the rapid changes happening at the federal level and their impact on our students, I’m constantly thinking about both the individuals and the community as a whole. What I’m seeing is an undercurrent of anxiety—students feeling deeply unsettled by the sheer velocity of change, regardless of their political perspective.
For those already vulnerable from a mental health standpoint, this uncertainty only amplifies their struggles. But even those who are generally resilient are feeling weighed down, less steady, and often simply confused. And that leads to deeper questions: “How do I process this? Is this something I should bring to therapy?” For some, becoming engaged in a community to advocate for change is an outlet. But if those actions don’t bring a sense of emotional relief, what then? How do they manage that lingering distress?
This moment in time creates a real tension between meeting personal emotional needs and navigating the external events unfolding around us. Finding balance between the two is a challenge we all must confront.
LW: What do you most worry about in terms of how this is affecting people?
Mills: I worry about all of it. In times of intense change, people often struggle to find their footing. That uncertainty can cause them to neglect their own wellbeing—whether it’s their mental health, their academic work, or even just basic daily routines. Reading and concentration become difficult. Decisions feel overwhelming. And stress can lead to choices that may have lasting consequences.
“In times of intense change, people often struggle to find their footing. That uncertainty can cause them to neglect their own wellbeing.”
What I worry about most is students making impulsive decisions—choices that could derail their long-term goals—simply because they feel like they’re being swept up in a tidal wave of external events. What they often need most in these moments is to pause, reflect, and take a step back before reacting. But in times of stress, that’s not always easy to do.
LW: Hearing you talk, I am reminded that, among all of your many distinctions, you are a licensed clinical social worker. How has this influenced how you approach your presidency?
Mills: I think it has been really central. I feel like I need to be aware of the therapeutic and resilience elements of our students’ lives. My background in clinical social work means I don’t just see the importance of seeking support, whether that’s through therapy, group counseling, or student organizations. I think deeply about students’ inner lives and what this particular moment in history means for them.
I also recognize that my position is unique. I don’t know many university presidents who are trained therapists. That experience gives me a different lens. I approach my role with an acute awareness of the mental health challenges our students, faculty, and staff are facing. It informs how I communicate, how I think, and how we develop programs that support not just the community as a whole but the individuals who need specific interventions.
So, in many ways, I am always thinking in two directions: What does our student body need collectively, and what does each student need individually? And that approach fundamentally shapes the way we build our mental health and wellbeing initiatives here.
LW: You recently hosted a national convening of university presidents on student mental health and wellbeing. What were some of the common concerns and challenges you and your peers discussed?
Mills: Zoe and I have been working on these issues for nearly 20 years. We started with a focus on direct services, ensuring that students who needed one-on-one counseling could access it quickly and effectively. That remains a core priority.
But over time, a larger challenge has come into focus: Not everyone will seek out traditional mental health services. Some students avoid therapy for religious, cultural, or familial reasons. Others struggle with the stigma attached to mental health care. So, our work has expanded beyond simply serving the most vulnerable students. It’s about creating a culture of wellbeing that reaches everyone.
The question we’re asking now is: How do we support mental health in a way that meets students where they are? How do we tailor programs that resonate with different backgrounds and lived experiences? That was the heart of our discussion at the convening—exploring innovative approaches that make mental health support accessible and relevant to all students, not just those who walk into a counseling center. And I was truly inspired by the creative solutions my peers are already testing.
LW: What are some of the challenges to that shift in focus?
Mills: One of the biggest challenges is that college is an incredibly demanding time with competing priorities pulling students in different directions. They have academic goals, study abroad opportunities, research projects, career aspirations—all of which require time and energy. So how do we integrate wellbeing into their daily lives in a way that doesn’t feel like yet another obligation?
That’s where I think Zoe has done this brilliantly, weaving mental health and resilience into every part of the student experience. If college is meant to prepare students for life, then wellbeing has to be a fundamental part of that preparation.
Some students arrive with strong wellbeing skills. They’ve been working on this for years. But others come to us with no foundation in self-care or emotional resilience—sometimes even with deeply ingrained stigma around mental health. For them, we’re starting from scratch, or even from a deficit.
So where should this integration happen? In student affairs? In study abroad programs? In the classroom? Faculty are often surprised when we suggest that mental health belongs in academic spaces, but the reality is it’s already showing up there. When a student asks for an extension on an assignment or when they can’t finish a course due to a personal issue, those are mental health concerns manifesting in academic life. Universities need to recognize this and build systems that support students holistically.
LW: Zoe, from your perspective, how do you see this shift in thinking taking shape?
Ragouzeos: Linda often spoke about “the student in the back of the calculus class”—the person who never raises their hand, who may never step forward to seek help. She instilled in us the importance of not just serving those who come to our counseling services but actively reaching those who won’t. And that philosophy, in many ways, is the foundation of the public health model we embrace today.
So, the real question becomes: How do we reach that student? Because this work isn’t just about clinical services, though those are critically important. It’s about every touchpoint a student has within our institution. Whether it’s an interaction with a faculty member, a peer, the physical environment, or student services, what messages are they receiving? What are we doing to strengthen their ability to cope?
At its core, resilience is the challenge we must address. While this model was initially built to support our most vulnerable students, we now recognize that every student benefits from stronger coping and resilience skills, regardless of where they start. In fact, we see it as our responsibility. By the time a student leaves here, they should not only have gained academic knowledge and the ability to think critically but also a greater capacity to navigate life’s challenges. That’s part of our mission.
