Author: Ella

In their book The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be, Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman explore what stakeholders, on and off campus, believe to be the purpose of higher education and assess the degree to which these views are consistent.  Their research began in 2012 when “return on investment” was emerging as the catchphrase for pragmatic families choosing a post-secondary path amid rapidly rising tuition rates. The authors hoped the effort would help validate a sector they believed to be second to none in terms of encouraging personal growth and understanding the world in all its complexity. After studying 10 campuses of diverse profiles and conducting over two thousand interviews, the researchers concluded that their views were not widely held and that higher education “had lost its way.”

Among their key findings was an uncertainty among students regarding their reason for attending college; a strong turn toward vocationalism (what they call “earning over learning”); and misalignment — between families and students on one hand and between faculty and administrators on the other — about what college is all about. In their exploration, one dominant element emerged: the consistent reporting that student mental health was the biggest problem in higher education today. Gardner and Fischman make plausible connections among these findings — including providing context for the mental health phenomenon — and deliver a series of recommendations for how higher education can reclaim its meritorious role in individuals’ lives and in society. 

“We conclude that if higher education in the United States is to be successful in the twenty-first century, it needs to be sharply reframed,” they write in the book’s introduction.

This proposition is meticulously unpacked throughout the book, each chapter building a staircase of knowledge indicative of the authors’ unique contributions: Gardner, the famous developmental psychologist and giant in the academic theory space whose synthesis and sequencing reveal his decades as a professor; and Fischman, whose pure and artful approach to qualitative research succeeds in leading to authentic and, at times, vexing findings. In fact, The Real World of College raises as many questions as it answers, which led the authors to continue today their exploration of American higher education and the dynamics they believe have caused it to flounder. 

Since publishing the book in 2022, Fischman, Gardner, and their research team have been working on another major initiative to help colleges and universities center ethics and character development, encouraging students to think not just about themselves, but about others around them. The Beyond the Self project is testing the probability that, with sensitive guidance and ample practice, today’s young people can move from “I” to “we,” an effort the researchers see as critical to the fate of higher education, as well as the country’s future. In their office in Cambridge, Gardner and Fischman are joined by their graduate assistant, Kate Abramowitz, in discussing their findings and the new work those have led them to. Together, the trio represent three generations of scholars hoping to steer higher education in a new direction to fit a rapidly changing world.

Real Findings 

As is often the case with good research, The Real World of College evolved from previous work the authors had done at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, from which Gardner launched the Good Work Project. For decades, the research center has explored various scenarios of ethics and character including the decline in the professional sense of responsibility for “good work.” The effort has produced ten books of various themes, including morality and ethics in high school students and young adults. Fischman, then just out of college, has now been working with Gardner for nearly 30 years and has co-authored a number of books and articles with him. The Real World of College is their most ambitious to date, and, while the research has a clear start and end, it is informed by and interwoven with their many years of working with students. 

“In reflection sessions with college students for our Good Work Project, we would ask them about why they were in college and what they wanted to get out of it,” said Fischman. “We were struck by how many students really didn’t know why they were there, and we were really curious about that. This was around the time the value of a college experience was being called into question, and we began to wonder how other higher education stakeholders responded to the question, ‘Why go?’”

The Real World of College establishes four ways of thinking about going to college. These mental mindsets are: Inertial: one goes to college and thinks little about being there, does not participate significantly; Transactional: one goes to college and does what (and only what) is required to get a degree and then (hopefully) secure placement in graduate school or a job; Exploratory: one goes to college intentionally to take time to learn about diverse fields of study and try out new activities; and Transformational: one goes to college to question and reflect about one’s own values and beliefs with the possibility that they will be changed, hopefully in constructive ways. 

“We were struck by how many students really didn’t know why they were in college.”

Their research showed that while few held an inertial mindset, nearly half of all students had a transactional view of college; these young persons were most concerned with grade-point averages and building their résumés and less concerned about personal and intellectual growth or expanding their understanding of the world around them.

“Students talked about academic rigor in terms of wanting to do well, getting As, not more challenging work,” said Fischman. “It was about performing well, being successful, and having those external markers of success.” 

