Author: Mollie Ames

Hear Their Voices

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Nichole Hastings called her experience navigating college a “trial by fire.”

As a student with cerebral palsy and autism, she found the small, private institution she chose near home in upstate New York didn’t have a background supporting learners with her disabilities. As a result, she said, her time in school often involved “more advocacy than education.” It was a constant job to arrange and maintain the systems she needed to graduate — to strike a balance between necessary accommodations and room for independence. 

More than 20 years after Hastings graduated, the barriers to getting to and through higher education for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities persist. She now helps run a public speaking course to prepare and promote the voices of current students who, like her, beat the odds and made it to college. The class from the Westchester Institute for Human Development (WIHD) in New York aims to make the path to post-secondary programs more visible and accessible to students of all abilities by elevating real-life stories, while equipping those who tell them with valuable communication and advocacy skills.

Mariela Adams, a program manager at WIHD, which provides resources to people with intellectual disabilities at all life stages, developed the public speaking course, inspired in large part by her experience caring for a son who is nonverbal due to profound autism. 

Her son’s inability to vocalize what it’s like living with his disability has made Adams sensitive to the importance of hearing from those who can. “When I’m working with students,” she said, “there are times when I think if my son could speak, this might be what he would say to me.” 

Adams’ role at WIHD had been to be “an agent of sorts,” she said, identifying and connecting people with intellectual disabilities to speaking opportunities. But as she found herself returning to the same presenters and presentations time and again, she began thinking about how to develop a larger network.

Building a new cohort of speakers by teaching them the communication skills herself seemed like a promising way forward. From tutoring individuals one-on-one, she teamed up with Think College, an advocacy organization for inclusive higher education programs, to develop a group course.

“We just really are connected to that mission that the most impactful way of understanding what it is like to be a person with intellectual disability pursuing a college degree is by listening to them,” Adams said of her alignment with Think College.

Think College’s purpose — to connect students with intellectual disabilities to post-secondary education — stems from a recognition of what the programs can offer them. As of 2022, only about two percent of those with intellectual disabilities who graduated high school were likely to attend college, even though the majority of those who did found competitive employment, higher wages, and mentorship on the other side.

So far, Adams has run the public speaking course twice remotely over the summer for students from all around the country and once in-person for students at InclusiveU, a program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities at Syracuse University.

Mariela Adams (farthest right) taught a version of her public speaking course at InclusiveU, a program for students with intellectual disabilities at Syracuse University. Via Mariela Adams.

In the ten-session summer courses, students learn to develop their own unique presentation, starting by exploring the audience they want to reach and the topic they’re interested in covering and moving into content development and practicing in front of peers.

The initial classes in which students decide on their subject are key, Adams said, because the more passionate they are about it, the more powerful their presentations are likely to be. “That’s my sort of guiding principle. It’s got to come from where they’re at, what’s relevant to them,” she said. 

The students craft strong messages based on their own experiences. Some have opted to address medical professionals and first responders, while others have targeted parents, educators, or administrators. Students have covered what to know about having a service animal in college, trying to build friendships and social connections, and needing to use a communication device when speaking becomes difficult.

Adams realizes that, while ideally empowering, opening up about these challenges can be anxiety provoking. “I really want to help them see that them sharing their lived experience can lead to significant change,” Adams said. “I also want them to see that they’re giving a lot of themselves, and I want to recognize that — that sharing your lived experience can also put you in a really vulnerable spot.”

One protective measure Adams encourages is for students to find the presentation style that makes them most comfortable, whether academic or humorous, data- or visuals-based. That way, the talks unfold on their terms. 

The group format of the class is also helpful, as students can derive motivation and inspiration from their peers, all tasked with the same challenge.

In general, Adams tries to balance pushing students to move through the scarier parts of public speaking and offering them the support they need. “I think that we can do a lot by teaching students that even the greatest public speakers, they work a lot on their craft,” she said. “It may not feel great when you first start doing it, but you can always get better.” 

Nichole Hastings joined the teaching team as a co-facilitator in part to be a model for students to see that people with disabilities can be successful both in higher education and as advocates and public speakers.

“I can show them that, yes, I’ve been where you’re at. I’ve been through post-secondary education programs as an individual with a disability, and it’s not an easy road, but if you want to pursue it, you can,” Hastings said.