With that in mind, how do we, as an institution, ensure that every student—not just those who seek support—leaves us more resilient than when they arrived?
LW: What’s the most effective thing a university president can do to address mental health on campus?
Mills: Modeling and reinforcing.
I often say that to be an effective therapist, you have to have gone to therapy yourself. The same is true for leadership around mental health. We need to model the idea that seeking support isn’t a weakness. It’s a fundamental part of a productive, healthy life.
That means speaking about it openly, normalizing conversations around mental health, and ensuring that our institutional policies reflect those values. We have to create a culture where prioritizing wellbeing is not just accepted but expected.
LW: What are your thoughts on the current state of higher education? What kind of change do you think is needed, especially in light of public skepticism?
Mills: Despite definite concerns about higher education, people still deeply believe in its value. The sheer volume of applications to NYU—over 120,000 this year—tells us that. Higher education remains the single most important factor in setting individuals and families up for success.
But beyond academic and professional preparation, universities also have a broader responsibility. We need to cultivate critical thinking, civic engagement, and the ability to navigate diverse perspectives.
One of the most urgent gaps I see is in bridge-building. Many students arrive on campus from homogenous communities, whether in the U.S. or abroad, and are suddenly immersed in one of the most diverse environments they’ve ever encountered. That transition can be jarring, especially in today’s polarized world.
Social media and cancel culture have made it even harder to engage across differences. We need to teach students the skills to have difficult conversations, to coexist with people who think differently, and to build meaningful connections across divides.
Interestingly, our research shows that students who study abroad improve their ability to navigate cultural differences. So how do we bring that kind of growth into all aspects of university life? Just as we integrate mental health and resilience from day one, we need to be just as intentional about fostering cross-cultural understanding and communication.
LW: Zoe, do you have any thoughts on that?
Ragouzeos: Resilience isn’t just about personal coping. It’s also about how we engage with the world around us. When we truly listen to one another and appreciate differences, we become more adaptable, more open, and, ultimately, more resilient. The ability to navigate life’s challenges is deeply connected to our capacity for understanding perspectives beyond our own.
“Resilience isn’t just about personal coping. It’s also about how we engage with the world around us.”
This is one of the reasons why study abroad experiences can be so transformative. When students immerse themselves in a different culture, they naturally give themselves permission to accept differences in a way they might not at home. As visitors, they recognize that they are stepping into a world with different customs, perspectives, and ways of life, so they adjust. They observe, and they grow.
Yet, back home, that openness often fades. In familiar environments, people tend to default to expecting things to function as they always have within the norms of their own communities. This can create resistance to difference, rather than a willingness to embrace it.
So the question becomes: How do we cultivate that same openness and adaptability within our own communities? How do we encourage students to bring that study abroad mindset—one of curiosity, acceptance, and resilience—into their daily lives, even in places that feel familiar?
LW: Do you ever get asked about your own mental health? This is a tough time to be a college president, but I’m guessing there’s no support group for that.
Mills: As a therapist by training, I think about my own mental health constantly. I believe that if I didn’t, I’d be failing my community. We all have to prioritize our wellbeing, especially in leadership roles where the pressures are relentless.
These are incredibly challenging times, and I have to be at my best to lead effectively. Some days are tougher than others, especially when events hit close to home, like my personal experiences with antisemitism. But those moments also deepen my understanding of resilience, making me a better advocate for our students. At the end of the day, I’m not just leading this community. I’m living these challenges alongside them.
“Living a Life Worth Working”
Like today’s future workforce, Dr. Michelle R. Weise is bound to hold numerous roles in her already accomplished career. The former college professor turned ed tech executive worked at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation before becoming the chief innovation officer of Strada Education Network’s Institute for the Future of Work.
Weise is also the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet. In it, she argues for reimagining how we train learners and earners for the prolonged careers that come with longevity, though not necessarily in ways one might think. In this interview for LearningWell, Weise talks about what little structure exists for us to gain the knowledge we will continuously need. She advocates for changes within post-secondary education and the workforce that will help align one’s inner and outer lives and lead us to recognize our shared humanity in an increasingly isolated world.
LW: Your book suggests there are numerous jobs we might have in our lives. What has your own work life been like in that regard?
Weise: When I look back, I can see the stepping stones, but I didn’t really plan any of this out. It was a lot of pivoting, learning new skills, and then taking that newly acquired knowledge and launching to the next thing. My first job was as a tenure-track English professor. That was supposed to be my job for life, but I realized early on that it didn’t feel like the right calling for me. My first job outside of academia was for an ed tech startup that was helping service members transition out of the military into civilian careers. We were creating tools and services to help them translate their skills into the language of the labor market. Even though I didn’t know it back then, that focus on learners’ translation of their own skill sets has been a resonant theme throughout all of my work.
I ended up building out the higher education practice of Clayton Christensen’s think tank on disruptive innovation. That was, as you can imagine, incredibly formative for my thinking, research, and exposure to every burgeoning innovation in ed tech and workforce tech. I’ve since built out various innovation labs for universities and have also worked with a wide range of stakeholders in the learn-and-work ecosystem and even created the Strada Institute for the Future of Work for Strada Education Network. All of these innovation and thought leadership roles have been focused on connecting post-secondary education more closely to the workforce.
LW: Could you define “long life learning” and what you think the implications of that are for the workforce?