In their transactional view of college, students were joined by parents, alumni, and trustees, but were out of synch with on-campus stakeholders like faculty, administrators and staff; the latter informants tended to view the college experience through the exploratory and transformational lenses, what one might think of as the more traditional stance. This misalignment may account for the declining rates of confidence the public has in higher education. For the authors, it was another indication that the sector was losing its grip on its reason for existence — after all, they thought, if stakeholders just want jobs, they should go directly into job-training (and résumé-building) programs.

“Nearly 80% of faculty and administrators in our sample viewed college as an opportunity for transformation, so the difference between families and campus adults was really striking and really significant,” said Abramowitz. “If students are there for one reason, which likely reflects why their parents are sending them, and faculty and administrators are designing their courses with a completely different approach in mind, everybody’s going to be unhappy.” 

Starting in 2012, Gardner and Fischman said they did not anticipate many of their findings, including what was far and away the most dominant: the prevalence of mental health issues among college students and the consistency with which all stakeholders believed this to be the number one problem in higher education today. “At the start, we didn’t ask them to rate problems,” said Fischman. “But simply to name what they thought was the biggest, and from there, mental health quickly became the number one area. It was one of the only topics that every stakeholder agreed on.” 

As rates of mental health problems among college students soared in the 2010s, Gardner and Fischman became less surprised and more curious about the origins of the problem as well as how it might relate to their other findings. They found that students not only personally experienced mental health issues but believed them to be pervasive throughout higher education. Among the distress – mainly feelings of anxiety — was a deep sense of alienation. The authors were also compelled to understand what “mental health issues” really meant to college students. 

“What does it take to say there’s a mental health problem?” asked Gardner. “I think if you did research across different societies and diverse cultures, you would find that there are very different answers to that question.” 

The most common explanation for why mental health was considered the biggest problem on campus was academic stress. In a section in the book called “What keeps you up at night: the 3 a.m. worries,” Abramowitz writes that more than half of the students interviewed reported that academic stress was the reason. More than a fifth (17%) of students raise mental health issues in relation to these academic concerns. Again, the responses revealed a fixation on performance. 

“For the most part, students talked about mental health problems relating to doing well in school, so the stress is focused again on these external markers,” said Fishman. 

The authors do not purport to have any specific training or background in mental health and lean heavily on the literature to describe its prevalence among college students. But they do posit that their prescription for reframing the purpose of higher education may have a positive impact.

“If you think that college is just about getting straight A’s, developing your own profile and getting a job, you of course are going to have stress and anxiety about meeting those milestones. But if colleges were to encourage more of an exploratory or transformational mindset, they may also address some level of the mental health issues we are seeing.”

The Work of Reframing 

In reflecting on their findings, Fishman, Gardner and Abramowitz discuss what they feel needs to be done for higher education to find its way, with an eagerness that underscores their own formative undergraduate experiences. While they discuss some concerns about Gen Z students’ preparedness to embrace the hard work of learning (one of the most frequently-used words in the responses was “mom”), the authors avoid judging the students. Instead, their analysis and recommendations are focused on the academy and its failure to adhere to, and communicate, its primary mission, indeed its primary reason for existing: effective learning. 

“We would rather students be less concerned about their grades and more transformational and exploratory in their thinking about college, but it’s hard for them when they don’t understand what the mission of their institution is – or of the sector of higher education overall for that matter,” said Gardner. 

The authors call this “mission sprawl,” which gives way to “projectitis” — the proliferation of offices and programs that, however well-intentioned, can serve to further distract and confuse students. 

The most common explanation for why mental health was considered the biggest problem on campus was academic stress. 

“In the late 19^th century, when we minimized the religious missions of our traditional institutions — which people like me might have applauded at the time — we did not replace them with being a good citizen or having a well-trained mind,” said Gardner. “We replaced them with a grab-bag of these other things—most of which do not have explicit learning aspirations.” 

Fischman concurs. “Colleges have become all things to all people and in doing so, they have lost their sense of purpose. Institutions need to remind themselves and their students what they stand for.” 