During one summer session, a student with cerebral palsy, like Hastings, arrived at the second day of class and announced, “I can’t do this.” His frustrations with needing to use a communication device, which often prompted people to cut him off or not let him finish his thoughts, had become overwhelming.

“I know what I want to say, but people just don’t let me get out,” the student told Hastings. “They don’t let me be the person that I am because I have to use a device and I have cerebral palsy and they see my physical disability first.”

Hastings assured him that the instructors and students in the class would give him “the time, the space, the respect, everything you need to be able to do what you need to do here.” 

From there, building awareness around communication devices and how to respond to those who use them became the heart of the presentation the student devised and Hastings coached him through.

“The reason why I do what I do and I love what I do is because once people find their voice and they find out how it can be used and how it can be heard, they grow by leaps and bounds,” Hastings said. “I’ve seen it.”

“Once people find their voice and they find out how it can be used and how it can be heard, they grow by leaps and bounds.”

Grace Medina, who is visually and hearing impaired due to a rare congenital condition called Goldenhar syndrome, came to Adams’ course after a previous public speaking opportunity, her first, opened her eyes to her own untapped talents. 

“I was on a panel, and I was super, super nervous, did not think that I could do it,” Medina said. “And then once I got up there, and I had the mic, I was like, ‘Oh, I could do this all day. I love this.’”

At that point, she was a sophomore at Sooner Works, a four-year certificate program at the University of Oklahoma for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

After the panel gig, Medina enrolled in Adams’ speaking course. In the beginning, she found herself rambling off topic while presenting and running out of time before making all her points. Adams helped her organize the content and manage time. 

Medina was also able to pinpoint her preferred communication style, which she said is “more lighthearted and funny” for the sake of audience members, especially those with disabilities who might be easily overwhelmed. 

Since graduating from her program at O.U. in May 2024, Medina has started teaching at a pre-school for children with special needs, while continuing to pursue public speaking and serving as a peer mentor to students in Adams’ class. 

This spring, she was the keynote speaker at a conference focused on inclusive post-secondary education and described the challenges and triumphs of her journey through college, particularly with a service dog, Velvet, by her side.

For Adams, the goal moving forward is to continue supporting former students, like Medina, already on the public speaking circuit, as well as reach new ones perhaps yet to discover a knack for presenting.

While funding changes at Think College mean Adams’ course didn’t run this summer, she’s anticipating another version this fall in partnership with U.I. Reach, a program for students with intellectual disabilities at the University of Iowa.

Adams is also still receiving some support from Think College to develop a guide for other instructors to start their own public speaking courses. They hope the manual will reach directors of post-secondary programs for students with disabilities who can then use it to promote their work. 

After all, Adams said, “there isn’t a better voice to tell about the program than a student that participates in the program.”

Without a Net

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Seven years ago, Sam touched down in the United States, alone. Just 17, she had left her mother and siblings behind in West Africa to live with her father in New England, where he waited with her new green card.

But Sam’s arrival was one of the first and last parts of the move to go as planned. Her father became abusive, and after the pandemic descended, she moved in with a teacher who’d grown worried about her welfare. From then on, Sam’s education became both anchor and bridge to a better life.  

“I got that security from my teachers,” she said. 

College presented another respite from home, although it ended up coming with its own set of challenges, especially financial. From her first day on campus, Sam felt lost. She struggled to make friends in a dominant social culture that seemed to require an entrance fee she couldn’t pay. For her chronic health issues, she could barely afford transportation to appointments, let alone medical bills.  

Every year, Sam said, she wrote letters to the university administration explaining her financial shortcomings and appealing for leniency. The process started to feel dehumanizing, she said, as she found herself trying to prove “my story is sad enough to give me some aid.”

Yet she pushed on, often powered by a simple but effective refrain: “I don’t want to be poor.” Halfway through her first year, she caught a break when she was connected to the Wily Network, a non-profit based in the Boston area that provides holistic support to students navigating college without family assistance. The Wily Network helped Sam cover basic needs and went to bat for her before her last semester when it looked like she wouldn’t be able to make the final payment. 

