Author: Ella

Wellbeing Curriculum: A Student’s Perspective

Posted on by Ella

Nestory Ngolle is a sophomore at Georgetown University, a biology and global health major, an EMT, and a member of the Engelhard Project Student Advisory Council. The Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning is Georgetown’s curricular approach to integrating whole-student learning and wellbeing into academic contexts — and, as Ngolle sees it, creating an environment where students can connect what they learn about the world to what they learn about themselves. 

Bringing health and wellbeing into the classroom increases engagement, encourages collaboration and self-reflection, and cultivates a sense of purpose that helps students flourish across all facets of college life, he says. In late March, Ngolle joined Joselyn Schultz Lewis, Director of Inclusive Pedagogy at Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, for a presentation on Engelhard’s innovative, student-informed pedagogy at the Coalition for Transformational Education’s national conference in Washington, D.C. LearningWell caught up with Ngolle to see what his experience can teach leaders and learners in higher education.

In his first semester at Georgetown, Ngolle took a foundational biology class that happened to be an Engelhard course. “Rather than memorizing information and applying it to problems, we were applying what we learned to ourselves and our experiences. It helped students feel connected to what they learned and reflect on their own lives in relation to the academic material.” The following semester, Ngolle enrolled in a medical anthropology class, another Engelhard course. “From there, I think I sort of fell in love with the Engelhard mission,” he said. “You can see the positive impact in the classroom, in student participation, and in how students approach the work.” 

Bringing health and wellbeing into the classroom increases engagement, encourages collaboration and self-reflection, and cultivates a sense of purpose.

While we tend to look to college counseling centers, peer advising, or support groups as the first frontiers of student mental health, Ngolle emphasizes the transformative potential of acknowledging and promoting wellbeing within the content and culture of academic life. In the classroom, that means inclusive pedagogy and exploring the relationship between student wellbeing and engaged learning. Engelhard’s course model invites faculty to redesign existing courses by identifying an area of wellbeing that is relevant to the curriculum. Engelhard courses exist across academic disciplines, so students of philosophy, mathematics, business, or medicine have opportunities to enroll in courses that incorporate topics such as substance use, depression and anxiety, sleep, social media use, or sexual assault into their curricula. 

Crucial to this integration is getting students to understand that good grades, even superlative grades, are not at odds with wellness. Rather, Ngolle says, academic success and wellbeing can coexist and complement one another. For students like Ngolle on the pre-medical track, academic rigor and ambition have a reputation of souring into severe stress or competitive, unsupportive peer relationships. Professors can be active in dismantling this process before it begins, Ngolle says, by creating a sense of community and belonging among classmates. “Those are the people we are going to walk across the stage with in four years,” Ngolle said of classmates, who often see each other as opponents rather than as peers. A spirit of unconditional individualism, he argues, can get in the way of finding community and belonging, an essential ingredient for good mental health in college. 

The end goal, as Ngolle sees it, is to arrive at a point where “all classes are centered around students and strive to cultivate a sense of health and wellness in the classroom.”

Ngolle believes that healthy behaviors, improved memory and information retention, positive peer networks, and the confidence to talk to professors or speak up in class all reinforce one another. He hopes to dismantle the narrative that students, in order to achieve a good GPA or ace their exams, must compromise their sleep, suffer under stressful conditions, and work themselves to the point of burnout. The Engelhard Project has taught Ngolle that wellbeing and care can extend into every aspect of a person’s college existence, including academic life. He now amplifies his peers’ voices as a Student Advisory Council member for the Engelhard Project, and he hopes to see the program’s reach grow. The end goal, as he sees it, is to make every course an Engelhard course, eliminating the need by arriving at a point where “all classes are centered around students and strive to cultivate a sense of health and wellness in the classroom.”

Ngolle’s experience as a student in classes that prioritize wellbeing has affirmed and shaped his ambition to pursue medicine. “Healthcare is more than just prescribing medication to a patient. It can mean connecting with patients on an individual level, being there to just sit and talk with them. These courses have led me to see patients as people: the goal is not to treat a disease; the goal is to treat a patient.” 

For Ngolle, the pre-med student experience has expanded his definition of what it means to be well, both for himself and for all medical patients receiving care. His professors have “challenged student perspectives of what it means to be healthy and well. That means that going to the doctor or talking to a psychiatrist are not the only settings where we can talk about our health and wellbeing. In the classroom, we can achieve wellness — not just through grades, but through the knowledge we acquire.” Students connect more meaningfully to course material when they are able to see its relevance to daily college life, Ngolle says. That connection not only leads to better academic outcomes, but to better lives.

How to Build a Global Citizen

Posted on by Ella
Listen to this article, read by Ezza Naveed.

The year is (sometime in the future), and a network of global leaders are working together across continents, languages, and disciplines on some of the world’s biggest problems. Be they scientists, artists, industry executives or NGO directors, they are particularly well-equipped with the skills needed to navigate a world with diverse cultures and common threats. Within their toolbox of competencies are empathy, agency, open-mindedness and grit. 

This is not a utopian fantasy, but rather the strategic vision that centers Mike Magee, PhD, and his students at Minerva University, a recently formed, selective institution aimed at developing the global leaders of the future. 

“Our mission is to develop leaders, problem-solvers, and entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe and to weave them together as one community committed to a world that is safe, sustainable and equitable,” said Magee, President of Minerva. 

Accredited in 2021, the university was originally called The Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute, founded by Ben Nelson and operated by the Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, where former US Senator and President Emeritus of the New School Bob Kerry served as executive chairman. Based in San Francisco, Minerva utilizes a hybrid platform of online learning and study away to engage high achieving students from around the world in a different kind of education. Within their regular studies, students work on location-based assignments in seven international cities. 

By design, it is the world’s most diverse university: less than 15% of its 600 students are from the US, and many come from low-income communities. Minerva has also been ranked “the world’s most innovative university,” and for good reason. To achieve a goal as ambitious as Magee describes within a system as traditional as higher education, Minerva had to reinvent pretty much everything. With minimal infrastructure, an unusual faculty profile, and a unique pedagogy, Minerva offers a fresh approach to higher education at a time of deep frustration with the status quo. 

College — reimagined 

One of the most obvious differences between Minerva and its elite peers is the environment in which students learn. Large, theater-style lecture halls do not exist. In fact, the school has minimal infrastructure which keeps the tuition about half that of many colleges. Classes of no more than 20 students are live and online and involve pre-class work and full participation. The goal is to create intimate learning environments that are dialogue based where students build relationships with peers and professors, even as they are mostly remote. After spending their first year in San Francisco taking the same general education curriculum, students move in cohorts to an additional 6 cities each semester: Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Taipei, and London.

“It’s a very special type of person who wants to work here.”

“From the beginning, we decided we were not going to build beautiful campuses. We were going to intentionally teach young people to treat economically and culturally vibrant cities as their campuses – to use their libraries, museums and labs and to immerse themselves in their cultures.”

Another feature that sets Minerva apart is the kind of people it attracts. Michael Horn is a trustee at Minerva and has been involved with the school since the beginning. “I see Minerva as a disruptive entrant into the elite higher education segment,” said Horn, who has authored several books including one with Clayton Christenson, considered the father of disruptive innovation theory. “It puts the learner and their needs first and prepares them for a complex world in a way that’s much more front and center than other higher ed institutions who are often asking themselves ‘Are we a research-first institution? Why do we exist?’ At Minerva, we are very clear. We are a learning institution.” 

A former international relations professor at the University of Southern California, Dollie   Davis taught in one of those large lecture halls and eventually left higher ed feeling unfulfilled. She worked in the non-profit sector until the chance to join Minerva lured her back to teaching. She is now Minerva’s dean of faculty.

“It’s a very special type of person who wants to work here,” she said. “We don’t have a publishing requirement and we don’t have tenure. Without the requirement to publish, we focus primarily on teaching. We care about our specific model of teaching and being engaged with our students.”

Davis says everything about Minerva is intentional which translates into a collective “buy-in” of the unusual culture. 

“The students know they are coming into a challenging university where classes are taught in the active learning style,” she said. “They know that they are going to be called on so as soon as they log on, they’re ready to go. It’s on us, the faculty, to promote a strong sense of community and a safe space in the classroom so they feel comfortable sharing new ideas. That’s a big part of our training.” 

Minerva professors are trained in an active learning pedagogy and the technology that enables it. With students and professors throughout the world, Minerva’s digital platform is critical, and the university is quick to distinguish it from the online accommodations colleges were forced to make due to the pandemic. The platform delivers real-time information to faculty and students during classroom discussion, which allows them to display material for the purpose of informing the conversation. Students and faculty see one another on a digital “stage” and can be moved around the screen. If students have worked together on a pre-class project and need to present, the professor can visually pair them with their material alongside them. Davis believes a digital theater can be more intimate than an actual classroom where it is easier to hide. 

Magee says many schools use online learning simply for knowledge transmission when they can be working the technology around the science of learning. “The technology should enable the pedagogy you choose. What do we want the classroom experience to be like? What type of outcomes are we trying to achieve for students?” In Minerva’s case, it is the evidence that emerging adults retain more knowledge from experiences and dialogue than they do from simply receiving information. 

An important distinction in the curriculum is the relevance of real-world problems which students work on in location-based assignments. Students in Buenos Aires taking Dean Davis’s economics class, for example, will attend a financial museum and discuss the history of the city’s economy and policies with the local experts there. Students who take sustainability courses on topics like energy or water can apply what they learn to projects they will work on in Seoul or Berlin. The variation in these experiences teaches students how different people and systems respond to similar challenges. 

To build their cultural competencies, students learn to master what the school calls “HC’s” – 75 habits and concepts that are basic tools for critical thinking and effective communication that students will use across their lifetime. They are particularly important when working across differences – a foundational principle in global citizen-building. Students are introduced to the HC’s in their first year and are assessed on them throughout their time at Minerva. Davis says the HC’s are continuously “pulled” throughout class and are referenced by hashtags that get students to think instantaneously. 

“When talking about a geopolitical conflict, I might say “hashtag – audience” to remind students of how what they’re saying affects others; or “hashtag – break it down” when we are working on problem-solving,” she said. 

The HC’s include personal characteristics such as purpose and resilience, which are linked to improved mental health and wellbeing, something that is highly valued at a school that asks a lot of its students. “Our curriculum is intentionally designed to build resilience in students and have them grow in those ways,” said Horn. “Resilience is incredibly important to wellbeing because things aren’t always going to be great, and it is how you respond that is important.” 

Magee said the challenges students face in becoming global citizens are not minimal. “I don’t want to give the impression that any of this is easy,” he said. “It’s really hard when you have young people who are by and large between the ages of 17 and 22 and they’re wary of one another and they’re still trying to develop their own sense of how the world works. And there’s a lot they still need to know about history and politics and identity.”

“If anyone wants to ‘do Minerva,’ you should be prepared that it will upend much of what you know about the world,” said Ezza Naveed, a Minerva alumnus of the class of 2021.