The authors conclude that schools should establish a well-defined, easily understood mission that is introduced with explicit onboarding and reinforced by ensuring that any additional priority is intertwined into that overarching academic mission. In confronting the tenuous notion that college is simply a means to an end, the authors offer a new measure for what they believe is a far more lasting and valuable asset: higher education capital (HEDCAP). HEDCAP’s five constituents are the abilities to “Attend, Analyze, Reflect, Connect and Communicate.” HEDCAP encompasses key components of becoming a well-educated person – what Gardner terms higher ed’s “raison d’etre.”

The authors’ promotion of the learning mission includes a sense of thinking “outside of oneself,” a component that could obviate some of the ambiguity students have about college and might dial back the obsession with personal milestones. “You should know, as a student, that ‘I’m here because I can learn about the rest of the world, understand other people’s perspectives, and contribute something when I get into the world that will not only benefit me but benefit others as well,” said Fischman. 

Gardner is even more emphatic. “If colleges don’t increase higher education capital – being able to think and understand better — we really should close them down. Given where we are with the world, if we don’t do something to get students beyond themselves, then we have also failed, because college is the last chance to think about these things—who we are and who we might become, what the world is like, how to think better about it and act more effectively and most compassionately—in the precious years before you go full-time into the world of work.” 

Moving from “I” to “We” 

In today’s internally focused world, getting stakeholders to think more broadly is a formidable challenge, particularly for young people who are relentlessly besieged with messages to the contrary. With a team of colleagues, Fischman, Gardner and Abramowitz are now working on a new project that they hope will nudge the sector toward recognizing the collective benefits of outward thinking.

“After the book was published, we were concerned about this transactional mindset and this preoccupation with self, so we piloted our own approach to try to get students to move from ‘I’ to ‘we,’ as we call it,” said Fischman. 

For two years the researchers worked with over 150 students at four different colleges, instructing them to keep journals about difficult dilemmas. Fischman says they did not explicitly use the word “ethics” but prompted students to think about the ethical complexities of the dilemmas they described. 

“Among the thousands of students we interviewed for The Real World of College, very few talked about decisions or dilemmas that affected other people,” she said. “We wanted to increase sensitivity to the fact that there are decisions you make and behaviors you have that affect others and there are things going on in the world that may not relate to you but may need your sense of agency.” 

Another red flag raised in the book was the fact that while students reported cheating to be widespread on campus, they rated it as far less important to them than mental health and dismissed it as something they needn’t deal with or, indeed, even think about. This tracked to previous work the researchers had done with high school students (see her co-authored 2004 book, Making Good). 

“We got the sense that teenagers believed that ethics were for later. ‘As a young person, I don’t need to worry about that. And actually, when I decide to cut corners and may not do the right thing, its justified because I’m moving forward and getting to where I need to be.’” 

The notion that “ethics are for later” may seem detrimental, but Fischman believes it is an understandable response given the pressures placed on high school students to do all they can to get into the right college. In their work with college students, particularly first year students, the researchers found the reflection exercises, where students considered other people, constituted a welcome respite. 

“We found the students really appreciated having that time to reflect on the world, as it was something they would not have done otherwise,” said Abramowitz. “Many of them expressed benefits for their mental health, though that was not our primary focus.”

The journaling effort has shown promising results, and the researchers are now looking to expand their impact by working with select colleges and universities to embed their “Beyond the Self” approach within existing curriculum like first year programs or capstone experiences. The work is funded by the Kern Family Foundation, a national nonprofit dedicated to empowering young people to build flourishing lives anchored in strong character and inspired by quality education. The work includes interviewing alumni who participated in Beyond the Self programs and other initiatives focused on building sensitivity to ethics and character, in order to understand how it may have affected how they see the world, their lives and their careers. The research with alumni is part of what Fischman describes as a whole-institution approach to paving the “I” to “we”’ pathway.

“We are looking at institutions that are taking on this approach and trying to understand: Do students come to these schools prepared for this mission? What do they take away? How do they leave and what have they gained? And, ideally, what might society gain?”