Sam graduated this May, against all odds, and just in time to avoid some of the added fear students like her are experiencing, as the Trump Administration plans major changes to higher education and related social services. Months of speculation surrounding cuts to federal financial aid and public assistance, the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) resources, and the removal of immigrant and international students have left learners already at the greatest disadvantage haunted by the precarity of their situation. As the overwhelming uncertainty continues, it is these students who hang in the balance — those who rely on college for their safety and welfare and are one policy move away from losing it all. 

Keeping It Together

As the executive director of the Wily Network, Judi Alperin King, Ph.D., has had a front row seat to the host of new challenges her students have been managing in recent months.

The ground had always been shaky for those the Wily Network serves, Alperin King said, but at least they knew more or less what to expect. “Now that shaky ground is unpredictable.” 

“You cannot see the cracks in the foundation, and they just keep appearing,” Alperin King said. “Every day there’s a new crack, but it wasn’t in the place you thought it was going to be.”

Earlier this summer, one of Alperin King’s students flew across the country and drove deep into a rural territory, only to arrive and discover the internship that led him there had been cancelled. The work he’d been hired to assist was defunded amid the slew of cuts to federally funded programs, spanning climate and cancer research, foreign aid, and D.E.I. initiatives.

Other students had found out they lost their jobs before relocating for them, Alperin King said. This one hadn’t been so lucky.

With the student’s call alerting them to what happened, the Wily staff spurred to action, trying to figure out how exactly to get him to the airport from an area, apparently, without access to Ubers or even taxis. From there, he would need money for a ticket to Boston, a place to live when he got there, groceries to eat, and income to support himself until school started up in the fall. Without Wily on standby, he might have found himself stranded.

Some developments, like internship-ending cuts to programs and research, are affecting students in real time. Others simply loom, making everyone squirm. 

At any given time, top of mind for students assisted by the Wily Network is whether they’ll continue to be able to pay for college. Concerns have been churning around the fate of federal financial aid since Trump first began promoting the closure of the Department of Education and then signed an executive order to that effect in March 2025. 

Assurances from Education Secretary Linda McMahon that aid would continue didn’t assuage worries, especially as the initial version of Trump’s bill overhauling domestic policy included reductions to the maximum award for federal Pell Grants, which prop up more than six million students with the highest financial need.

This month, the bill that passed Congress and Trump signed into law didn’t include the Pell restrictions that had stoked the most fear, although there are other implications for financial aid. Among them are the elimination of Pell eligibility for students already receiving full scholarships from their institutions, as well as the expansion of Pell to cover shorter-term workforce training programs. In addition, the bill sets limits around the lifetime amount of federal aid students can receive for graduate school and winds down the number of loan repayment plans to two. 

Perhaps raising the most alarm are the law’s cuts to public assistance programs, namely Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. In 2020, an estimated 3.3 million students qualified for SNAP. But even if the changes don’t impact students directly, a trickle-down effect could. As states look to trim their budgets to fill the new gaps left in health care and food assistance, sector experts have warned higher education could take a hit that cuts back student support services or ramps up tuition costs.

The Trump bill’s changes to Medicaid and SNAP also involve denying eligibility to certain legal residents, including refugees and asylees. These restrictions come on the back of a larger crackdown on noncitizens in the United States.

From a higher education standpoint, these efforts have included the high-profile detention of international students, legally in the United States, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for their involvement in pro-Palestine advocacy on campus. The Trump Administration has also threatened to bar entry to international students who go to Harvard University as part of an ongoing power struggle with the Ivy League institution.

Any student originally from outside the United States or with family members from outside may be feeling vulnerable. Even Sam, armed with a green card upon arrival almost a decade ago, said she often can’t sleep at night from worrying about her status in the country. Learning about the recent detainment of an undocumented high school student by ICE in the town where she now lives didn’t make her feel better. 

“I think for me, I have always been scared,” she said. “I’m legal. I paid a lot of money to be here, but if you’ve never dealt with immigration before, it’s one hell of a beast.” 

“I think for me, I have always been scared.”

While policy confusion stirs up fear for high-needs students around their ability to stay on campus or in the country, the support services once designed to help them navigate this type of uncertainty are also taking a hit. 

Social worker Jamie Bennett, Ph.D., leads the Fostering Success Coaching Institute, which trains staff at groups like the Wily Network in best practices to assist high-needs students. Through her partnerships with these organizations, on and off college campuses, Bennett has gained first-hand insight into the kind of pressure they now find themselves under. At least two have undergone “mass layoffs,” Bennett said, due to funding cuts.