Naveed was a highschool student in her native Pakistan when she told her guidance counselor she was not interested in a traditional four-year university. “If it were up to me, I would have traveled the world instead of going to college – I think it would teach me more,” she said. But her mother had other ideas and so her guidance counselor suggested an alternative — Minerva. Naveed was an excellent student, though her grades had slipped that year due to a significant personal loss. She had achieved much in her young life including working on class poverty within her community, which she wrote about in her application. She was overjoyed when she was accepted.

“I think Minerva saw in me someone who, if given this education, was going to run with it and make a difference in people’s lives,” she said.

Naveed now says Minerva was the exciting, soul- searching, transformational experience she had hoped for, building her sense of empathy and understanding of different cultures and helping her discover new parts of herself. 

“The most formative experiences in my life happened in all of these cities around the world, in all these unique cultures where I learned new customs and made best friends for life,” she said. In Seoul, she joined the local debate team at Hanyang University and was amazed that she became a quarter finalist for the Seoul National Debate Tournament. During her trek to Patagonia whilst living in Buenos Aires, and doing solo hikes by herself, she realized something. “I, as a woman, can compete and do anything, anywhere in the world,” she remembers thinking, countering the cultural narrative she grew up with about the inferior capabilities of women. 

“For me, Minerva was about ‘unlearning that,’” she said. 

Naveed wrote her Minerva capstone on gender immobility of Pakistani women. “I was always passionate about this issue, but I wasn’t confident in my ability to bring that forward,” she said. “Minerva gave me that toolbox. I lived in 5 out of the 7 countries where I got to see what ‘normal’ was like for women in different parts of the world.”

When she returned to Pakistan after graduation, she sensed that her peers did not get the same opportunities and had not grown in the same ways, even those she considered “really smart.” She attributes that to a systemic and personal investment gap in their education. “At Minerva, my professors knew me so well, the staff knew me so well. They were so invested in my success, and they really cared for us, my friends cared for me, it was just a deeply caring community. I realized that’s not a universal thing.” Shortly after graduating, she formed a partnership with Codematics, a tech company in Pakistan to teach low-income students, aged 18 to 25, for her project “Young Leaders Program” at Urraan, both hard tech skills like coding but also personal, pragmatic skills like public speaking, how to pitch an idea and networking. She is particularly proud of the outcomes she has seen in her female students.

“I think Minerva saw in me someone who, if given this education, was going to run with it and make a difference in people’s lives.”

Naveed is now a student at Harvard Graduate School of Education where she runs the student organization, Women’s Education Movement which recently hosted a leadership forum for School of Leadership Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s first and only boarding school for girls.  She continues to feel the personal growth that occurred when at Minerva – “My friends and I can literally go anywhere and figure it out” — but she cautions that the school is not for everyone.

When asked about the challenges she encountered, Narveed is candid about the emotional toll it can take on students, particularly those, like her, who had suffered a loss or were emotionally vulnerable.

“The mental, emotional load of it was really tiring,” she said. “We had to uproot and reroute and establish community from scratch in all these places — and then there was the pandemic — it really took a toll on me, mentally, emotionally and physically.” Naveed said students, particularly in the early classes, felt particularly dependent on one another and their professors. “The only sense of stability came from our own friendship and community.”

The school has worked on strengthening its mental health services platform which included coordinating therapy appointments around countries and time zones which Naveed said was a problem early on. Her ability to put these challenges in the context of her overall experience hints at the resilience Minerva believes is a part of global leadership.

“It can be challenging but it is extremely worth it. If I could go back and do it all again, I absolutely would.” 

Expanding the pipeline

If there was one thing Magee would change about Minerva it would be to make it available to more students around the world which reflects a deep personal commitment to and experience with educational equity. An academic for many years, Magee left higher ed to found a network of new, racially integrated public schools in Rhode Island before coming to Minerva. 

“Since I was a child, I’ve been really fascinated by and passionate about the role that schools can play in bringing young people together from lots of different backgrounds and across many lines of difference into community and belonging with each other.”

Magee acknowledges that the rigorous pedagogy and international campus require a certain level of skill and maturity, (as Ezza Narveed points out, it’s not for everyone), but he hopes to open Minerva up to more students for whom the unique method would be beneficial. Last year, the school grew its student body by 20% and plans to do the same in the coming year. With faculty that can be onboarded anywhere in the world and ample real estate available in their host cities, Minerva’s model makes it easy to expand.

“I think it’s fair to say that none of us is satisfied with limiting this to 600 students,” said Michael Horn. 

In regard to being a prototype for change, Magee hopes other institutions will acknowledge the value of low capital costs to solve one of higher education’s biggest barriers, the rising cost of tuition. Magee blames the current unaffordability of higher ed for many Americans, and the resulting decline in public support for it, on a growing trend toward a business model more akin to a luxury brand or a country club membership. “The elite institutions started this trend by intentionally constraining supply, astronomically raising prices, emphasizing their elitism and not thinking about how to create an experience that is more available and less alienating,” he said. Magee believes the strategy pays off for the relatively few institutions whose alumni will enjoy a lifetime of social capital but is a debilitating trend for the rest. 

“It has really broken higher education in America.” 

If Minerva can offer an alternative path, one that can be scaled to reach far more of the future global citizens the world needs, Magee is happy to share it. His focus on growth also reveals a desire to prove something to those who may interpret “innovative” as “experimental.”  

“I think we can do a real service to higher ed by growing to a size where we’re a little less easy to dismiss.”

The Jed Foundation/SHEEO Mental Health and Equity Initiative

Posted on by Ella

In 2023, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and The Jed Foundation (JED) launched a learning community across state higher education agencies and systems  to better support college student mental health and determinants such as equity and belonging. In late April, SHEEO and JED will host a convening in Minneapolis, “The Wellness Blueprint: Cultivating Foundations for Statewide Student Mental Health Policy,” with the purpose of continuing the development and implementation of state- and system-wide policy recommendations to advance student mental health and wellness. The hope is after a year-long collaboration, states will have moved the needle on a problem that lies at the intersection of each organization’s area of advocacy and expertise: mental health challenges remain the number one reason students stop out or consider stopping out of their post-secondary programs.

Dr. John Lane is the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Equity Initiatives at SHEEO, where he leads policy and project development in educational equity, academic programs, and student success. SHEEO works with state higher education officers to promote equitable higher education attainment for all Americans. 

“Whether these challenges are crisis circumstances or are accumulated over time and hidden, students identify mental health as the primary challenge to their academic persistence and achievement,” says Lane. The issue is exacerbated for low-income students, many of whom will never return to school, and are often laden with debt and the result is no degree to show for it.  

Last year, states submitted grant proposals detailing their plans and commitments to mental health as a facet of equity in higher education, as well as their efforts to engage internal stakeholders, such as a state Department of Public Health. Five states — Arizona, Louisiana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas — were selected to receive $25,000 grants to support their work to implement mental health solutions tailored to their unique contexts over a 15-month period. The objective of the partnership was to provide states with the resources to explore how mental health and equity are being addressed and to share their findings through cross-state collaboration. 

The Jed Foundation brings decades of research and expertise in suicide prevention and student mental health to the table. It is also another example of an expanding focus for the non-profit, which has recently added a public affairs and advocacy component to its work with colleges and high schools.  The JED Equitable Implementation Framework and the JED Campus Program will be used to guide state policymakers in creating a space for states to identify best practices, refine strategies, and work toward inter-state collaboration. The Jed Foundation has a longstanding precedent of centering student mental health as an academic issue, making its partnership with SHEEO an opportunity for the organizations to implement robust, research-supported policy change, study best practices as tailored to states’ unique resources and needs, and improve student outcomes by working directly with policymakers. 

“There is no rulebook right now for investing in student mental health at the state level. We are building as we climb.”

Dr. Zainab Okolo is the Senior Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Government Relations at the Jed Foundation. Okolo says the mission of the learning community is to help guide state systems in centering mental health in state and federal policy. “What we found at JED was a gap and an opportunity,” she says. “In response to the mental health crisis that was exacerbated during the pandemic, we saw many state-level leaders begin to directly invest in mental health. Governors had clear new line items around mental health — but there wasn’t any guidance on how to actually move the needle on mental health, or whether or not the investments being made at the state level were answering the questions around how we destigmatize mental health, how we expand resources, and how we ensure that students, particularly within school settings, are having their mental health needs met so they can continue to thrive as they pursue their degrees.” In having conversations with their partners at SHEEO, an imperative emerged to ensure that state policymakers had the means to support the work that they were already investing in. The priority was there, Okolo says, but procedural clarity wasn’t: “There is no rulebook right now for investing in student mental health at the state level. We are building as we climb.”

A Just Design

The mental health learning community comes at a time when mental health is a steadfast feature of public discourse and a topic of conversation on the federal stage. “There is a great opportunity here to take advantage of the attention that is being rightly paid to this work, as recently as the President’s State of the Union address,” says Lane.“We are so fortunate to do this work now; we have the Surgeon General whose platform is mental health, and the Secretary of Education who cares about the wellbeing and mental health of college students, and wants to know how to best sustain support for students and for systems that are supporting them.” 

According to Okolo, bringing states together on these issues highlights the similarities of their positions even as they navigate different political landscapes. “They’re all grappling with very similar questions. How do you scale crisis response? What specific policy levers need to be in place in order to continue this work, even beyond this kind of mental health Renaissance moment? How do we flag for our federal stakeholders and leaders that we need harder lines of funding to continue on even beyond these next couple of years? The learning community creates a space for states to collaborate and learn from each other.”

The five states selected for the learning community project — Texas, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Louisiana — represent a diverse range of education policy, resources, and student demographics. “We were deliberate about the variety of states,” says Lane. “The topography of the states is representative of a deeper conversation about how we tailor our work to the unique circumstances of each state. The political landscape varies greatly across these five states. So does the availability of resources, the governance model and the engagement profile. So, states work really hard to build consensus among their stakeholders, and regardless of the model, try to provide direction to help set important way points.”

Texas is one of several U.S. states to implement changes to its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies within the last year. Senate Bill 17 banned all DEI programming from public colleges and universities in the state, creating  potential mental health risks for students who relied on affinity groups and identity-based spaces to cultivate a sense of inclusion and belonging on campus. These changes to DEI policies went into effect after the launch of the learning community, Okolo points out, and only reinforce the importance of adaptability and community engagement. When mental health initiatives find themselves in the crosshairs of fraught political divides, they reveal a unique area of bipartisanship. 

“The interesting thing about working within these political contexts is that this work remains bipartisan,” Okolo explains. “We see clarity around the importance of mental health echoed across states. What’s not bipartisan is the approach to issues around parental access, data, and funding. So the approach is not bipartisan, but the issue and the framing of the issue remains undoubtedly bipartisan. We want to keep it that way and lean into that opportunity by learning about how to do this work no matter the political ground that we find ourselves in.”