Weise: Our lifespans are extending, and our work lives are getting longer. People are staying in the workforce at historically high rates, well into their sixties and seventies. There’s been this conception that folks who are currently retiring only had a couple of jobs or maybe one job throughout their careers—the “gold watch generation”—but the data shows that’s not true. Even our early baby boomers are retiring with an average of 12 job changes under their belts. So for the rest of us, we can expect many more job changes and pivots to come. For younger generations, that may mean maybe 20 or 30 job changes over a lifetime. For me, the simple mental model of a longer life and longer work life brings into sharp relief that we have no architecture, no infrastructure, no systems really set up to help us keep up with a rapidly evolving future of work.
So, the book is really my attempt to put the decades-old concept of lifelong learning into action by laying out how we can begin to invest in the on- and off-ramps we’ll all need to move more seamlessly in and out of learning and work. How might we get just what we need and then keep moving along on the workforce highway without always having to make a tradeoff and forgo our wages in order to advance our education? What are the ways in which we can do this much more fluidly and in the flow of work?
LW: How can we begin to solve for that from both a preparation lens and a workforce lens?
Weise: I’ll start from a curricular perspective. In an ideal world, we’d like to hire talented people whom we could trust in highly ambiguous circumstances. We’d like to trust that they’d take in various kinds of information, signals, and analyses, make sense of all that, and then use good ethical judgment to inform their decision-making process. It’s a mix of both human and technical skills. We need people to be able to dance across disciplines, take ideas from another domain and use them in new ways. But it’s very hard to train someone to do this unless we teach them how to really deal with ambiguity.
In order to do that, we can’t keep teaching in silos. In our industrial learning complex, we silo everything we teach. We don’t illuminate the ways in which disciplines interact and overlap. For me, the future of teaching and learning will center on purpose learning—orienting learners around solving a problem they care about like poverty, hunger, or climate change, and in the process of struggling with that larger challenge, they learn why certain principles and disciplinary knowledge are necessary. They also learn how to transfer and apply knowledge from one domain to another.
The refrain in higher ed is that we teach people how to fish, but we don’t actually do this well. We teach people very specific content and problems within a discipline. We don’t help our learners understand the coherence across a vast array of courses as a body of understanding.
At the same time, in order for our learners to thrive in an increasingly uncertain future, especially now in an age of AI, they’re going to need to hone their human skills to complement the work of machines. The term “human skills” might make us think, “Oh, I’m human, I have these innate skills.” Yes, but they require deep practice. And for older adults in the workforce, where do they go to practice skills like emotional intelligence, communication, and systems thinking? The lack of these human skills make themselves known in the workplace when there’s friction, when there’s an inability to build strong and collaborative teams. We also need to be thinking about how we build the right kinds of learning experiences for working learners to actually deepen their human expertise and their character skills.
LW: What role does the workplace play?
Weise: If you think about a T-shaped learner, it’s having both those human broad-based skills and some technical or technological expertise. And if we return to the concept of a longer work life, we’re not only going to have to deepen our human skills over time. We’re also going to have to gain different kinds of expertise over time and get skilled up. Sometimes we’re going to need that new knowledge in a very shallow way—just enough to be dangerous. Other times, it will require deeper engagement. We need to do this in an affordable way, within the flow of work.
In my book, I lay out five principles needed for a healthier learning ecosystem, and the fourth is this idea of integrated earning and learning. Right now, when someone’s in the workplace and wants to skill up, we say, “Here’s some tuition reimbursement money. Go do it on your own time on top of this full-time job or multiple part-time jobs and on top of your caregiving activities. Be self-disciplined.” But we need to bring the onus for training back onto employers. It’s not just on post-secondary education to solve this problem.
In 1979, we used to offer workers something like two and a half weeks worth of training for new skills. According to Peter Capelli, by 1995, that went down to less than 10 hours per year. But those 10 hours weren’t even about building new skills for the future. It was for things like compliance training, risk mitigation, sexual harassment training, or discrimination training. When I was writing the book, Accenture had data that around 44% of employers had zero upskilling opportunities for their existing workforce. We have to begin to reimagine on-the-job training. Skilling people up has to be a shared responsibility about building skills for the future.
LW: You use the phrase “living a life worth working.” How would you interpret that?
Weise: My work has been oriented around issues like career navigation, skills gaps, skills building, precision education, and automation and AI’s impact on our careers. And at a certain point, I realized that something was missing. I call it “the soul of work,” but it’s this question of how do we align our inner lives with what it is that we do when we’re making some sort of contribution in the world? This incredibly human element has been missing from all the trending discussions about the future of work.
One of the things that has been helpful for me as I’ve been studying the loneliness epidemic more is this understanding of the ways in which we’re clearly searching for something more. I found this interesting data that in the US alone, the consumer wellness market has reached $480 billion a year. Globally, it’s close to $1.8 trillion. People are paying for detox cleanses, intermittent fasting, and even bone broths. We’re clearly in search of something, and this is happening along with the deterioration of our communities, family structures, and faith-based organizations. In the wake of all that, we’re feeling like something is missing. There’s some hole or aching need we need to fill.
And so when I talk about a ‘life worth working,’ it’s not that we all have to suddenly drop what we’re doing and pursue our passions. It’s about how we actually find moments of real authentic encounters, even in what can sometimes feel like mundane work or even in some things that are not necessarily compensated as paid work. How do we find the small moments of encounter that give us that feeling of purpose and meaning in our lives?