In the liberal arts, small student populations, intimate learning environments, and dedicated faculty and staff create pathways for students to develop a sense of purpose, belonging, and identity on campus — pillars of wellbeing that will sustain them long after commencement day. Amid a youth mental health crisis with young adults reporting that their lives lack purpose, the liberal arts mission of whole-person development has never been more vital. For twelve small colleges across the United States, that mission has become a collective venture thanks to a $3.275 million grant from the Endeavor Foundation. “Collective challenges require collective solutions,” says Warren Wilson College President Damián Fernández. “The Endeavor Foundation’s collaborative approach to addressing student mental health and wellness—one of the pervasive issues of our times—promises broader and deeper impact.” 

The Endeavor Lab Colleges (ELCs) are a consortium of 12 small liberal arts colleges across the United States who share a commitment to student mental health, experiential learning, civic engagement, and purposeful work. Working across their campuses as a cohesive ecosystem, the collaborative has been supported by the Endeavor Foundation in New York City since 2016. In 2023, the ELCs — Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH; Bennington College in Bennington, VT; Blackburn College in Carlinville, IL; College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME; Northland College in Ashland, WI; Prescott College in Prescott, AZ; Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA; St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD; St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM; Sterling College in Craftsbury, VT; Unity Environmental University in New Gloucester, ME; and Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC — received the $3.275 million grant to fund the first phase of their collaborative project, “Enhancing Student Learning and Experience through Campus Wellness, Student Well-Being, and Mental Health Initiatives.”

Capacity to care

Phase I of the Endeavor Mental Health Initiative, which will continue to unfold over the course of the 2024-2025 academic year, focuses on building capacity — on the individual ELC campuses and across the “collaborative school” — for shared pilot projects within four categories: curricular initiatives to promote mental health and wellbeing in the classroom; purposeful life and work; place-based experiential learning; and expanded services, which include clinical and non-clinical mental health interventions such as peer mentoring, faculty and staff trainings, and bringing 24/7 counseling services to campus.

The colleges each received $100,000 for capacity-building in the 2023-2024 academic year and will receive an additional $75,000 to continue their efforts in the upcoming academic year. Also during Phase I, the Endeavor Lab Colleges will convene on progress and implementation, share expertise, and deepen their inter-institutional collaboration. With successful completion of this phase, the colleges will earn access to an additional $5.225 million over three years. Together, they will design and implement mental health and wellbeing that can be shared and adapted across the collective and become self-sustaining.

Dr. Lori Collins-Hall is the project manager for the Endeavor Foundation Mental Health Initiative. She also serves as vice president and chief operating officer of Sterling College, a liberal arts college in rural Craftsbury, Vermont and member of the Endeavor Lab Colleges. Prior to her work with the Endeavor initiative, Collins-Hall spent 20 years as a professor of sociology at Hartwick College in upstate New York, where her teaching and scholarship focused on criminal justice reform, alternatives to incarceration, and victim advocacy. She then served for five years as the provost and vice president of academic affairs at Antioch College in Ohio (also a member of the Endeavor Lab), before coming to Sterling in 2021. 

“Collective challenges require collective solutions. The Endeavor Foundation’s collaborative approach to addressing student mental health and wellness—one of the pervasive issues of our times—promises broader and deeper impact.”

From the first leg of her career at Hartwick College to her work with the Endeavor Foundation nearly 30 years later, Collins-Hall has been dedicated to community-based service work, exploring the transformative potential of the liberal arts model and place-based learning at institutions that value experiential education.  Both Antioch and Sterling (as well as Blackburn College and Warren Wilson College, also Endeavor Lab institutions), are among the ten federally-recognized work colleges that compose the Work College Consortium. These small colleges share a commitment to place-based education, community engagement and service, integrating work into the learning experience. 