The public spirit, Lane and Okolo say, has not changed even where laws have. DEI “is directly adjacent to our mental health work, and it influences the scope of our reach when it comes to identifying needs based on race,” says Okolo. “What I’m happy to see, though, is that Texas made a commitment to making mental health resources accessible to all. What the ban might mean is that the language, how we frame it, what we call it, may change. But it doesn’t change the intent of the work.”

The mental health learning community leans into designing equitable futures within the contexts of each state. This, Lane says, calls for new approaches to address the systemic biases and inequity that are known contributors to the lack of access to mental health supports and can therefore serve as deterrents to student success and degree attainment. As a result, new projects at SHEEO include more dialogue about “just design.” According to Lane, “If you know pre-existing structures, and best efforts in the past have resulted in the need for current work and equity to try to mitigate disparities, then, if we have new solutions without addressing those original systemic circumstances, we could accidentally perpetuate the disparities that equity efforts are meant to close.” 

“The topography of the states is representative of a deeper conversation about how we tailor our work to the unique circumstances of each state. The political landscape varies greatly across these five states. So does the availability of resources, the governance model and the engagement profile.”

In order to address systemic discrimination and avoid repeating previously unsuccessful — and potentially harmful — initiatives, Lane says states must raise questions about designing systems and environments. A just design, he says, is one that centers community engagement, student voices, and adaptability to different states and institutions. The SHEEO/JED collaboration is currently building a student panel to foreground the student experience in policy reform. The goal is to not only amplify student voices, but to give students a seat at the table of changemaking. 

“Our goal to center student voices goes beyond the traditional model, which often includes bringing on students who share a narrative in the first-person,” Lane says. “My feeling is that too often we resume the policy work without taking an important next step, and that next step is giving students a sense of agency so that they are at the table with us as thought partners and are mentored in collaborating around policy in a way that helps us in the present, that gives them development opportunities for the future and really enriches the work that we’re doing.”

Lane and Okolo are looking forward to the late April conference to collectively assess how much has been accomplished and to provide a best practices guide. “What we are hoping to achieve with the best practices guide is a bit of a north star and a guardrail context on what to consider when implementing and scaling mental health work within your state,” Okolo says. “What are the blind spots? Who are the unsung heroes and key stakeholders that should be at the table when making these decisions? What opportunities do you have to triage off campus? What community-based organizations do you have at your fingertips to close the gap between resources on your campus and ensuring that students get the support that they need? Those kinds of strategic levers are what we hope to outline, so that if the state never engages with us directly, they have a way of navigating this work within their state context.”

Interview with Paul Tough, journalist and author of “The Inequality Machine”

Posted on by Ella

The following is a transcript of LearningWell Radio Episode 2: Interview with Paul Tough. You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Marjorie Malpiede: This is LearningWell Radio, the podcast of Learning Well Magazine, covering the intersection of higher education and lifelong well-being, I’m Marjorie Malpiede, the editor of LearningWell and your host today. Paul Tough is an author and journalist, widely known in the education equity space with books such as How Children Succeed and the Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. Widely read, Paul Tough has become a national voice for making college more equitable, affordable, and accessible to all Americans, and holding up a mirror to higher education asking, “Can’t we do better?” He joins us today from the National Conference of the Coalition for Transformational Education where he delivered a keynote address. Paul, welcome to LearningWell Radio.

Paul Tough: Thank you. Great to be here.

MM: Let’s get started. So your book, the Inequality Machine and your New York Times article last fall and the public’s perception of the value of a college degree have really led the national narrative on this big question, right? Is college worth it? Why is it not for so many Americans?

PT: Well, it’s a great question and I mean part of what is complicated about this question is there’s the reality for whom it is worth it, and when and then there’s the perception that a lot of people have. And I try to stay in the reality though the perception is really important to a lot of families. But I think that what has changed is that the calculus, the sort of economic calculus of when college pays off has grown more complicated in the last couple of decades. So when you look at the sort of big picture number, the college wage premium that economists talk about, they point out the fact that on average people who have a BA in this country earn substantially more than people who only have a high school degree, about two thirds more. So that’s what the college wage premium is. So when you just look at that, college obviously pays off, right? It’s a great deal for everybody. However, a few things have changed. One is the cost of college, which then means that getting that benefit has a bunch of costs to it. But the other that I think is more crucial and is harder to measure is that the variability of the returns to college have changed. So that in the past, a couple of generations ago, didn’t really matter what happened in college. If you graduated, didn’t matter what your major was, even sort of where you went, those things mattered somewhat, but you were going to do just fine. But now because college has become more expensive, because higher education is more stratified, there are some people who with a BA, who are making a ton of money. And some people with a BA who aren’t making much more than a high school graduate, in fact some who are earning less than the average high school graduate. It’s additionally complicated by the fact that a lot of people don’t finish their college degree. And the numbers are really clear that when you start a degree and you borrow money and you don’t finish, you are not doing well at all. Economically, you’re probably earning less than the average high school graduate and about 40% of people who start a degree don’t finish. We can predict somewhat who’s going to and who isn’t, but for any one student, there’re just all these factors that make going to college a real gamble. And that just isn’t the way we think about college and certainly not the way we should think about it or want to think about it. We’ve been trained to think about it as this investment. That’s what we tell kids. It’s an investment, it’s like a treasury buying a treasury bond. In fact, for a lot of families it’s more like going to a casino. So you could win big but you also could lose your shirt. And that kind of uncertainty is emotionally, psychologically really unpleasant, painful for a lot of families, but financially it’s a real true risk.

MM: So I think this information that came to the fore is incredibly important. If you are thinking about this investment, don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s a bit of a downer, right? When you think-

PT: It is true.

MM: … about how we think about higher education. So in your book, you tell amazing stories about families who actually still believe that this is going to give them a better life. And in fact, the data show that in terms of public opinion of the value of college, a recent Gallup survey showed that 66% of Hispanics and 65% of Blacks said that a college education was very important compared to just 45% of whites. So I could read this through the lines that you’re rooting for these people and you hope that we get back to a place where we can still hold a college degree out as the ladder to upward mobility. But I guess my question is, Paul, what would be the two or three things that you would change about higher ed to keep that dream alive for these people you wrote about?

PT: Well, I mean I’ll talk about two or three, but there’s one that’s really the biggest.

MM: Go with the one.

PT: Which is cost. I mean, I think that is really what is so hard for these families. So yes, absolutely. I wrote about a lot of low-income students, including a lot of Black and Latino and Latina students. And for individual students it is still amazing how higher education, how completing a degree can change your life. I saw it happen again and again where students would just go from a really difficult economic background, four years of college, they have these opportunities that open up to them that are going to change their lives and change their children’s and grandchildren’s lives for generations. You can see this is what higher education is supposed to do and it does work absolutely for individual students again and again. The problem again is that the overall calculation now just has all this risk in it for a lot of families

And especially for low-income families, the risk has to do with cost and costs have absolutely gone up. I understand the economics that we shouldn’t just look at list price, that there’s financial aid, there are ways to save money. But for a lot of families, even the cost of public college with some good financial aid, it’s a big deal for those families. And going into 20 or $30,000 worth of debt, which is sort of what we tell students is totally reasonable. You’re going to earn that back. That’s really scary. And so I think that’s where we have to do better. We’re creating a system where those families, in order to achieve the American dream and in order to achieve their goals, it’s not enough for them to just work hard. They also have to invest a lot of money and it shouldn’t be that way. We don’t have that kind of risk in high school. There’s not that idea of like, “Well, you go to high school but you’re rolling the dice about whether it’s going to be worth it or not.” And so this is not a problem that any institution can change on its own, though I think institutions can do a lot to make a degree more affordable, to make the finances and tuition more transparent. But I think this is something we need to take on as a country to figure out how to make college much more affordable for millions of students. And that’s the way it always was, right? It’s the way it is in other countries. It’s the way it was in this country 50 years ago. We have just created this new model where higher education is suddenly this high stakes high risk game and it doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t work for a whole lot of families.

MM: And you do a phenomenal job of unpacking the history around that. And I know we don’t have time for all of that, but people should read the book to get those kind of details. But I don’t want to simplify, but is the number one thing reinvesting from a public funding perspective in higher education? And I know that you do a lot of comparison to countries in Europe which are actually doing the opposite of what we’re doing, instead of sort of questioning the value, they’re kind of doubling down. So yeah, is that really what we need to be doing?

PT: Is what we need to be doing in terms of public investment?

MM: Public investment,

PT: Yeah, I think-

MM: And we saw that dip right after the recession, the Great Recession of 2008, 2009.

PT: Yes, there was a dip then, but I mean it started back in the late ’60s. Ronald Reagan who I think was the first to sort of say like, “Well, wait a second. The benefits from college go to a student. They don’t go to society. So why are the rest of us underwriting this college wage premium? Why are we paying for these certain people to be able to earn more than the rest of us?” It’s a very powerful sort of populist message and it’s made more powerful when a lot of students, a lot of families feel excluded from higher education. And that began this process of disinvestment in public higher education. Before that started in the ’60s and ’70s, the cost of going to the University of California, to any good public flagship institution was a few hundred dollars tuition and fees for a year. It was something you could work a minimum wage job in the summer and you could pay for your tuition fees. That seems like a good model. And again, that’s true in lots of other countries. And then there was this sort of progressive disinvestment in public universities, public higher education beginning sort of late ’70s and ’80s. And what public colleges found is that if they didn’t have money coming in from the state, they needed to charge more tuition. If they charge more tuition, people would still show up. And at the same time, we made debt easier get for students. And this sort of happened gradually over time. You’re right, the recession of 2008, 2009 sort of turbocharged it and continued that process, but there was a bit of a boiling frog quality. There was no one year where everything suddenly changed, but over time, the shift in public higher education just went from the public paying for it to students paying for it. And I think, I’m not clear, I think economists are not clear why the same thing happened in private higher education, but I think the two things are linked. As it became clear that people were going to pay more for public higher education, private higher education said, “Well, we need to and can do the same thing.”

MM: Right, right. So again, this is very concerning and disturbing because it leads to implications that could be pretty dire in terms of… to the extent that you care about things like equity or a civically engaged society, some of the things you talk about in your book. I’m going to ask you something more specific about the business model and have you stick with that for a minute. But I want to come back and also talk to you about some solutions. So one of the things that I think in terms of disturbing consequences is this idea that because of the higher education business model, which you described, if I got this correct from reading your book, it incentivizes schools to attract more high income students oftentimes over performance. But given that, what are we supposed to be doing about high performing low income students? You talk in your book about people as an academy having an interest and a desire to reach those students, but because of this business model, it’s complicated, right?

PT: It’s really complicated.

MM: That may be a complicated question.