“When I talk about a ‘life worth working,’ it’s not that we all have to suddenly drop what we’re doing and pursue our passions. It’s about how we actually find moments of real authentic encounters, even in what can sometimes feel like mundane work.”
And that is really tough because studies are showing that we’re becoming more narcissistic and less empathetic. We are becoming so cloistered in ourselves that even small interactions are hard for us.
I was thinking about how there have been all these return-to-work mandates recently, and I think in the minds of management, they’re thinking, “My people aren’t being as productive as they should be, so I need to bring them back in-person, so I can watch them and make sure they’ll be efficient and productive.” Those water-cooler moments and those serendipitous moments of connecting are being hailed as a way to get to greater productivity and deeper collaboration. But what I think we’re missing is that we need those moments of serendipity to actually build more of those small and authentic encounters because we have become so consumed with ourselves.
LW: Is this something we can teach or learn?
Weise: How to move towards this kind of service orientation and thinking about others rather than ourselves? I think it’s really hard. Our entire system is set up to build super individual high achievers, and then suddenly learners graduate from college, and we expect them to be great team players. I’ve always been impressed by how [Olin College] grads go through 20 to 30 different team-based projects connected to the real world by the time they leave. Why aren’t more schools doing this? It’s a way for us to help learners deepen their human skills and practice teaming and collaboration. In addition, by focusing on larger problems, learners must engage in design thinking. And the first step is empathy to understand the challenge they’re trying to solve for a company or an organization. They get to immerse themselves in acts of caring that are pointed away from themselves.
LW: You talk about human skills being an important part of mastering machines versus the other way around. What are your thoughts on the use of AI in higher education?
Wiese: People are getting really fearful about the use of AI, but instead of thinking about how it can replace humans, we should be leveraging this technology to fix a super unsexy problem: stitching together incredible amounts of data across our higher ed and workforce systems. We have so much data in various silos and legacy systems, and we don’t know how to tap into it all. GenAI gives us a way forward.
Think about how retail companies have built virtuous loops of information about us as consumers. Amazon’s doing randomized control trials on us every few seconds. In higher ed, we need to get smarter about our own people, our own prospective learners, to be able to offer them something that really taps into a pain point in their work lives.
This is where I see real potential for AI in higher education.
Navigate U
Around 2021, administrators at the University of Utah discovered an unsettling pattern while reviewing student data: In an effort to satisfy requirements and pass some mandatory courses, some students had needed to retake a class five, ten times, or more. In one example, administrators found that a student had spent over $50,000 taking a single math course. These repeated attempts went unflagged because academic advising and course tracking systems were siloed instead of fully integrated across departments. In effect, when it came to the university body, one hand didn’t know what the other was doing—and neither one was reaching out to the student struggling with the path toward graduation.
The revelation brought into focus the number of students struggling with key courses without sufficient support or intervention. But more broadly, it illuminated a systemic disconnect: a lack of coordination between advising, academic support, and course scheduling, which was likely contributing to Utah’s unsatisfactory retention and graduation rates. The path towards a solution was paved with integrated technology and data transparency.
“University policy hadn’t been updated in over 30 years and was kind of adrift, just stacking additional credits on top of requirements. No one had made the case about how that impacts degree completion, how that impacts debt, and tying those things together in a really simple, clear way,” says Chase Hagood, vice provost for student success, who was hired in 2021 to be part of the new initiative’s leadership. “But not everyone was behind the open sharing of data. What does it take for a whole university to come together to say, ‘We believe in the exceptional educational experience. What is it going to take to get us there?’ We joined the Innovation Alliance, and the Coalition for Transformational Education, and getting in those peer groups helped elevate the work we do.”
University leaders recognized the need for a more integrated, proactive approach, beginning with more democratized data. Within two years—and the addition of a new president and provost—this recognition had become forged into a commitment, leveraging EAB’s Navigate360 as the CRM platform to connect the campus. This became the tech muscle behind Navigate U, a 2024 university-wide initiative aimed at improving metrics of student success, including retention and graduation rates. Utah is banking on software and data analysis to follow individual student performance, flag potential issues, and introduce interventions—and on the horizon, even track behavior trends.
Eight Pillars and Key Features
University leadership recognized that existing approaches had “topped out” their effectiveness at steering 32,700 students toward their graduation goals. A new comprehensive strategy was needed, one that put the data capabilities to work under pillars of priorities, each with key features of innovation. The pillars of Navigate U were designed to bring together student support services, streamline policies, and integrate data systems to provide real-time insights into student progress through a structured, coordinated, more supportive approach.
“This whole Navigate U method is about looking at the institution and figuring out how we can prepare as clear a pathway as possible to help the student through here in four to six years,” says Brandon Johnson, senior associate dean of student success and transformative experiences. “By asking those questions, we stop blaming the students. We stop blaming high school for lack of preparedness. If we admit a student into the university, we should do everything possible to make sure that they are as successful as they want to be.”
“If we admit a student into the university, we should do everything possible to make sure that they are as successful as they want to be.”
One key feature of Navigate U is its proactive advising system. Previously, students often had difficulty knowing where to go for guidance, as advising structures varied across colleges. Some students had clear academic roadmaps, while others struggled with course selection and degree planning. Navigate U introduced a centralized approach, ensuring that all students are assigned an advisor with clear, standardized expectations for advising practices. Advisors now have access to real-time student data, allowing them to identify students at risk of falling behind and intervene earlier.