At a recent event Bennett hosted, free of charge and ironically focused on practitioner wellbeing, she guessed about 20 percent of those she had expected didn’t show. “Either they had lost their job or they were taking on responsibility from colleagues who were being laid off, so they couldn’t join,” she said.

For the most part, Bennett has been able to stave off any fallout for her work. But she imagines cutbacks for her partners could reduce her own services down the road. “That’s going to impact our ability to keep offering as many trainings as we do,” she said. “If they don’t have the funds to send their folks to professional development, they don’t come to us.” 

The Wily Network’s efforts have been affected, as well, as the flurry of cuts to university departments and resources leave even veteran advocates like Judi Alperin King unsure of how to help students. “In some ways, we’ve lost our power,” she said of her and her staff of “coaches.” With boundaries different from those of therapists and mentors, coaches take on wide-ranging tasks, from troubleshooting social problems and locating academic resources for students to acting as the emergency contact they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We knew what to do. Not every situation, but a lot of situations, they were predictable, and we could say, ‘Okay, here are the three steps you can take to support yourself through this,’” Alperin King said. Now those steps may no longer apply. 

Although neither Alperin King nor Bennett’s organizations receive federal funding, concerns have still emerged about whether they can completely evade government scrutiny. Both leaders have heard rumors that their group’s nonprofit status, which falls under the purview of the Internal Revenue Code, could be at risk should any of their activities draw higher concern, most likely in relation to the promotion of D.E.I.  

Those warnings haven’t stopped either from maintaining commitments to D.E.I., whether in spirit or explicitly on the company website and other materials. Bennett is firm on upholding her organization’s founding ideals. “We will say what we feel is just and what we feel is aligned with our values. Which are aligned on equity. They’re aligned on inclusion. They’re aligned on everybody’s voice matters.” 

While not overly concerned about her own job security, Bennett does worry about how that kind of stress, combined with increasing student needs, may affect the emotional wellbeing of other service providers. It’s critical, she said, for them to be “well and resourced and feel like they’re equipped to do their work, as they meet with students who have really complex situations and trauma.”

“If we start to see the support of them drop off, then it makes me nervous for what students will start to notice,” Bennett said.

At the Wily Network, one coach has begun to find her background in hospice care unsettlingly relevant to her current role supporting high-needs college students.

“You don’t really coach people at the end of life. You just sit with them, like, ‘Yep, death. Death is death,’” she said. Working with young people facing the unknown where their degree and future are concerned has started to feel like a similar experience.

“It’s more of an existential suffering,” she said.

The same coach has been struggling under the increasing weight of her students’ challenges. Guilt is a dominant emotion, stemming from the understanding she can distance herself from issues surfacing in higher education, from her job, in a way students can’t. 

“I feel like my empathic distress for students is harder to manage because, I mean, what’s going on is hard for me, but I feel like I have a home. I have a job. I have a lot of ‘knowns’ in my life that ballast against what’s going on,” she said. 

Student mental health has always been a prime concern for coaches, but now the uncertainty and fear fueled by real and perceived policy changes seem like the ultimate pile-on for young people already emotionally tested by years of striving and struggling. 

Alperin King knows her students are among the most resilient in higher education. She once used that fact to recruit new coaches, advertising the joys of championing talented students uniquely capable of battling through barriers — all the way to and through college.  

Students without family support who make it to college have a history of defying expectations. People like Alperin King and her colleagues are now asking, “Do we really need to raise the bar?” 

LearningWell used the pseudonym “Sam” and withheld other names in this article due to subjects’ privacy concerns.

You can reach LearningWell reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

A New Way at the Greenway Institute 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

The Greenway Institute is in Montpelier, Vermont, but in theory, it could be anywhere. The start-up engineering school is both a place and a strategy for a radically different way to earn a college degree.  

“We started with the question: How do we make college more affordable and more attractive to a larger set of students?” said Mark Somerville, president of the Greenway Institute and one of its co-founders. “You do it by giving students an experience that is exciting and empowering, that will help them thrive but won’t cripple them financially.” 

Somerville believes that combining student-centered pedagogy with a resource-sensitive business model will bring many more students into higher education at a time when the absence of both is keeping them out. While its doors are not yet open, the Institute has spent three years prototyping a curriculum by which students learn engineering in unconventional classrooms, while working in the community and earning a salary. The goal is for them to graduate debt free and ready to take on the real world. 