Collins-Hall describes the Mental Health Project as a “capstone” to a career dedicated to cultivating pathways for student success in the liberal arts. For her, mental health care and the liberal arts share a common goal of whole-person development: “Within the liberal arts framework,” Collins-Hall says, “health and wellness becomes another avenue for being a whole person.” Whole-person development encompasses critical thinking, social engagement, and a sense of community —ideas we often associate with higher education and, more broadly, with the experience of “becoming” oneself — but it also includes self-care, self-reflection, and understanding one’s own behaviors within a larger social context. At their core, Collins-Hall explains, the Endeavor Lab Colleges have joined as a united front to develop methods “to integrate mental health and wellness as an acceptable and central piece of the liberal arts’ mission toward becoming a holistic person.”

The big impact of a small college

While the Endeavor Lab Colleges vary somewhat in size — most have fewer than 1,000 students; Sterling College has fewer than 100 — they all fit within the “small liberal arts college” or “micro college” designations. Institutions of their size and scope provide intimate learning environments, community engagement, and social belonging. For students, this kind of college environment can be an opportunity to establish a strong sense of self and place. As Collins-Hall describes, “These small colleges are community-oriented. They are student-focused,” and, importantly, she says, “they tend to be very relational, so people feel the impact when their communities are healthy — and they feel the impact when they’re not, perhaps more immensely, more directly.”

Among the most significant offerings of a small college environment is the development of students’ sense of purpose. Though purposeful work and learning have been shown to promote wellbeing and life satisfaction throughout a person’s lifetime, a 2022 Harvard University study of teens and young adults found that a striking 58 percent of respondents reported feeling little to no purpose or meaning. By prioritizing purpose, one of the four project areas of the Endeavor Lab Colleges, a liberal arts education can set students up for wellbeing in their post-graduate lives.

But these small institutions are not without challenges. As undergraduate enrollment falls, Americans’ trust in higher education continues to falter, and colleges now close at a rate of one per week, higher education has reached an inflection point — and perhaps no institution feels the weight of change as acutely as the small liberal arts college. While the endowments of larger universities may insulate them somewhat from cultural and financial pressures, those same pressures can be lethal for small colleges. Wells College in Aurora, NY was originally the thirteenth member of the Endeavor Lab Colleges; in April, it abruptly announced its closure after 156 years. (The shutdown and its fallout were the subject of a deep-dive by The Hechinger Report.)

Through a consortial approach, the Endeavor Mental Health Initiative preserves the immense value that the small liberal arts colleges provide their students while mitigating the budgetary challenges to creating and sustaining new programs. These are, as Collins-Hall describes, “some of the smallest, leanest, least financially resourced institutions.” 

Joining forces on mental health and wellbeing amplifies what each institution is able to accomplish on its own. “The support of the Endeavor Foundation and participation in the collaborative is vital to our small, private school as we strive to provide the best possible educational experiences to our students,” says Randolph College President Sue Ott Rowlands. “Our Endeavor Foundation grant funding has made it possible for us to enhance services to our students.”

While the endowments of larger universities may insulate them somewhat from cultural and financial pressures, those same pressures can be lethal for small liberal arts colleges.

Dr. Matt Vosler is a professor of outdoor leadership at Warren Wilson College. Vosler grew up in rural Western Ohio, where the outdoors were an integral part of his life — so integral, in fact, that he did not realize their impact until college, when his priorities shifted and experiences in nature became scarce. During his undergraduate studies at Ohio University, Vosler found himself spending less time outside— and feeling less fulfilled — than ever before. 

“Growing up in a rural area, being outdoors had always been a part of my daily routine. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t, and I was suffering.” At this realization, Vosler abandoned the pre-medical track he was on and went on to earn a degree in recreation, or, as he affectionately put it, “the study of play.” While pursuing a master’s degree in experiential education at Minnesota State University Mankato, he studied the traditional K-12 schooling system and the history of education reform in the U.S., leading to a revelation about the structure of education and the kinds of learners it is designed to serve. “When I left my K-12 education, I thought I wasn’t a good learner,” Vosler reflects. He experienced hyperactivity and ADHD as a child, and the traditional educational model was at odds with his style of learning. Upon discovering experiential education as an adult, Vosler thought of the many learners, including himself, who could benefit from the hands-on approach. He earned his PhD in curriculum and instruction, specializing in the transformative potential of outdoor education. 