Another feature is the data integration and early alert system. In the past, crucial information about students—such as course performance, attendance patterns, and engagement with support services—was scattered across different departments. Navigate U centralizes this data through the EAB Navigate platform, enabling faculty and advisors to monitor student progress more effectively. This system can flag students who may need extra support, whether due to failing grades, repeated course withdrawals, or financial concerns. It connects students to resources like tutoring, coaching, and peer mentoring programs. It also promotes student engagement, recognizing that a strong sense of belonging is critical for success. First-year transition programs, on-campus housing opportunities, and community-building efforts have been expanded to support this goal.
Course availability has also been a major focus of Navigate U. Many students faced delays in graduation because required courses were either full or not offered frequently enough. The initiative introduced a strategic course scheduling system, using data to predict demand and ensure essential classes are available when students need them. Additionally, the university implemented new guidelines for course enrollment thresholds to spur the scheduling of courses based on historical data and anticipated demand, and identify courses with high demand to consider opening additional sections.
“One of the things with no institutional policy was monitoring thresholds,” says Hagood. “You might be running a class with six students over here, but in another college—or even within the same college—maybe a department head says, ‘No, you have to have at least 15.’ We had no across-the-board guidelines to help deans make the best use of resources and kind of press them to think about it. It wasn’t good for faculty, and it wasn’t good for students.”
The pillars also target academic wellness, engagement, transitions, and financial structures.
Goals and Metrics
Graduation rates are a particular area targeted for improvement. At present, the six-year rate is around 66% (a previous peak of 70% declined during the COVID-19 pandemic). By addressing obstacles such as course bottlenecks and repetition, outdated policies, and inconsistent advising, the initiative aims to see 80% of students completing their degrees in six years by 2030.
In tandem with this is the goal to increase the rate of retention. Currently, about 85% of first-year students return for their second year. With enhanced advising, course availability, and academic support, the university aims to raise this to 90% or higher, aligning with top public research institutions.
The goals extend beyond graduation. With an improved focus on career readiness and job placement, Utah seeks to ensure that 90% or more of graduates secure employment or enroll in graduate school within six months of completing their degree. This effort includes strengthening connections between academic programs and career services, expanding internship opportunities, and incorporating career development into students’ academic experiences.
In tracking these key metrics and continuously refining its strategies, Navigate U intends to create a more efficient, supportive, and results-driven approach to student success. And with a new kind of tracking under development, the school hopes to gain a clearer picture of each student’s academic journey in order to provide targeted assistance before small setbacks become major obstacles.
The enhanced tracking aims to put more points of data into profiles to build a more comprehensive picture of the student life cycle: where they’re going, and where they’re not.
“The next phase is working out how we incorporate swipe data from student affairs and event attendance, and then we can start to see this really interesting profile of the student. Are they using the library? Did they go to a coaching appointment? Did they meet with their advisor? Do they attend sporting events?” says Johnson. “If we start to see some gaps, we can launch some outreach to a student because we’re seeing them not only notengaged in some of these academic support resources, but they’re not engaging in campus life and wellness and belonging-fostering activities and events.”
If a student had been missing class, for example, administrators could use their swipe history in the residence halls, dining halls, and gyms to get a picture of where they’re spending their time. And if they see the student is spending a lot of time swiping into the Student Union, they can send a coach, advisor, or mentor to informally reach out to them there.
“The more we know about our students and how best to support them, the better it is for the student,” says Johnson. “I would love a day when we can create a spider web profile like you see on some of those career and personality assessments with different indicators and quadrants. You can see if it’s low or heavy in one area, then we can act on the areas that need to be filled in.”
Johnson believes one of the greatest behind-the-scenes benefits of the Navigate U work might be the introspective thinking it encourages in faculty and administrators. It’s hard to look at a longstanding practice with fresh eyes if it isn’t considered broken. But that, he says, is where the work happens.
“With some honest conversation, sometimes we come to see that something probably isn’t in the best interest of students after all. Instead of asking, ‘Why are we doing this?’—because there’s usually some answer for why—we try asking, ‘Do we really need to keep doing this? Is it something that’s benefitting us or the students?’” says Johnson. “Those questions are happening more often. And I think we’re fixing a lot of things.”
Sometimes There’s a Wolf
In his 2023 book, “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Brian Rosenberg sums up higher education’s aversion to change. In making his case, the Macalester College president emeritus identifies institutional barriers, such as shared governance and insular cultures, that keep higher education from addressing uncomfortable truths, like a flawed economic model and plummeting public support. He warns that this head-in-the-sand strategy will leave higher education vulnerable to a political take-down, like the one it is currently experiencing.
Now that external forces of change, led by the Trump administration, are threatening to upend higher education as we know it, Rosenberg is far from gloating. A visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Rosenberg continues to advocate for strategies that will strengthen higher ed—those that will bend the cost curve, improve the student experience, and open up access for people who want to go to college but can’t afford it. He distinguishes this type of change from the unhelpful assaults on higher education he believes will have disastrous effects on the sector he both admires and admonishes.
In this candid interview, Rosenberg explains how higher education got to where it is now and why this is not the time to stay neutral.
LW: You have long advocated for change in higher education which, as you say, is very difficult to achieve. Do you think this point in time feels different?