As the Greenway Institute prepares to matriculate its first class of students, it holds broad appeal for families, faculty, and communities seeking something more and different from higher education. Its work-integrated learning model is emerging as one of the innovative ways the sector can restore the public’s trust in the value of a college degree, now at a record low. What influence the Greenway Institute has on higher education hinges on its own success, which includes the conviction that, if they build it, the students will come.  

Innovative Roots 

Mark Somerville is no stranger to disruption. He was an early team member and then provost at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, an award-winning start-up that broke the rules in engineering education with its inter-disciplinary, project-based approach. During his time at Olin, Somerville worked with and helped launch new programs and institutions in the United States and in other countries, including Fulbright University in Vietnam.  

Somerville said his two co-founders, Troy McBride and Rebecca Holcombe, had been working on pieces of the Greenway concept for some time. In 2022, they collaborated with Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and received a grant from the National Science Foundation to consider how to make engineering more appealing to more students by designing a curriculum that involved sustainable thinking as a core competency for every engineer. Greenway’s tag line is “Engineering our Sustainable Future,” but its value proposition involves a wide interpretation that includes an economic component that the Institute now markets.  

“We propose that in the age of climate change, sustainability should be something all engineers are thinking about no matter their discipline,” Somerville said. “But beyond that, we need to be thinking about how to enable people to live well and thrive on this planet.” 

With his background in innovative educational models, Somerville was frustrated at what he sees as higher education’s failure to integrate transformational education with a sustainable business model. This concern eventually led to the work-integrated learning model Greenway is promoting. Its viability involves breaking precedent by making work a central and integrated part of the learning journey: Students receive credit for working — and get support and instruction from Greenway while they are on the job.  

The four-year program involves two years of residential education that are high-touch and heavily hands-on. Greenway adopts a collaborative mastery orientation to learning, focused on process, metacognition, and developing strong relationships with faculty. This is coupled with two years of working at a company, in a credit-bearing, co-op style that lets students earn an average of $50,000 per school year. Well-paid co-ops are not unusual in engineering but integrating them into the academic process is.  

“Even schools that have really strong co-op programs don’t usually allow students to get credit when they are out in the world doing real stuff that matters to people,” Somerville said. 

At the Greenway Institute, students not only get credit for their work but are connected to a faculty member who acts as a coach and mentor throughout their two-years of employment.  

“Students are mastering a whole set of professional and design skills in the workplace that we are able to put educational scaffolding around,” Somerville said. “They are learning more because there is someone there who is helping them do the reflection work, the sense-making that is often missing in apprenticeships.” 

President Mark Somerville addresses students and staff in pilot class. Courtesy of the Greenway Institute.

The out-of-the-box pedagogy is paired with smart economics. As Somerville described it, students are earning money half the time they are in school. They are learning in-person at the school’s physical plant for half the time they are enrolled and distance-learning during the time they are out in the workplace. That set-up drives down the cost of running the institution and, thus, what it costs students to earn their degree.  

For the first classes of students coming to the Greenway Institute, that cost will be zero. According to Somerville, the free tuition is security against an accreditation process that will take until the first class of students graduates to complete, making attending Greenway a risk as well as an opportunity. With confidence in its model, the team at the Greenway Institute sees this and other challenges as just part of what you take on when you’re creating something new. 

Collaborative Pioneers 

Hannah Root had been a middle school science teacher in a rural district of the state when an opportunity at the Greenway Institute made her change course.   

“My classroom was full of hands-on, real-world projects, and we were having a blast,” she said. “But it was really hard to witness how many of these young people didn’t see themselves as pursuing higher education, even though they had tons of skills and lots of promise. I was drawn to the idea of creating a space where students, like the ones I had in my classrooms, could feel like they could succeed.” 

Root wears many hats on the small campus in Montpelier, but her primary focus is helping run the two pilot programs that are part of the curriculum development. In 2023, through a partnership with Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, the Greenway Institute enlisted a group of sophomores to participate in a credit-bearing semester away in Montpelier to pilot the project-based portion of the model. This past spring, another cohort from Elizabethtown participated in the work-integrated learning program. 