Today, Vosler points out, students entering college had their middle school and high school years interrupted by the pandemic, spending formative developmental years online. Connection with nature supports attention restoration and stress reduction, but for a generation of college students that is less social and spends less time outdoors than its predecessors, the power of nature as a space for holistic wellbeing has eluded many. In his role at Warren Wilson, Vosler is devoted to exploring the connection between mental health and experiential learning in non-traditional classroom spaces. Nature Rx is a program that joins traditional mental health supports, such as counseling and clinical services, with the use of nature as a powerful supplementary tool for wellbeing. The mission, Vosler says, is to “empower students to cultivate relationships to nature, to others, and to themselves, creating sanctuary within the chaos of the modern college experience.” In a time when “hustle culture,” careerism, and pursuit of high-paying jobs are a proven detriment to college students’ sense of purpose, that sanctuary is worth protecting.

“At a small college, our capacity gets stretched. With the Endeavor grant, we were able to hit the ground running,” Vosler says. “We can grow and sustain our outdoor programs, ensuring that mental health and wellbeing remain an institutional priority.”

At Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA, Dean of Students Chris Lemasters is spearheading the Endeavor Lab’s expanded services initiative. With a background in residential life, Lemasters embodies the community-oriented approach to wellbeing that the liberal arts model encourages. “In the 2024-2025 academic year and beyond,” Lemasters says, “we have an opportunity to bring new and comprehensive mental health resources to expand the scope of our services and consistently keep mental health on the radar.” This expansion will go beyond acute care, such as mental health first aid, by prioritizing wellbeing across all areas of student life.

With an undergraduate population of just under 500 students, Randolph’s faculty promotes experiential and student-centered learning opportunities. Last year, Professor of Religious Studies Suzanne Bessenger and her colleagues built a contemplative studies minor into the Randolph curriculum, after a course taught by Bessenger proved meaningful for students. The contemplative studies field illuminates the human psychological experience through philosophical inquiry, deepening students’ exploration of self while encouraging intercultural exchange of ideas.

At Bennington College, Italian studies professor and First-Year Forum Director Dr. Barbara Alfano is exploring curricular opportunities such as trauma-informed learning to integrate wellbeing into the classroom within the first year of college. The First-Year Forum is a year-long advising course designed to help first-year students navigate campus resources, engage with their community, explore their interests, and develop their writing and critical thinking skills. As director of the First-Year Forum, Alfano thinks a lot about how the first year shapes the college experience. Her work within the Endeavor Lab focuses on integrating wellbeing into the liberal arts curriculum through developing shared curricular and co-curricular learning modules. 

Meanwhile in the Midwest, Blackburn College in Carlinville, IL conducted a Mental Health Needs Assessment to identify the status of student wellbeing on campus and helped college leaders locate areas for improvement. Now, the survey will expand from Blackburn into a multi-institution survey that will help all twelve Endeavor Lab institutions collect data on life experience, mental health, sense of belonging, and self-care behaviors among their students, creating a collective database for tracking and supporting mental health and wellness across the ELCs. 

In Bar Harbor, ME, College of the Atlantic Community Engagement Coordinator Nick Jenei is constructing campus maps to foster a sense of place and deepen students’ connections to their campus, local communities, and the cultural and natural history in their midst. Using interactive digital maps, the initiative leverages mobile phone technology to promote real-world engagement and will be adapted to create a sense of place and connection on other Endeavor campuses. Being connected to one’s physical place — its people, history, and environment — has shown positive effects on human health, improving both emotional wellbeing and academic performance in college. 

Together, the Endeavor Lab Colleges are not only enacting change on their own campuses, but tapping into the growing pool of knowledge they have built together. Their models for mental health and wellness are scaled and adapted to reach across the collaborative school of the Endeavor campuses. “These initiatives will support thousands of students on the members’ campuses but reach far beyond,” President Fernández says. “The work will have a multiplier effect through the creation of a model for all colleges and universities to implement refined best practices for student mental health and wellness.”