Rosenberg: Higher education has been the most stable industry in the world for centuries. It hasn’t really needed to change in more than incremental ways, and there have been some good things about that. But when you go years and years without change because you don’t have to, you also fall into some really suboptimal practices, and sooner or later those are going to catch up with you. I think right now the pressures on higher education are so strong that incremental change just won’t do it anymore. People have been saying this for a long time, and it’s easy to think of someone like me as a boy crying wolf. But what I say to people all the time is, every once in a while, there’s a wolf. And I think we’re at that moment.
LW: What would you say is driving the necessity for change?
Rosenberg: First, the economic model is unsustainable. The demographic trends are not on our side. And if it wasn’t clear to people a year ago, it certainly should be clear right now: people don’t like us. If there’s anything that the far left and the far right agree upon right now, it’s that they’re not particularly fans of higher education. They have different reasons, but what we’re seeing is that public discontent translates into public policy and that public policy has the potential to be extremely damaging to higher education, whether it’s an endowment tax or cuts to funding from the N.I.H. (National Institutes of Health) or limitations on what people can teach or services they can provide.
If people liked us, it would be harder to implement those changes. But because the public regard for higher education has declined so much, we become a politically convenient punching bag, and that’s going to have real impact. If you combine economics, demographics, and public sentiment—you can throw in technology and artificial intelligence—I really do think we are at an inflection point now where same old, same old is just not going to cut it for the next five, 10, 20, 25 years.
LW: Let’s start with the economics of higher education. What needs to change there?
Rosenberg: When people say, change isn’t really necessary, the number that comes to mind for me is 56%—that is the average discount rate now at private colleges across the United States. Higher education in these places is on sale for more than half off. If you walked into a store and you saw a sign that said everything is 60% off, you would assume it was a closeout sale.
That is the definition of an unsustainable model—when that discount is going up every year and every year you are marking down your product more and more. And sooner or later you’re going to get to 100% and be giving it away for free. So the need to bend the cost curve seems to me inarguable. We cannot continue on this economic trajectory. More people are deciding not to go to college because it’s too expensive, and more people who can afford it are still deciding not to pay it because it’s too expensive. In Boston for instance, the percentage of students in public schools who choose to go directly to college has dropped over the last decade from almost 70% to a little over 50%. In a high education state like Massachusetts, that’s staggering.
LW: People tend to think of high tuition as the result of overspending or inefficiency. Is there truth to that?
Rosenberg: The economic problem in higher education is not caused by climbing walls and lazy rivers, and it’s not caused by extravagant residence halls. Sure, at some institutions those are wasteful expenditures, but that’s not what is driving the increase in cost. What is driving the increase in cost overwhelmingly is personnel, which is about two-thirds of the budget. The majority of every college and university budget in the country goes toward paying people’s salaries and benefits because it has always been a very people-intensive industry. And the problem that higher education has faced is that the cost of hiring those people has gone up, but productivity hasn’t changed. It’s a fundamental economic problem called “cost disease,” where your costs of hiring people go up but you see no increased productivity. Industries that have bent their cost curves have generally done it by increasing productivity. It’s easier to do in manufacturing than in service. If you look at things like the cost of producing an automobile adjusted for inflation, that’s actually gone down because you have so many fewer people. It’s so automated. But in higher ed, that’s not the case.
The second largest cost driver is the physical plant. Institutions tend to have big, old physical plants that cost a fortune to maintain. They almost all have gigantic deferred maintenance budgets that they’re not really addressing. The only way to make it cheaper—and people don’t like to hear this, but it’s true—the only way to make it cheaper is to do it with fewer people and fewer buildings. And that’s very, very hard to accomplish in higher education because it’s not wastefulness as much as it is things that we prize. Things like student faculty contact are exactly the things that drive our costs. We haven’t found the right balance between doing things that we think are effective and doing things that we think are economically affordable. And so that’s the situation that the vast majority of colleges that are not places like Harvard find themselves in right now.
LW: What is at stake here if higher education does not change?
Rosenberg: I think what’s at stake is that you’re likely to see high quality higher education become a luxury good reserved for the few and much lower quality, less expensive higher education become something that most people experience. At one extreme, you have places like Harvard and Williams and they’re not going to go anywhere, but I think we run the risk of seeing a lot of very good, much less wealthy institutions go away and be replaced by institutions that are far less effective and consumer-focused.
I’m someone who believes that essential public services are not best served when they are provided by for-profit entities because the profit motive and the motive of social good can come into conflict. Worst case scenario is that higher education becomes taken over by for-profits and it stops being a public good and starts being a revenue source and a way to return money to shareholders. And I think that would be a disaster.
LW: The title of your book suggests you know something about resistance to change in higher education. You’ve lived it and studied it. What is your theory?
Rosenberg: If I had to boil it down to the simplest formulation, I’dborrow a phrase from Larry Bacow, who was the president at Tufts and then the president at Harvard for five years. He has said, “Virtually none of the internal actors within higher education have incentive to change it.” There’s certainly a lot of incentive for people outside of higher education—families who want to pay for college, students who want to attend college, states that want to educate more people. But inside higher education, if you think about the key actors, you have college presidents, and any college president who wants to keep their job knows that if you push for dramatic change, you’re likely looking at no-confidence votes and a short presidency. If you want to keep your job as a college president, the easiest thing to do is not rock too many boats. Steer the boat, but don’t sharply change direction because you’re probably not going to survive.