Root said the students in the pilot were attracted to Greenway’s hands-on element and the opportunity to help launch a new school. “These were students who knew they weren’t textbook learners,” she said. “They didn’t want to sit through lectures when they could go and build stuff and learn by experience.”  

One of the students was Emanuel Attah, a sophomore and mechatronics engineering major, who interned at Hallam-ICS, an engineering consulting firm near Burlington, Vermont. “I heard a presentation about Greenway in one of my classes, and I was immediately like, ‘I want to be there. This is literally calling my name,’” said Attah, who is from Nigeria. 

Attah said his time in Montpelier prepared him to be “a whole engineer,” able to tackle complex problems but also to interact with colleagues and supervisors and understand how things work in the world. In addition to work and classes, he said he and his peers received a lot of coaching.  

“Before we even got started, we’d discuss basic things like, ‘How are you going to get there? Who is your supervisor? How are you going to ask for feedback?’” he said. “One of the things we did was to define our professional tenets of behavior: ‘How are you going to show up? How are you going to be your best?’”  

Attah recalled fondly the “asset-low” living arrangements the founders designed to teach basic life skills and keep costs low. “We lived on our own. We cooked our own meals. We commuted to work by ourselves. We had an authentic, real-world experience.”  

Attah said the Greenway Institute gave him the confidence to want to stay and work in the United States after graduation. Regarding the financial advantage of earning while learning, Attah said, “It really helped me out. Otherwise, I would have had to work at some other kind of job for like 15 hours a week to help pay the bills.”  

The students aren’t the only ones who are inspired by the Greenway Institute’s innovative model. Annick Dewald is a founding faculty member at Greenway. The Smith College graduate worked briefly at Boeing before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to receive her doctorate. There, she helped design high altitude, long endurance solar aircrafts for earth and climate observation missions. Before coming to the Institute, she worked at an aerospace start-up, where she managed a team of 14 interns tasked with building a 30-meter wingspan aircraft.   

“That start-up experience, plus working closely with students, is what drew me to the Greenway Institute,” she said. “I saw the advantages of working at a small space, where you get a lot of responsibility, you get a lot of different experiences, rather than a really clear job description and a very narrow focus.”

Dewald described her experience working with students in the spring pilot of 2025 as highly collaborative. “The community we built was really, really strong because we were all co-creators, so we broke down the hierarchy of faculty and student, where we were all on first-name basis.”  

Dewald said equity in education is something all Greenway staff care deeply about. The key elements of the Institute’s model reflect that sentiment, starting with a framing of engineering as collaborative and altruistic which may attract more women and people of color into a field from which they have felt excluded. The professional development scaffolding students receive will help first-generation engineering students succeed. And cracking the affordability nut will help make engineering education, indeed all of higher education, more accessible — or so goes the plan. 

For those who are cheering for the Greenway team, there is ample proof of concept. Since 2020, Somerville’s colleague and advisor, Ron Ulseth, has been running a similar work-integrated program at Iron Range Engineering in Minnesota. A partnership between Minnesota North College and Minnesota State University, Iron Range also connects students with paid, supervised internships, project-based learning, and a similar professional support system.  

Iron Range differs from the Greenway Institute in that it is for community college students who are majoring in engineering. Students spend a total of nine semesters, first in community college, then in Iron Range’s academy and boot camp, where Ulseth said they “learn how to be an engineer.” For their last two years, they are out working in engineering co-ops, getting paid and also earning credit toward their degree. 

Ulseth said that earning money and learning how to navigate the workplace help address the barriers that lead students towards worst-case scenarios, like leaving college with significant debt and no degree.  

“Earning money and learning how to navigate the workplace help address the barriers that lead students towards worst-case scenarios, like leaving college with significant debt and no degree.” 

“Many of our people were disadvantaged in their ability to continue their education given the structures that exist, be it racism, socioeconomic issues, or fill-in-the-blank,” said Ulseth, who recently stepped down as Iron Range program director.  

Iron Range has achieved A.B.E.T. (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accreditation and was recognized as “an emerging world leader in engineering education” in a 2018 report by M.I.T. These distinctions are important benchmarks for the Greenway Institute, as it seeks its own accreditation and the financial backing that will help it get there. Meanwhile, the team continues to develop its signature curriculum and is beginning to market the new institution to students and families. It may not be for everyone, but given the thirst for change in higher education, the Greenway Institute may well be a concept whose time has come.  

