Month: September 2026

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

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

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

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

Shrinking the Experience Gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting Work Directly into the Degree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cloverleaf University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opening the Loop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mirroring the Real World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scaling flourishing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The flourishing foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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