Boards of trustees certainly at private colleges are made up of alumni whose vision of the college is from the past more than it is the future. And so they hold on very tightly. And this is true of alumni in general. They hold on to the past version of the college that they experienced. Any college president you ask will tell you that any kind of change beyond what is very small is going to get pushback from alumni. If you’re a tenured faculty member and you have a job for life and your institution isn’t about to go under, why in the world would you change anything? You have a privilege that no other worker in the American workforce has, with the exception of federal judges.
People often point to students, but when students push for change, it tends to be around things like political issues or better food in the dining hall. Most students don’t want the college that they enrolled in to go through disruptive change while they’re there. That’s not comfortable. The only people within the system who I think are incentivized to change it are the people who have no power to change it. I would say that’s staff, non-tenure track faculty and graduate students. They all know the system’s broken, but they have no power in the governance instruction. And so you have power located with people with no incentive to change, and you have incentive to change located with people who have no power. And that is a recipe for stasis. And of course then there are all these structural impediments like shared governance.
Anyone who studies change will tell you that two of the conditions that are necessary to change an organization are the right incentives and alignment, and you don’t have either in higher education. The desires and the priorities of a history department and the priorities of a college president are not necessarily going to be in any way aligned. And colleges, if you think of a metaphor, aren’t like highways. They’re like those bumper car rides that you used to go to at amusement parks, where everybody’s driving into each other and nobody goes anywhere because everybody’s driving in their own direction. That’s kind of the way decision-making at a college happens. We prioritize participation over outcomes. And that has a history that goes back more than half a century now, and it’s very hard to change when consensus and innovation don’t sit easily together because innovation by its very nature is disruptive and consensus by its very nature is not.
LW: What other things about higher ed do you think need to change that may or may not be related to the economic model but may be contributing to the decline in public sentiment or the questioning of its value?
Rosenberg: Higher education has tended to be extraordinarily insular. Just think about the typical college campus: it has sometimes literal walls between itself and the rest of the community, and it certainly has figurative walls. One of the things that needs to change is that higher education needs to start looking outward more and stop looking inward, asking itself, “What does society need?” People who teach at liberal arts colleges or research universities don’t like to hear this, but we need to be asking, “How can students get jobs?” This is for most people the largest investment they’re going to make other than maybe buying their house. Especially for first generation students, getting a job is not a luxury. It’s kind of a requirement.
I’m not saying that it all needs to be vocational, but are we teaching the right skills? Are we teaching the right competencies so that the people we are sending into the workforce are the people that employers want? Right now, the message back from employers is you’re not doing a very good job, that there’s not a great alignment between what we’re seeing in your graduates and what we want in our employees—things like creativity, being able to work in teams, resilience, adaptability. There are certain hard skills like being able to communicate well, work with numbers, work with data sets. I would describe it as a set of hard and soft skills that higher education has neglected in its focus on disciplinary expertise and on research. I mean, most college and university majors are still designed as if their graduates are going to become college professors, and that’s not what they’re doing.
I also think about the method of instruction. There have been, at this point, countless studies that have shown that passive learning is not very effective. And yet higher education still relies very heavily on things like large lectures, when we know that students learn very little in that setting. You get a grade, you move out of the class, and then within a year, you don’t remember anything that you learned, whereas learning through doing—experiential learning—teaches you a lot more. And higher education has been incredibly slow to embrace the importance of learning-through-doing rather than learning-through-listening ,so I think the pedagogy could be improved as well. And that means that faculty members like me who were trained in a certain way have to rethink how they teach. And it’s hard to get people to do that.
LW: Without those incentives, other than being a good person who cares about the post-graduate lives of your students, what is the motivation for professors to change their teaching?
Rosenberg: I think the incentive is going to come from the bottom-up and not from the top-down. All of these schools now are facing incredible constraints and challenges, and you have a choice when you’re in that situation. For most schools, the incentive is survival. If you’re going to survive, then you’re going to have to offer something different than what you’re offering now. I have to believe that there are going to be some schools that take a look at a failing model and say, “All right, we have nothing to lose. We’re going to try something different.” My old AP biology teacher used to say that the nature of change is adapt, migrate or die, and migration is not a real option for colleges. But adapt or die is going to be, I think, the thing that sparks change In higher education.
LW: You mentioned experiential learning, working in teams, some of the other high-impact practices that have proven to lead to things like wellbeing, fulfillment, and flourishing. These outcomes are also important to employers. Do you think embracing these kinds of experiences would help improve how people view higher ed?
Rosenberg: I think they would. And again, even if you look within very well-resourced institutions, there are departments that are struggling. Everybody points to the humanities. And so if you’re in a department where you’re just bleeding students, it seems to me you should be incentivized to look at what you’re doing and say, “All right, what can we do to make what we’re doing, what we’re teaching, more attractive to students?” And that would mean adopting some of those high-impact practices that we know work very well.
We’re not talking about the French Revolution here. I think that there are things that could be done without completely blowing up the system that would begin to incorporate some of these high impact practices and conceivably could help bend the cost curve a little bit. For example, if you have more students doing group work, then maybe you don’t need quite as many TAs, or maybe you don’t need quite as many instructors because students are working in groups. So certainly, it could improve the quality, and it might actually even help with the cost.
LW: As you say, the wolf is at the door. Is there anything positive about what we are witnessing from the Trump administration in regards to changes in higher ed?