PT: It is. I mean, in some ways that’s what the whole book is about. And what, it took me a decade to try to understand. I mean, when I started reporting the inequality machine a little more than a decade ago, it was what I felt was going to be the interesting story to track was the way that colleges changed the way they attracted high performing low income students. It was this moment, it was during the Obama administration, it was this moment, there was this big study that had come out that was on the front page of the New York Times by Caroline Hoxby in which he said that if you just send a packet to high performing low income students saying, “Here’s where you should apply, here’s a voucher for your waiver, for your application fees. They will go to more selective institutions and they will succeed.” And this was a big deal.There was a ton of philanthropy that got put behind it. College board got involved, but it was all premised on this idea that the problem was in the students. That the problem was that students and their families were making mistakes in how they were applying, that they just weren’t… they didn’t understand enough about college. They weren’t enough like us, the college people, and they were blowing it. And so all you needed to do was just nudge them. Let’s just remind them how much it would pay off and things would change. And that underwrote just many years of efforts by both colleges and nonprofits and the government to do things differently. And it did not work and it has not worked. And I think why it didn’t work is because that really wasn’t where the obstacles lay. There were some of that. Sometimes I think students didn’t know enough. Sometimes they didn’t have the right advising, all true. But really the obstacles were in the institutions that these selective institutions weren’t admitting these students, if they were admitting them, they weren’t giving them the aid that could make it reasonable for them to come. If they did come, they weren’t making them feel welcome and create a sense of belonging for those students. And so over 10 years after all of these institutions and government agencies got together and said, “We’re going to flood the campuses with low income students.” The reverse has happened. There are fewer low income students at highly selective institutions than there were a decade ago. And so it’s clear what has to change. What has to change is those obstacles that exist within institutions. And a lot of it I think is financial. I think that it is very difficult for institutions to admit students who can’t pay full freight. If you’ve got two students to choose from and one’s going to pay full tuition and one’s going to pay zero, it’s a lot easier to admit the one who’s going to pay full tuition. And I think a lot of those institutions are not in great financial shape. Some of them obviously are in fantastic financial shape, but a lot of them aren’t. But I think there are all of these institutional pressures that is making it hard for those colleges to do what they really want to do as individuals, which is to admit more of those low-income students. And what’s frustrating to me as a journalist and as an American is that I feel like we wasted this decade with a lot of rhetoric about what it was going to take to admit more of these low-income students and nothing really changed. And so what my hope is what can happen next, is that we really take seriously the question of how to admit more of those students because they’re out there, they’re applying, they’re just being rejected or not being given enough aid to attend.

MM: Remind me, I know you go into this in the book and you give some really good examples, particularly around how they show up and how to receive them. And that makes a big difference in how they stick because as I think you point out, the absolute worst case scenario is for someone to take on debt, go to school, and then drop out with absolutely nothing to show for it. So a little bit more, Paul, for our listeners who are mostly in higher ed and mostly care about these issues, I would say not mostly. But if they’re listening to our podcasts, they care about these issues.

PT: Yep, yep, yep.

MM: Some words of advice then, I mean the economic model is one thing, but what more can they do other than when people show up and they can create welcoming environments for them, which is big. Any other advice?

PT: Yeah, so actually I don’t think we’ve made great progress in admissions, but I do think we’ve made great progress in student support over the last decade. So I did a lot of my reporting at the University of Texas, which I think has made great strides in creating communities that are really welcoming for first generation low income students. And creating not just emotionally welcoming, but actual that make it easier for those students to get the courses they need to negotiate the university bureaucracy in ways that will get them to the finish line. So I think we’re doing a better job with a lot of that. I think for your listeners, they’re at a level of expertise where it’s useful to know exactly which programs work. And what strikes me as more of a journalist and a lay person is that it’s not rocket science. It really is about removing obstacles, institutional obstacles, and then it is about the sort of emotional, psychological work of creating belonging. And sometimes that’s like ice cream socials and pizza parties, and it’s just the stuff that when you’re 18 makes a difference and makes you feel like you belong in summer programs, that let you get oriented before the first day of school. That stuff really matters and really makes a big difference to students. I’ll just say one other thing, which is that I still feel though I do think we’re making strides in that sort of student support world, there’s still this obstacle that admissions creates, which is just numbers. If you are a Black student on a campus that has five or six or 8% of the population, student body is African-American, it’s great if there are steps taken to make you feel welcome, but you’re still going to feel like a very small minority on a large campus. And so I think that’s true for some racial minorities, but I also think it’s true for low-income students, for Pell eligible students. I also think it’s true for rural students. I think it’s true for conservative students. I think it’s true for lots of students who just don’t fit the mold of-

MM: Feel like I belong here.

PT: Exactly. And so again, that’s partly a question of how you create a sense of belonging. It’s partly a question of how you do admissions.

MM: So I want to ask you a little bit more about the big question, is college worth it? And some of it is economic, some of it is PR. It’s this public perception of the value of college. Now this question is a little bit of a personal perspective, but so much of the public discussion on the value of higher ed is about cost, logically so for all of the reasons you’ve just described. I wonder if we who sort of work in higher ed and are cheering for the students, I wonder if we are not doing a good enough job talking about the other benefits that come from a college experience, right? So in our world, so LearningWell covers a lot about re-flourishing and mental health. We cover opportunities colleges have to improve students’ lifelong well-being and their engaged learning. So I don’t want to be in these two different worlds where we’re not actually acknowledging that if we don’t crack the affordability nut, we can’t do all these other great things. But I’m going to sort of challenge you to think about it in the reverse. So how do we work those benefits to the extent that you agree with me, that come from the years that matter the most? How do we work that into this public narrative? Do people care about that stuff? Do we need to talk about it more?

PT: Yeah, my perspective on it, I think maybe different than other people’s, and I wonder, I’m not sure if it’s supported by the data that’s out there. And I keep going back to the same themes, but I think it has a lot to do with cost, that I think that when college is expensive and creates a lot of debt, it’s very difficult for students to think about it any other way than what am I going to get out of it? And there is this sort of a cultural social expectation that sort of snowballs around that. But yeah, when I went to college, I was not thinking about what my first job was going to be. I wasn’t thinking about how I was going to make money. I wasn’t thinking about what the payoff was going to be. I majored in religious studies and I’m really grateful for all of that. I think that was the right way to go through college. For me, I think that it helped me, it helped create skills that turned out to be marketable later. I’m a big believer in the humanities and the arts. That was what everyone I knew was studying. And so yeah, I think that’s a really important story to tell. And again, even beyond what I was studying, I think that the social experiences I was having, emotional, psychological, cultural experiences I was having were a big part of what was going on in those years. So I think it’s important to tell that story, but I don’t think actually that eighteen-year-olds don’t get that. I just think they were like, when we’re handing them the bill, it’s really hard to say now, “Just go goof around and have fun, major in religious studies.” Because they know they’ve got to pay that off and their families do as well. So until we lower the stakes, it’s hard for them not to think about the high stakes.

MM: Yes, I think that is such a great point. And we talk a lot about the vocationalism and why it’s out there and how we might work against it, not against getting great work. We talk a lot about purpose in work and aligning one’s work, the people go to college to get jobs, right? So we can’t dismiss that, but we’d love obviously to see a little bit more fusion of the both. So the last question, and Paul, you’re just such a fantastic journalist, I can’t help but bring politics into this discussion.

PT: Great.

MM: So you point out that political ideology influences the public’s view of higher education clearly. So state legislators obviously are now making curriculum decisions. 80 some bills have been filed to eliminate DEI offices. I guess my question is what do you make of that in terms of how this affects what you wrote the book for, which is to try to enact some change to this formula that’s not working for anyone? And I guess my follow-up to that is, to the extent that you agree, is there a way to depoliticize this so we actually get to work on the real issues? What do you think?

PT: I think it’s a really, really important question. I think it’s a hard one to talk about in higher education. I think my take on it is probably not going to be totally popular among people in higher education. So when I was reporting, not the book, but this magazine article that came out last fall, I was interested in the political angle. So I talked to some conservative thinkers and tried to understand from their point of view what was going on politically in terms of college. And what really struck me, I talked to this one guy named Rick Hess from the American Enterprise Institute, who I disagree with on all sorts of ways. But when he talked about what higher education felt like to him and people who think like him, there was a lot of overlap with how I felt and how the low-income students I talked to felt. He just saw it through an ideological lens. He was like, “The game is rigged. It’s just designed to help certain people and create… It’s just this machine that perpetuates.” And so when I talk about how it’s a machine that perpetuates things, I think about it in terms of economic class. He thinks of it in terms of ideology. He thinks that there are these institutions that are governed by liberal elites and that use higher education to perpetuate their thinking, right? I don’t agree with that in lots of ways, but I do understand where it’s coming from. And the data is really clear was I was struck and I wrote about it in that article. College campuses really are really liberal places. And so it is true that if you’re a conservative student or a conservative family, it’s hard to feel welcome in the same way that it’s hard to feel welcome for a low- income student or an underrepresented minority student on a college campus. And so the difference though is that in terms of politics is I think in some ways it’s even more salient.

I mean, it’s debatable how this is going to play out in private colleges, certainly government and political parties are finding ways to interfere, to intervene with private colleges in ways those private colleges don’t always like. But in terms of public colleges, they are supported by the public. And so the public in the United States includes as many conservatives as it does liberals. And I feel like those institutions should reflect that. And of Europe, conservative student from a small town in Iowa, and you’re going to your flagship college, you should feel welcome. You should feel like this is a place where your ideas are respected and you belong. And there’s not going to be some lingo that you’re supposed to know and you’re not going to be accused of things in terms of… based on who you voted for and where you go to church and everything else. And I think that’s often not true on our most prestigious campuses. And to go even more broad, I think that this division that has happened only in the last 10 years or so. If you look at the, I think it’s a 2012 election, I think that was Romney and Obama. And if you look at the educational divide in that election, it was not the way it is now. So college grads were voting more for Romney and non-college people were voting more for Obama, kind of what you’d expect from Democrats and Republicans, but more it was just even, right? What education you had didn’t predict how you voted. Now, it absolutely does, and that’s bad for everybody. I think it’s certainly bad for the Democratic Party to be, I think, associated with higher education and educated elites. I think it’s bad for higher education to be so associated with one party, especially if the other party comes into power. And I just think it’s bad for the country. It’s bad to divide ourselves through education. Education should not be the thing that sort of affects how you vote and how you live your life to the extent that it does right now. So what can higher education do? I think they actually more so than some of the other things we’re talking about, I think they can change that. And I think that it doesn’t mean you have to sell out your principles and you have to give in to conservative politicians, but it does mean that you should think about diversity on your campus in terms of politics as well. And make sure that if there are, especially for public campuses, that I would say for everybody, if you’re a conservative student coming to that institution, there are things that make you feel welcome. And again, that doesn’t mean censoring yourself or not saying what you believe, but I think it really is important that those students feel welcome, that those families feel represented by that institution. And I think that could be the beginning, not only of lowering the political pressure on institutions of higher education, but it could be the beginning of trying to bridge that bigger divide, which I think is a real problem for the country as well as for higher ed.

MM: And that is a great message to folks in higher ed. I’m going to push back a little bit.

PT: Please.