Rosenberg: Is there anything positive here? Sometimes it takes a major jolt to the system to change something for the better. If you’re in the habit of driving while intoxicated, and you get into an accident, and you narrowly escape with your life, maybe you say, “I’m not going to do that anymore.” And I would say higher education needs to start looking outward more and stop looking inward, asking itself, “What does society need?”
I don’t know what’s going to happen with this cut in indirect cost from the NIH, but if it stands, no university, even places like Harvard and MIT, is going to be immune. It’s certainly a message that if you don’t pay attention to the world outside the campus, sooner or later, that’s going to come back and bite you. And so if we get through this without complete disaster, maybe colleges and universities will rethink how they engage with the world beyond their campuses, do a better job of making the case for their value, and actually provide more value. I think it’s waking people up to the fact that whether we like it or not, it’s not going to look the same in 10 years as it looks now. The question is: to what extent do we want that forced upon us? And to what extent do we want to try to have some control over that?
“The question is: to what extent do we want [change] forced upon us? And to what extent do we want to try to have some control over that?”
LW: What would you offer as suggestions to people like Vice President JD Vance who have called higher education the enemy?
Rosenberg: If in some alternative universe, someone like JD Vance were reasonable enough to actually listen to how to improve higher education, my response would be pretty simple and that is to double the Pell Grant—double the size. That is one tool that could make a major difference tomorrow. The Pell Grant has been stuck in the $6,000 to $7,000 range for decades. When it was first designed, it mostly covered the cost of college. Now, it doesn’t even come close, unless you’re talking about a community college. If you dramatically increased the Pell Grant, a) the money would be going to people who need it—lower income students and families—and b) it would make college much more accessible. I don’t believe everybody should go to college. What I believe is anyone who wants to go to college should be able to, shouldn’t be prevented by economics from not being able to. As with our infrastructure, we’ve neglected these kinds of investments because we’re so fixated in this country on low taxes.
I would also acknowledge that one major weakness is that higher education has become too ideologically uniform and that that’s not helping students. We need to figure out a way to make sure that people with all reasonable views can express them on college campuses without fear of reprisal or being shouted down. And that’s on colleges and universities. We haven’t done as good a job as we might have. That said, the answer to one form of censorship is not another form of censorship. And what we’re seeing now, in response to the soft power of students shouting down a speaker, is the hard power of the government telling you what you can and cannot teach and what you can and cannot do. That’s exactly the wrong thing. People like JD Vance and Musk talk about all the woke things that they’re rooting out. What we’re seeing now is that if you’re not on board with that particular ideology, then the law’s going to come after you. And that’s a lot scarier.
You can say all you want about student protestors or about student demonstrators, but their power compared to the power of the state is minuscule. And right now, we’re seeing the enormous power of the state being brought to bear to shut down the open exchange of ideas on college campuses. And that is infinitely more dangerous than anything that’s come from within colleges. So I would acknowledge the failures, but I would also say that this prescription for correcting it is worse than the disease.
LW: I am guessing this is not the kind of change you talked about in your book.
Rosenberg: That Dear Colleague letter from the DOE, I’ve never seen anything like that come from any agency of any government in my entire life — state, local, federal. It read like an editorial in the New York Post. I mean, it was crazy—not just in terms of its language, but its interpretation of the law was also just completely wacky. In some ways, it was directly inconsistent with the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, where Justice Roberts said, for example, that schools could use the students’ essays to make judgments about their life experiences. It went way beyond what was a fairly narrow ruling about affirmative action and admissions. I have yet to see a legal expert, right or left wing, that says this is actually supported by the law. There’s nothing about it that’s helpful. It’s just a standard playbook: overreach and scare people. And it’s a standard authoritarian playbook. What you get is a lot of what historians have called anticipatory obedience. People obey without you having to force them to do it because they’re scared. We’re seeing a lot of that right now. It’s a very effective way of exerting control when you can’t actually do what you’re threatening to do, but just the threat causes people to cower and to change what they’re doing.
LW: Are you disappointed in the way that higher ed leadership has responded?
Rosenberg: The short answer is yes, I’m disappointed. But I do understand. I’m sympathetic to the notion that we should become more neutral. It’s probably true that higher education over the last decade has gotten too embroiled in political issues. I don’t think that’s entirely unreasonable because I think it coincided with the rise of Trump and so many actual or proposed policies that go against everything that higher education is supposed to stand for. That led higher education to get much more politically active and opened it up to a lot of these attacks.
“I believe that more leaders have an obligation to speak about what parts of the university we will not compromise on.”
I’m also sympathetic to the fear of reprisal. If you’re a college president and you’re dependent upon the legislature for funding, you don’t want to do harm to your institution. But having said all that, we need to have a different response. This goes back to something called the Kalven Report from the University of Chicago in 1967, which talks about institutional neutrality. It says the exception to that is when society or some segments of society propose or do things that threaten the mission of the university. In these instances, you have an obligation to speak—not an option, an obligation. And I really believe that we’re at that point now. I believe that more leaders have an obligation to speak about what parts of the university we will not compromise on and we will fight for and what things being done to our students in particular are unjust.
I am sympathetic to the caution, but I’m also somewhat disappointed in it. I think that one of the things you learn when you’re in a schoolyard is if you keep getting punched in the nose by a bully, they’re going to keep punching you until you punch back. If you think that someone like Donald Trump or Elon Musk is going to stop punching you because you hide behind neutrality, you haven’t been paying attention.