MM: I think there is a movement within higher ed acknowledging this because what you’re describing on its merits, a good majority, I don’t know if it’s a majority, you’re this person who deals with the numbers, would agree with you. Because on its merits, they’re absolutely, they absolutely want each student to have their knowledge grow with facts, not with ideology. My question to you is there are these sort of good faith reasons why higher ed needs to change around, quote, unquote “wokeism”. I’m asking your personal opinion. Do you not though with all your reporting over the years, see that this public opinion around the cumulative effect of professors being liberal leaning is been utilized superbly by politicians?

PT: No, no, I think it’s really true. I mean, I guess I feel like it kind of doesn’t matter. You know what I mean?

MM: Yeah, I know what you’re saying.

PT: But I think at this point, I think there’s enough blame to be placed on higher education and enough solutions that higher education itself can enact, that I mostly… though I absolutely think that’s true. And if I was speaking to Governor DeSantis or something, I would be saying, yeah, much the opposite. And I feel like, yeah, it’s not a good faith effort in all sorts of ways, but the sort of conservative pushback against higher education,.but I think it is based on real public opinion. And so it doesn’t matter that those politicians are politician-ing, right? They’re going to do that and you can’t stop them. If you’re in a state with a governor and a legislature that are pushing on you the way… So I live in Texas, the way it’s happening in Texas, the way it’s happening in Florida and lots of other places. I would encourage higher education to deal with that as best they can, except yes, that a lot of it is politics. But then accept that it’s working partly because good at it, but partly because they responding to something very real in public opinion, that is coming from a genuine sense that higher education is exclusive elitist, not for them and deal with that, right? And so if you change public opinion and create a system we used to have where people who weren’t going to college still felt really proud of higher education of their state’s higher education of their state’s, flagship school. It wasn’t that long ago that there were lots of people who weren’t going to college, who felt like college is great. That it’s not for me, but it’s great that it exists. It’s great that my kids can maybe go there or my grandkids. You want that sort of feeling, right? And so I think changes have happened, some of which higher education itself is responsible for that has made that not happen. And that I think is reversible by higher education. And so the more that they can let go of the aggravation of people taking advantage of it, and the more they can think, “Well, what can I do to change the underlying feelings among Americans?”

MM: And I love a couple of things you’ve said there that I just want to emphasize. One is to ignore this very real public opinion of higher education right now is at your peril basically in terms of higher, is what I’m hearing you saying. And the other thing that I actually love you saying, when I sort of was sticking it to you on the political question, you said it doesn’t really matter. And you know what? I think that’s a really important takeaway because it’s irritating and it’s something to deal with. But if you really want to solve this problem so that more kids that you write about in your book can fulfill the dreams that they have and the stories you wrote about, which were so beautiful, if you really want that, it’s really not the point is it?

PT: It’s not. And so just to take a step back from that, I mean, if you’re at the University of Texas, Austin, where I am, and you’re provost or dean or a president and you’re having a deal with the actual legislature, of course you got to take it seriously, right? And you’ve got to figure out when to give in, when to push back. You have to deal with politics. But for public higher education as a whole, I think the more you can ignore the frustration of those politicians taking advantage of this and start to think like, “Well, how can we change what’s going on underneath,” the better.

MM: Right, let’s solve the problem. So this has been a fantastic interview with Paul Tough. And Paul, I don’t know what more to say other than, thank you so much for being with us today, and we’ll keep in touch with all your great work.

PT: Great. Well, thanks for this opportunity. Really appreciate it.

Ian Elsner: This has been LearningWell Radio, a production of LearningWell. For more information about our work, go to learningwellmag.org. And if you like what we’re doing, leave us a rating or review. LearningWell Radio is engineered by me, Ian Elsner. Thanks so much for listening.

The Furman Advantage

Posted on by Ella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos courtesy of Furman University

Building the Advantage

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

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

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

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

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

Photos courtesy of Furman University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Global Mindset

Posted on by Ella

When Leïlah Sory was a structural engineering student at Montreal’s McGill University, she won a scholarship in 2020 to participate in a sustainability program hosted in Toronto. There, 140 students from universities throughout Canada were divided into small interdisciplinary teams exploring sustainability challenges in global communities. Sory’s cohort focused on transportation solutions for San José, Costa Rica.

For several days, they combined what they knew from their respective fields of study, guided by industry professionals and community experts, to design an electric bus infrastructure to support underserved parts of the capital city. 

“We were teamed up to develop a project based on pairing our interests with SDGs [UN Sustainable Development Goals] that are critical there. Because I study engineering, I was paired with a project that focuses on the UN Sustainable Cities and Communities goal,” says Sory. Originally from Burkina Faso, she came with an appreciation for collaborating on projects pertaining to the communities that were foreign to her. But this project brought new aspects of that lesson home. “Everyone has different backgrounds and knowledge they can contribute and learn from one another. But you also need to remember the importance of the specific community and think about what their needs really are before you start thinking about a solution straightaway.”  

When she returned to McGill, she had gained more than hands-on, real-world problem-solving experience and a digital portfolio. She came away with a new way of looking at sustainable development, a mentoring network, and a place in a budding alumni network of young people developing critical skills and passions in a world ready and waiting. 

The program that enabled Sory to focus on the challenge in Costa Rica was How to Change the World, a London-based social enterprise connecting diverse students, educators, industry professionals, and community stakeholders in experiential learning programs.The goals are as pragmatic as they are lofty: Namely, tackling some of the world’s thorniest sustainability challenges while training students in the skills of tomorrow, and introducing them to the companies that will need them. Students use the 17 UN SDGs as their north star addressing substantive global issues – poverty, transportation, education, climate change, waste management — on the local level, designed to target specific communities all around the world.

It started—as many things do that later catch fire—as a college course. Prof. Jason Blackstock started as a quantum physicist in Silicon Valley, originally from Canada, and then made his way via a master’s in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School to work on global climate and sustainability policy. In 2012 he was invited to the University College of London (UCL) to set up a new department encompassing science, technology, engineering, and policy-making, and to examine critical bits missing in current disciplines. UCL queried both employers about what recent graduates were missing when they started in the workforce, and alumni about what they wished they’d learned in their years as students.  The answers came back from across disciplines – accounting and engineering, business and computer science: there had not been nearly enough exploration of real-world problems to prepare recent graduates. Employers had to retrain them to learn how to tackle problems when there were no answers in the back of a textbook. Alumni felt the solutions required more than technical excellence in their fields; they needed collaboration with people in entirely different disciplines, an understanding of what they did – and how it would be useful in concert with their expertise.

The final ask from the Dean was not what Blackstock had expected. “When all the input came back, he told me, ‘We’ve got all this data. Can you add one course to the program that addresses that please?’ ’” Blackstock recalls. “And I told him, ‘What you want is me to teach students how to change the world in one course.’ And he was like, ‘Yes. And you should call it that.’”

UCL’s Engineering program had just completed a rebranding, and conveniently enough, the side of the building had been painted with the motto, UCL Engineering – Change the World. For the pilot course, students would be assigned project-based work challenges in highly interdisciplinary teams, combining their shared technical excellence on corporate challenges, government challenges, economic challenges…anything, really. 

Blackstock asked students, ‘What kind of things would they like to work on?’

“It was summarized best by one young British student who stood up and said, ‘Well sir, you old people broke the planet. We’d like to know how to fix it, please.” 

In 2014, the initially 500-student program began tackling stubborn sustainability challenges for communities around the world. It flourished for several years, and in 2016 it became a required capstone for over a dozen engineering and business degree programs. By then word had spread through conferences and summits to a wider horizon of universities, and the requests began to trickle in: Could you do one for us?

In 2019, Blackstock spun the program out of UCL as an independent social enterprise, partnering with global entrepreneur Alana Heath, who’d spent a decade mobilizing businesses as a force for good across the financial inclusion, energy access and impact investing sectors. In their newly formed enterprise, partnerships were developed with communities, professionals, and educators who could bring object lessons to life.

​“We’d officially launched,” recalls Heath. “It was February 2020, and we had almost 150 students from more than a dozen Canadian universities gathered in Toronto for a fantastic in-person program. And when the program finished, we’d run this incredible experience, and basically flew back into lockdown.” The response from participants and stakeholders was overwhelmingly positive. But the model had to shift immediately. “We had a bunch of deans very excited about what we’d done, getting rave reviews and feedback from their students. And they said to us, ‘We’re all online right now. Can you figure out how to do what you just did in person, virtually? Our students really need these types of opportunities.’” 

“Companies need both current employees and a future talent pipeline who are able to apply a sustainability lens to their work.”

“Need” is an apt word. In January 2023, new research released by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) examined some of the employee-talent obstacles that stand in the way of global companies reaching their sustainability goals. From 2017 to 2022, the number of large companies setting science-based targets grew by 36 times, to over 4,200 companies. But only 17 percent are on target to meet those goals. BCG partnered with Microsoft to research the experience of 15 companies trying to reach their goals, a project that included polling sustainability leaders at a wider selection of companies. 

Responses showed that companies are relying heavily on their internal talent. Of sustainability leaders surveyed, 68 percent are “homegrown” (hired from within the company), while just 32 percent are brought in from the outside. Sixty percent of people on sustainability teams say they were not hired for their sustainability expertise; 32 percent consider themselves an expert in another field, while 28 percent did not consider themselves an expert in any field.

​“There’s a massive sustainability skills gap within industries and corporations today,” says Blackstock. “Businesses are hungry for talent, and hungry to upskill and develop their employees to understand how to apply a sustainability lens. That’s the only way companies can hit the sustainability targets they’ve set – and that regulations are increasingly requiring them to hit.”

​The most common corporate-sustainability pitfall Blackstock hears about is having the whole effort rest on one individual or department instead of having knowledge, and accountability, spread throughout multiple departments. “It’s a great way to fail ethically, having one sustainability officer burdened with the success of something no one else understands or acts upon. But more than 75% of corporate leaders today expect every job will have a sustainability component by 2050,” Blackstock says. “That’s why we support the idea that every employee should have a sustainability lens to their work.”

To support companies with this challenge, How to Change the World is now developing programs that combine students from higher ed with working early career professionals from the companies. This provides businesses with a way of upskilling their existing workforce, investing in their future talent pipeline, and generating innovative ideas that can help them reach their sustainability targets – and ideally develop new sustainable products and services along the way.

This model has strong benefits for higher ed, Blackstock says, because the students get to learn and engage directly with the companies they want to go work for. To support this connection, How to Change the World has also started running Careers Nights, bringing program alumni together with sustainability professionals and leaders and interested companies. Two of the most common questions he gets from participants who feel their career-view expanding after an eye-opening project: How can I get a job with a sustainability angle? And, What’s the role of private industry here?

“That’s generating just a huge amount of interest, sort of a built-in recruiting process. It’s integrated as a follow-on from our boot camps and courses to provide a bridge between higher ed and the future of sustainable work,” says Heath.

“If you can bring higher ed to the table with the students bringing in new ideas, employers can pick the best-fit ones to hire,” she says. “It’s that mix of value that can significantly benefit businesses.”

Post-covid, the virtual programs that grew to take the place of in-person ones had the same practical problem-solving focus through the lens of sustainability. Blackstock initially worried that remote programs wouldn’t pack the same punch as they did in person. But in fact, he found that they had all that and more. 

“It proved to be as good, and in some ways better than, our in-person experiences. We didn’t try to replicate the in-person ones. We really asked ourselves, ‘What’s different about virtual? How can we access extra benefits and still retain the human connection and real-life problems?’” he says. “You’re not going to get the hugs, but whole new virtual collaboration skills can bloom, and that’s going to be needed in the future, too.”

“I chose to join How to Change the World exactly because I was seeking a connection to the real world. We need to be mindful of never losing track of the big picture.”

As How to Change the World continued to grow, the target audience of their programs was also expanding. Students were being trained in the same creative questioning and community-oriented approach, with a growing understanding of the sustainability skills needed for the solutions, as well as the careers they wanted to step into. Companies were increasingly interested, very much in need of the types of skilled students stepping out of these programs. Educators were interested in learning too; foundational lessons in guiding experiential learning ‘at scale’ is a valuable form of professional development, while increasing knowledge base in sustainability for themselves as well. 

​Francesco Ambrogi is a teaching fellow in mechanical engineering at Queen’s University in Ontario. When he was a second-year PhD there, he received a departmental email looking for engineers to volunteer as teaching associates for university students participating in a How to Change the World bootcamp. He signed up, thinking, ‘I like teaching, I’d love to get more experience and learn about this.’ Since then, he’s become a teaching member and course lead for many How to Change the World programs, and calls it tremendously influential in his development as a professor. 

​“It’s had a huge effect on my career. I’ve taken a lot of what I learn from How To Change The World and implemented it in my own classes,” Ambrogi says. He cites the skillful use of virtual resources, so important for how students learn today, from short-form video and online resources to synchronous, collaborative virtual discussions with industry leaders and visionaries, a wider range of whom are accessible to How to Change the World in virtual format than in-person programs. He reserves the most praise for the multidisciplinary approach.

“It forces students to go out of their little comfort zone, which is mainly engineering, and expands a discussion with someone from business school and law school and the biological sciences, which I think is the key to actually solving any real problems these days,” says Ambrogi. “Otherwise, you could go through four years of undergraduate studies never having the opportunity to brainstorm with class members in other fields. You iterate the process, and the new ideas are kind of raw, but it’s exactly through this kind of repeated process that the solution comes up.”

​The lens of sustainability, he admits, wasn’t one that had been a focus in his studies, something he’s grateful to have changed.

​“I never heard much about it, to be honest. When you’re working on your PhD you’re so focused on your small tiny problem. My research area is very abstract, computer simulations of fluid flows, and can be very isolated,” he says. “So I chose to join How to Change the World exactly because I was seeking a connection to the real world. We need to be mindful of never losing track of the big picture. We need to go in that direction now more than ever, because of climate change and pollution and the economy, and at the end of the day, we’re teaching students how to solve problems. You never know what the course might spark in their mind, what they might be able to do.”

A few months ago, Blackstock and Heath received a message through LinkedIn from a student who’d participated in a 2021 bootcamp. She’d wanted to reach out and let them know How to Change the World had changed her life. The University of British Columbia student, Anastasia Kiku, had worked on a coastal community challenge for Lagos. Now, she was co-founder of a startup providing reusable containers for take-out food service and had just been named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30. 

“The most influential part of the program for me was an introduction to systems thinking,” says Kiku, of reusables.com. “There were so many lasting lessons. Before you implement something, you really have to work within the local context to understand what the core problems are. You can’t assume what the answer is. And to address one area, like customer behavior change, you have to move one piece of the puzzle at a time, instead of closing your eyes and creating policy.” 

To her, the real value of the program is creating an excellent experience by bridging academic ideas with very tangible problems, in terms of both employability and inspiration. 

​“It’s all about that transformational experience for the student, and how we help create it,” Blackstock says. “How do we make an educational experience about more than how to do math or thermodynamics? Okay, checkmark, you’ve learned the basics. But if you don’t know how to connect it, and it hasn’t been given meaning and purpose, you’ve missed a piece. You can always go back and learn bits of math you missed. But it’s harder to relearn purpose.”

New survey shows stop-out rates remain steady; emotional stress, mental health are main drivers

Posted on by Ella

A new survey report from the Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education study shows that the number of students considering leaving their post-secondary positions has remained about the same as last year and that emotional stress and personal mental health continue to top the list of drivers, just ahead of cost. The survey also showed that Black and Hispanic students are more likely than their White peers to report they have considered leaving school (Hispanic (42%) and Black (40%) compared to White (31%)). 

Stephanie Marken, the senior partner of Gallup’s education division and author of the report, says the findings within the more than 14,000-person survey are particularly instructive for colleges and universities keeping a watchful eye on both overall retention and efforts to increase enrollment for underrepresented groups.

“One of the most interesting findings from my perspective is that people are about as likely as they were last year to consider stopping out in general, about 1 in 3,” said Marken, referring to data in the 2023 Lumina-Gallup survey.  The report notes that postsecondary enrollment, although up slightly due to increases for community college and short-term credential programs, have been steadily declining for the past four years. The fact that the number of those considering stopping out has also remained steady, indicates initial losses due to the pandemic may be more of a trend than a disruption.   

“This is alarming on a number of levels,” said Marken. “We know that from a social mobility perspective, from an economic perspective, people who complete a college degree are far more likely to be thriving in their lives. Whether it’s their career, their financial future, or their general wellbeing. The group that is even more disadvantaged is the “some college, no degree” cohort (those who stop out and never come back) who have huge amounts of student loans and nothing to show for it.” 

The report finds that consideration (of leaving) among Blacks and Hispanics has improved slightly but is still higher than among their White peers.  Marken sees the losses among this group as even more problematic when considering the outsized gain disadvantaged groups, including women, receive from a college degree.  

“We know that from a social mobility perspective, from an economic perspective, people who complete a college degree are far more likely to be thriving in their lives.“

“When we think about people who have been historically marginalized in our workplaces, in our communities, in our institutions, as Black and Hispanic individuals have been, we see that the lift those individuals experience is significant when it comes to receiving a college education,” she said.  “They enter the workplace in a very different situation from a pay perspective, even more so than their white peers.”  

Marken says the consistency among all racial/ethnic groups about the primary reasons for considering leaving school (emotional stress, mental health) is particularly concerning. 

“The fact that emotional stress and personal mental health are universal reasons (for consideration of leaving) and have remained as high as they are is a good reminder that all students are struggling and the core foundational need to stay enrolled is to have a strong sense of wellbeing,” she said. “We know that for Black and Hispanic students, because more of them are considering stopping out, it’s a really high need within those communities.”  

The recent survey is the latest in a series within the Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education study.  Begun in 2020, the research first looked at the learning experiences of enrolled students amidst the pandemic but expanded to include non-enrolled individuals or those who have left college in an effort to understand what drove them to opt-out or stop out.  Marken says learning more about these dynamics will help colleges and universities better understand how to get them back. 

“This is a good reminder that the core foundational need to stay enrolled is to have a strong sense of wellbeing.”

The latest report surveyed 6,015 currently enrolled students, about 5,012 Us adults who were previously enrolled in an education program after high school but had not completed a degree, and 3,005 adults who never enrolled in higher education.  The survey showed that about six in 10 Black and Hispanic unenrolled U.S. adults report they have considered enrolling in the past two years and that Certificate and Associate programs are most attractive to Black and Hispanic Americans.  

Marken sees this as good news and tracks it to 2019 Gallup research that showed that 66% of Hispanics and 65% of Blacks said that a college education was very important compared to just 44% of Whites.  

“All of this research is really aimed at figuring out how do we keep more of these individuals within higher education – those who want to be in higher ed and who perceive it to be a highly valuable experience — so they don’t stop out temporarily or permanently.”

Filling the Research Gap on Student Health and Wellbeing

Posted on by Ella

Last August, as Kent State University students were busy reconnecting with friends and settling into another year of college, professors John Gunstad and Karin Coifman were launching a research initiative that could improve their wellbeing and that of the thousands of students who come after them. The new Student Life Study is the largest and most ambitious investigation into the health and wellbeing of college students ever conducted. It will collect a high-dimensional data set on a group of 10,000 students and follow them throughout their lifetimes, providing real-time data on student mental and physical health. Gunstad and Coifman believe a study of this magnitude will eventually identify best-practice interventions, provide immediate access to health and wellness resources, re-structure university programming and decision-making, and even predict outcomes after graduation. 

“Our goal is to create a comprehensive understanding of what it’s like to be a modern-day college student in order to help them live happier and healthier lives,” said Dr. Gunstad. 

Longitudinal, population-scale research projects, like the Harvard Study of Adult Development, can provide a treasure trove of data as they follow individuals over the course of their lifetimes. But no studies of this scope and intensity have ever focused on college students. Dr. Karin Coifman is a clinical psychologist whose research focuses on following people over extended periods of time, particularly through stages of stress—including normative, developmental stressors like the transition into college. Dr. John Gunstad is a clinical neurologist interested in tracking changes in the brain over the course of a lifetime. Their combined expertise is now fully dedicated to helping improve the overall wellbeing of college students by looking at all the contributing factors – including mental and physical health, social belonging, academic and career success and equity and inclusion. 

An unmet need

The Student Life Study’s abstract states that “Current students represent a unique generation, the first raised entirely within the broader context of social media. Presently, U.S. colleges and universities do not have adequate resources to address this increased demand and existing surveillance and broad-scope interventional tools are limited. The Kent State Student Life Study (SLS) is designed to investigate complex and dynamical developmental shifts in psychological health and functioning in this generation of college students.” By understanding the unique social, cultural, and psychological challenges faced by these students, Dr. Coifman and Dr. Gunstad believe that universities can better accommodate their needs and support their development. 

A population-scale study of this magnitude and with this intensity of measurement has never been conducted on college students.

As Dr. Coifman explains, “college is a developmental period when the bad habits that drive many health concerns later in life are formed. There’s a shift that happens when kids leave home and come onto the college campus. They come with their history. They come with their risk. They come with their experiences and certainly patterns of behavior. But those things dynamically shift during the college years, and we don’t yet understand exactly how that occurs—which means we’re not very good at intervening.” 

Both Dr. Gunstad and Dr. Coifman speak passionately about the research methodology and the rigor of the study. The Student Life Study aims to gather data on a sample of 10,000 college students—not only while they are on campus, but after graduation and throughout their lives. The research methods range from surveys and video responses to physical health assessments, the combination of which is itself precedent setting. The model of the study involves both tracking behaviors and testing methods of intervention, discovering what works in real time. When something works, the researchers will make it available without delay—an intervention found to be effective will be available to all students and continuously refined. 

The process of data collection is equally rigorous, agile and ever evolving. “To capture developmental processes, you have to use a dynamic model for research,” Dr. Coifman says. “It’s often called a measurement burst framework, where you do these fits of intense measurement, and then you wait, and then you do them again, and then you wait and repeat. We’re doing that within a platform that’s really comfortable for this population. We rely on a lot of remote assessment, such as surveys delivered through the smartphone, as well as a process called ecological momentary assessment, a technique that allows researchers to observe behaviors and experiences in real time.”

In the Student Life Study, this assessment takes place during one week of each semester, when students will report their behaviors and experiences 5 times a day for a period of 7 days. “We’ve paired these periods of ecological momentary assessment with passive biosensing,” Dr. Coifman explains. This means hardware and software integration, pairing survey data with health data collected by a Garmin device such as a Fitbit or Apple watch. 

The study has “enormous scientific potential,” Dr. Coifman explains, in part due to the scope and methods of data collection. A population-scale study of this magnitude and with this intensity of measurement has never been conducted on college students. It allows the researchers to make better, more nuanced scientific inferences. “There are lots of population-scale studies following individuals over the course of their lifetimes, but the intensity of measurement is gathering data maybe once or twice a year. We are doing continuous, intensive sampling, and we’re also collecting biological data that other samples haven’t.” 

Phase 1 of the study began last fall and involves measuring the health, social behavior and academic performance of 10,000 college students during their time on campus. Phase 2 will follow these same students after graduation, studying how their physical health, mental and emotional wellbeing, social and professional lives play out over the course of their lifetimes. The researchers will use information gathered in both phases to identify predictors of successful outcomes, develop effective interventions for issues like substance abuse or mental health concerns, and understand how students’ college years affect the rest of their lives. 

The ultimate goal of the Student Life Study is to work with university administrators and decision-makers at Kent State and beyond to implement resources and best practices based on the findings of the study.

“We’re trying to capture all domains of operations,” Dr. Coifman says. “We are, of course, interested in psychological states, but we’re also interested in basic biological functions. We want to know how people are sleeping, how they’re eating, how they’re moving; what their social networks look like and how they experience social connection.” Additionally, the researchers will collect data on difficult experiences in students’ lives—as well as how they think about those experiences, and how different ways of thinking about difficult experiences affect life outcomes. At the end of every semester, students complete a survey detailing the primary stressors they encountered, as well as completing a video prompt where they discuss those sources of stress. They use the same method to record positive experiences and achievements. The video offers a platform for narrative response and, importantly, a window into the way students think. 

“Often what people say is much less useful for predicting outcomes than how they say it,” Dr. Coifman explains, adding that “subtle things, like how people use words or how the syntax moves in their phrasing” can help researchers glean qualitative information about how they are processing positive or negative events and emotions. Beneath the content of what students say, the psychology of how they feel about what they are saying opens another world of interpretation. 

With this ambitious undertaking comes a tremendous potential for meaningful change. The ultimate goal of the study is to work with university administrators and decision-makers at Kent State and beyond to implement resources and best practices based on the findings of the study. Dr. Gunstad emphasizes that helping universities reallocate their resources to better serve students in an important benefit. “Universities have limited funds for programming to help students succeed,” he says, noting that much of that funding is misallocated to interventions whose efficacy is unproven. “If we can help universities be smart about how they use those funds, we can create better outcomes for students.”

The Student Life Study is funded by a competitive “Game Changer” award sponsored by the Division of Research and Economic Development at Kent State University, which provides internal pilot funds to research projects at the university. When Phase 1 launched in August of 2023, the Student Life Study had amassed around $450,000 in funding to cover the first two years of the study. Dr. Coifman and Dr. Gunstad are grateful for the university’s investment into the program, and they agree that Kent State is the ideal setting for an initiative of this size, scope and potential outcome. 

With nearly 35,000 students across 8 campuses, the university’s geographic spread includes both rural and urban campuses in Ohio. Additionally, more than a third of Kent State students are first-generation college students, and a longitudinal study could have meaningful implications for that population of students. “These are individuals who are the first in their families to make their way into college,” Dr. Gunstad says. “Being able to capture information on that group is critically valuable to their development, and also valuable to us as a country and a society.” 

Dr. Gunstad also points out that past longitudinal and life course studies have typically looked at populations on the east and west coasts. Kent State’s midwestern location means that the study will fill in what past research has missed: “flyover country,” as Dr. Gunstad affectionately puts it. 

Additionally, Dr. Coifman emphasizes institutional support as a crucial element to the study’s success. “The potential of the study is in the commitment of this institution to this project. We are reaping the tremendous benefit of many institutional resources. I suspect that lots of institutions are very concerned with the fact that it’s incredibly hard to meet the needs of students today, and they simply have inadequate funding available to do it. The gap between the need and the resources is just getting wider and wider,” she says. Institutional investment into the Student Life Study may eventually mean that those limited resources can be reallocated to better serve students at colleges and universities across the country.

To learn more about the Kent State University Student Life Study, visit https://www.kent.edu/student-life-study. 

Identity, Work, and Purpose

Posted on by Ella

Clayton Spencer served as the President of Bates College from 2012 to 2023. A lawyer by training, Clayton was the vice president for policy at Harvard for seven years, and she has also served as chief education counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources.

“Purpose in Work and Life” by Clayton Spencer first appeared in Virtues and Vocations: Spring 2024.

Thinking About Work

When I arrived in Lewiston, Maine in the summer of 2012 to become the eighth president of Bates College, I was captivated by its grand landscape of manufacturing. Enormous mill buildings, most now quiet, line the city’s river and canals, their perfect rectangular forms, huge courses of impeccable brickwork, and row upon row of tall, symmetrical windows embodying the very essence of the industry they made possible. The number and sheer scale of these buildings speak to the might of Lewiston and its sister city Auburn as a textile and shoe manufacturing hub well into the twentieth century. The beauty and precision with which these structures were crafted reflect “industry” in a different sense—namely, the diligence and skill of the human beings who built the mills and ultimately worked within their walls.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had landed myself in a world whose deep logic involved “work.” Work as a beacon of hope for generations of French-speaking Canadians who saw in the mills of Maine the promise of a paycheck and a means to build new lives. Work as a source of vibrancy and community in a new country. Work in its most concrete form—making things.

Yet, I was charged with the seemingly cerebral task of leading an excellent undergraduate college devoted to the liberal arts and justly proud of its strong academic culture. How, then, was I to think about the work of the liberal arts in this particular setting? To be sure, a liberal arts education is not primarily about making things, but might it, in fact, involve making?

I found a compelling starting point in the words of Peter Gomes—Harvard professor, theologian, long-time minister of the university’s Memorial Church, and, as it happens, a Bates graduate. He died in 2011, after forty years spent sharing his wisdom with successive generations of Harvard undergraduates. About the aims of a Harvard education, he famously said: “We put the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”1 According to Gomes, we do this by helping students figure out what kind of life they wish to lead: “What is my purpose? How can my life be better? How can I help to make a better world? These are the questions worth asking, and college is one of the few places that allows you, even requires you, to do so.”2

The Logic of Purposeful Work

If motivating and equipping our students to live lives of meaning and contribution is a core purpose of the liberal arts, then work is central to the project. Whatever a person’s particular interests, choices, or constraints, most people wish to figure out a way to stay healthy and happy, to nourish human connection, and to leave the world—or at least their corner of it—better than they found it. For many people, this means, among other things, finding work that contributes to an overall sense of fulfillment, while also furnishing the practical and financial means to sustain a life.

The most important dimension of the Purposeful Work approach is the sense of agency and confidence it fosters in students.

Which is why preparing students for work and career should not be—as it has been for far too long at many excellent colleges and universities—an afterthought relegated to the waning months of senior year. (Remember the binders of banking jobs?) Nor can it be addressed by tactics alone—online hiring platforms, access to alumni networks, job shadows, internships, or industry info sessions. These practical tools are important, but only as part of a framework that locates questions about work where they belong—at the center, not on the outskirts, of the project of the liberal arts.

Purposeful work, as we came to think about it at Bates, is not a kind of work. It is not found “out there” inherent in a particular type of job or career. It can be paid or unpaid, within a family or for an outside organization, part-time or full-time, manual or intellectual, artistic or managerial. It is not “do-gooder” work, though for some individuals it might be. Rather, purposeful work is about aligning who you are with what you do and how you choose to move through the world.

Because life is a journey and we evolve over time, even as the world and ourworlds also evolve, the answers to the question of how we wish to live our lives change over the lifespan. But the essence of the exercise—learning to navigate the dynamic relationship between “self” and “world”—remains the core pursuit.

In a liberal arts setting, we give our students a great deal of choice about which courses they will take, what they will major in, and how they will populate their college experience outside the classroom. We also do our best to give them the tools to approach their choices with self-awareness, diligence, and discernment so that they can carve out a path, in college, first, and ultimately in life, that will be authentically their own.

The concept and methodology of the Purposeful Work program are built on these core principles. It is not, for instance, about exhorting students to “find their passion.” Just as purpose is not found “out there” inherent in certain types of work and not in others, it also does not typically reside within a person as a pre-existing passion waiting to be liberated. Unless, perhaps, you are Albert Einstein, or Toni Morrison, or Yo-Yo Ma.

For most ordinary mortals, purpose tends to emerge in the “doing.” This is how Richard Courtemanche, a handsewer in one of the shoe factories of Lewiston, described his purposeful work.

An average handsew[er], back in those days, in the ’60s, would probably do about twenty pairs a day. A good handsewer would do around thirty pairs a day, as he was considered to be fast.

A real fast guy, we’re talking, you know . . . thirty-five to forty pairs. I would do around sixty pairs a day, for many years. Myself and Vern, Vernon Daigle, locally, were probably the fastest handsewers. That was unheard of, what we could do. We did it because it was, it came natural, what other people would do, unnatural. So he was a good man. I learned from him, because he used to handsew quite a few years before me. I used to watch, and I’d say, I can do the same thing. And then from there I picked up the tricks that my dad used to show me, then I picked up some others, then after that, I loved it.3

Richard Courtemanche did not start with a passion for shoemaking that he unleashed on the world. Rather he waded in, he paid attention, he learned the skills, and then along the way he discovered that he was really good at stitching shoes. Only “after that,” did he come to love his work. In other words, the passion did not precede the engagement with work, it was the other way around.

Learning a set of skills or a base of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of identity formation, of becoming fully human. I can sew shoes. This is what I do. This is who I am. I am proud of it. “Myself and Vern . . . . That was unheard of, what we could do.”

For our students, most of whom have a luxury of choice that Richard Courtemanche could only dream of, purpose emerges (or not) as you try different things and get your hands dirty. But this only happens if exploration is paired with reflection. The Purposeful Work team at Bates works with students beginning in first-year orientation to ease them into the notion that the starting point for making life choices is understanding who you are and what matters to you. The staff use various tools and strategies to help students gain an awareness of their interests, strengths, and values—what brings them joy, what kind of things they know they are good at, where they are, or are not, confident in their abilities, what sorts of things they might like to try, and how much risk are they willing to take, to name a few examples.

Unquestionably, the most important dimension of the Purposeful Work approach is the sense of agency and confidence it fosters in students as they make their way through various cycles of exploration, reflection, and adaptation. These elements are specific and concrete, and students internalize the process. Based on what you’ve figured out about yourself, what kinds of work would you like to explore? Once in an internship or a job shadow, how was the experience for you, and do you wish to pursue it further? If it feels like the right field, but the wrong role, you refine your choice for your next opportunity. If the experience does not feel right at all, you move on, consciously rejecting pathways that do not align.

Learning a set of skills or a base of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of identity formation, of becoming fully human.

Not only is the Purposeful Work program built on the core values of the liberal arts, it also reinforces them. The emphasis on self-knowledge as the starting point, and the structured approaches used to develop it, puts students in the habit of making conscious choices about many aspects of their college experience—whether in the classes they choose, the activities they jump into, or the leadership responsibilities they take on. Students begin to think of their college experience itself as their “purposeful work” during the undergraduate years, even as they look toward how they will find it after graduation.4

This well-scaffolded approach is proving to be powerful for all students. It is particularly important, however, for students who may be the first in their families to go to college or have not had much exposure to a broad range of careers. From the beginning, Bates conceived of the Purposeful Work program as an important piece of its equity promise to all students. Bates is committed to providing broad access to the education it offers, and it has become much more intentional about supporting all students for academic success and full participation in the college experience. Purposeful Work adds another piece of the puzzle. A well-thought-out and well-executed approach to helping students bridge from college to work and career ensures that all students—not only those whose parents are able to connect them to networks of opportunity—have the skills and confidence to seek out career opportunities commensurate in scope and ambition with the education they have received.

Testing Our Assumptions

Bates developed its Purposeful Work program based on the intrinsic logic of a liberal arts education. Yet, the link between finding purpose in work and overall fulfillment resonates far beyond a particular set of colleges and universities and the students who attend them.

In the fall of 2018, Bates partnered with the Gallup organization to conduct a survey of nationally representative college graduates, of varying ages, career stages, and types of higher education experience, to examine how they think about purpose and work.5 Since the mid 20th-century, Gallup has explored global measures of well-being in terms of five interrelated elements: purpose well-being, social well-being, financial well-being, community well-being, and physical well-being. In examining the relationships among these, Gallup identified purpose (defined as liking what you do every day and learning or doing something interesting each day) as the most important element given its disproportionate impact on one’s overall well-being.

The Bates/Gallup study was designed to build on the existing research related to purpose well-being by specifically examining the extent to which college graduates seek purpose in their work. The findings were striking. Eighty percent of college graduates say that it is very important (37%) or extremely important (43%) to derive a sense of purpose from their work. Yet less than half succeed in finding purposeful work, and purposeful work was found to be particularly important to the younger workforce. Reflection and self-understanding are central to finding purpose—graduates who align their work with their interests, values, and strengths are three times more likely to experience high purpose than those with low levels of reflection. Finally, graduates with high purpose in work are almost ten times more likely to have high overall well-being. Only 6% of those who have low levels of purpose in their work have high levels of well-being, whereas fully 59% of those with high purpose in work have high well-being.

I offer this study not as the definitive word on a topic as deep and rich as “purpose.” Rather, I mean to describe the impulse we had at Bates, as we moved forward in developing the Purposeful Work program, to pressure-test our assumptions with a broader audience not necessarily steeped in the goals and methods of a liberal arts education.

Concluding Thoughts

We live in a world defined increasingly by complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change, where a college graduate can expect to have multiple distinct jobs before the age of 50. It is no longer sufficient or even plausible, therefore, to prepare our students for work or career based on the availability of a particular kind of first job, or on the notion of “career” as a stable and well-defined pathway through life. Instead, the ability to sustain work over a lifetime will increasingly depend on individual agency that combines the content knowledge, cognitive skills, and interpersonal abilities required for employment with a mindset of informed self-determination and adaptability.

Far from being irrelevant to preparing students for work and career, these are precisely the strengths that a liberal arts education brings to the table.

The Purposeful Work program at Bates reflects the efforts and contributions of many, including faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, and outside experts. It began with an idea and generative discussions on campus, followed by the appointment of the “Purposeful Work Working Group” that crafted its report and recommendations in 2013-14, further program development led by a small design team reporting to the President, and the creation of the Center for Purposeful Work in the fall of 2018.

To find out more about the Bates Center for Purposeful Work, visit https://www.bates.edu/purposeful-work.

To learn about other efforts across higher education focused on the education of the whole person for growth and transformation, visit https://thecte.org.

Notes

  1. Gomes, Peter, Never Give Up! And Other Sermons Preached at Harvard, 2008–2010, ed. Cynthia Wight Rossano, Cambridge Memorial Church, Harvard University, 2011, p. 21.
  2. Ibid., p. 41.
  3. Richard Courtemanche, “Portraits and Voices: Shoemaking Skills of Generations,” Exhibition, Museum L-A, Lewiston, Maine (2012).
  4. Almost half of Bates faculty have formally integrated aspects of Purposeful Work into their classes, and all Bates students at this point engage with the program over the course of their college, many in multiple ways.
  5. The final report of the Bates/Gallup survey may be found in full here: bates.edu/purposeful-work.

Looking for meaning in college? Try discussing a great book.

Posted on by Ella

Andrew Delbanco has argued that, as innovations go, the American university is a pretty distinctive one. Right up there with abstract impressionism and fast food.

But Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, worries that higher education has increasingly moved away from one of its core obligations: to help students think deeply and collectively about life’s most profound questions. 

Instead, he says, “colleges and universities — without quite saying so — have begun to think of themselves more and more as vocational training institutions.”

The fate of higher education has long captivated Delbanco, author of the 2012 book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. And to be fair, as he notes in College, folks have been complaining about American higher education pretty much as long as it’s been around. 

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband that professors too often shirked their teaching duties; the state of education, she said, had never been more dire.

Still, for all the hand-wringing, colleges and universities in the US have been distinguished by their willingness to allow students to explore various interests, rather than — as in many other countries — immediately hone in on a very specific course of study. It’s an environment where folks from Condoleezza Rice to Bill Bradley have encountered people and ideas that changed their lives.

“Young people want an experience of self-discovery,” says Delbanco. “They want to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. And it’s a betrayal of the American promise to expect young people to know exactly what they want to do, what they’re fit for, and what their life is going to look like at the age of 17 or 18.”

Delbanco has spent more than 40 years as a professor, penned books on everything from Herman Melville to the Puritans, and received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. But he says he’s not concerned that fewer students now major in the humanities. Nor is he surprised that young people are drawn to science and technology.

What does worry him is that while a student is pursuing a degree, they “should be having an experience in college that allows for some kind of reflection, that allows for learning… Learning how to listen to other people with different points of view. Learning the difference between an argument and an opinion. Learning that debating with somebody is not the same thing as fighting with that person. And the classroom where those lessons are most likely to be learned is the humanities classroom.”

But as college sticker prices have skyrocketed, haven’t the humanities become an increasingly unaffordable luxury? No, Delbanco argues. “One of the things that employers are telling [colleges and universities] is: We want people who can actually work together with people with whom they disagree. We want people who understand that there are multiple perspectives on the world.” 

“It’s a betrayal of the American promise to expect young people to know exactly what they want to do, what they’re fit for, and what their life is going to look like at the age of 17 or 18.”

“In an increasingly diverse society, in an increasingly global economy, we don’t only want people who can code or do actuary tables. We want people who can work productively with other human beings, and who can think creatively.” 

“And as the humanities majors have been emptying out, general education becomes all the more important. Because it’s going to be the only place where students will have an experience of reading a great novel or seeing a Shakespeare play or grappling with a philosophical concept.”

Beyond that, as institutions diversify, there are more opportunities for students to splinter into identity-based groups and organizations. Foundational humanities classes provide a place to transcend those differences, a place where everyone comes together around a common text.

Over the last few years, a wave of schools have brought back core courses designed to engage with questions around meaning and purpose. In 2020, for example, Stanford instituted a requirement for first-year students: Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). The program echoed a century-old compulsory course introduced at Stanford in the 1920s, amidst the backdrop of global and national upheaval (post-WWI realignments, women’s newfound right to vote, and an enormous surge in foreign-born Americans).

“An educational model that leaves no room for a core curriculum shaped by the demands of 21st-century democracies leaves students woefully ill equipped for dealing with disagreements,” Stanford’s Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein recently noted in The New York Times.

In his role as president of The Teagle Foundation, Delbanco has sought to support these sorts of efforts around the country — at Stanford, Vanderbilt, Purdue, and nearly sixty other schools. It’s worth keeping an eye on, he says, “because I think this could be the beginning of a real change.”

Melinda Zook, a history professor who leads the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program at Purdue, agrees. “This should have always been the job of the liberal arts… To me, the point of college is to challenge you.”

The Cornerstone Program requires that first-year students — who, at Purdue, often plan to major in engineering, computer science, or business — take a sequence of two courses on transformative texts. There are usually about 30 students in each class, and texts can range across time and place, from Plato to Frederick Douglass to Virginia Woolf. 

But Zook emphasizes that great texts only come alive in the hands of great teachers. So when she preps professors — who are drawn from the ranks of liberal arts faculty — she tells them to “create the class you always wanted to teach. So it gives them a lot of flexibility, and you know it’s going to fill up. It fills every time.” 

Zook notes that while technical knowledge can become outdated, certain skills never will, like learning how to think, communicate, and interact with a wide range of people. One day, she recalls, “I’m walking back to the parking garage, and I bump into one of our basketball players, who you cannot miss because he’s so tall. And he’s in transformative texts. And he says to me: ‘who would have thought Plato would have been so relevant?’”

“We in the liberal arts! We thought of that,” she tells me, laughing.

But Purdue’s program has a significant, additional upside, says Zook. It creates a space in which a faculty member gets to know a small group of students. “One of the things that we do at Cornerstone is we use it as sort of a hub, where we have eyes on the students. We know their names. We know how they’re doing. And none of their other classes do, because they’re huge.”

Zook notes that, while there was a mental health crisis among students prior to the pandemic, it has gotten much worse. And building strong relationships with faculty early on can be crucial to getting students the support they need.

In Delbanco’s view, a small class that tackles big questions around a text or piece of art “can become a safe space where you can trust the teacher to teach you like a person… The teacher is not in the room fundamentally because he or she wants to show off how much they know about a given subject. They’re not in the room on behalf of the discipline. They’re in the room on behalf of the students.”

The Teagle Foundation now seeks to envelop even younger people in this effort to read great authors and ask big questions. Their “Knowledge for Freedom” program offers grants to colleges to create on-campus, humanities-focused programs for local, low-income high school students. And there are now more than 30 such programs around the country.

Delbanco sees the program changing kids’ lives. And, he says, it’s a way of “reminding them that when you go to college, you should expect this kind of experience. You should be able to ask yourself questions about justice, about how society should be organized, about what kind of life I want to lead.”