Lehigh360 Offers Students a Wide-Angle View 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Zoe had always wanted to study abroad. When looking at colleges, she was drawn to Lehigh University because of something she saw called “Lehigh360.” As the name suggests, Lehigh360 is an institution-wide initiative that helps students see the world through a broader angle by engaging in high-impact practices, like traveling to different countries, conducting research, or working on real-world problems.  

“That said to me, ‘This school cares about these experiences and the students who want to have them,’” said Zoe, now a rising junior at Lehigh who spent last summer in Africa. “Lehigh360 connected me with an amazing opportunity that literally changed my life.”  

While it continues to accommodate students like Zoe who gravitate towards new experiences, Lehigh360 is also there to inspire the larger number of students who, for whatever reason, do not. Now in its third year, Lehigh360 aims to equip every student at Lehigh with the information, access, and encouragement to pursue projects or programs that can prepare them for life, as well as career. Part database, part marketing campaign, Lehigh360 seeks to fill the access gap around these opportunities by addressing a number of barriers, whether lack of awareness, affordability, or self-confidence. 

“We want all students to have these kinds of transformative experiences, and we want a more democratic, egalitarian process, where any student that comes here should be able to participate in them,” said Michelle Spada, the director of Lehigh360. 

Spada works within Lehigh’s Office of Creative Inquiry, where Lehigh360 was, fittingly, created. Formed out of a desire to have students work on complex problems through open-ended projects, the Office of Creative Inquiry is an academic and non-academic vehicle for digging into big global issues. Its core program is called “Impact Fellowships,” through which students work in small teams and with faculty mentors on a host of global and local issues over two semesters with two to three weeks of on-site fieldwork in the summer.   

Within the Office of Creative Inquiry, Bill Whitney is assistant vice provost for experiential learning programs. Having seen the positive impact of the office’s work on students who engaged, Whitney and his colleague, Vice Provost for Creative Inquiry Khanjan Mehta, were curious about how many of the university’s students were taking advantage of similar experiences on campus. What little information they found proved disappointing. When they asked students and alumni about study abroad or leadership or mentorship opportunities, a lot of them said they hadn’t participated in them; many said they didn’t know about them at Lehigh. 

“It was clear then that we needed a better way of getting all these ambitious, driven, capable students doing things that are outside of just their march to degree, as important as that is,” Whitney said. “That’s what led us to Lehigh360.” 

Whitney said part of the urgency to improve access to high-impact programs and experiences stems from the evidence of their significant educational benefit. Their longer-term benefits, including helping to develop a sense of purpose and fulfillment in life and career, have broad appeal for many worried about the lack of purpose so many young people are reporting. 

As strong advocates of this work, Whitney and Mehta began to convene campus stakeholders and alert them to the gap that existed in connecting students with these evidence-based practices. It was not a tough sell, given the school’s strong history of learning through doing. Best known for engineering, Lehigh’s close affiliation with Bethlehem Steel, once the anchor industry in the region, offered a host of work/learning opportunities that still exist today.  

“There is a historical connection to experiential learning that I think everyone is on board with here, and there are these incredible pockets of signature high-impact opportunities,” said Whitney. “The problem is they exist in totally different spaces, and there’s no connection between them. There’s no common place to find them or learn how to get involved.”

Whitney met with over a hundred campus offices across numerous departments to achieve a significant level of buy-in for a campus-wide effort to organize and promote the many opportunities. They created a director-level position for Lehigh360 and hired Michelle Spada. Spada had previously worked on one of Lehigh’s high-impact opportunities — the Iacocca International Internship, a fully funded program for students who have some level of need — and before that, for an Africa fellowship program at Princeton University.  

Spada said her previous work opened her eyes to the equity and access issues that exist in these programs. “Too often with these high-impact practices, we are just passing students back and forth — those that are really good at writing applications and presenting, those who happen to be bumping into the right people. But what about the others? Do they even know these opportunities exist or how they may get funded for them?”  

Spada said the accessibility issue becomes even more pronounced considering the advantage these experiences have in today’s job market. Employers looking for distinctions beyond G.P.A. are eager to see what kinds of activities or work/learning experiences candidates have had in college. Those who decry Gen Z’s lack of readiness are likely to see working on real-world problems as a protective factor.  

“When you consider that employers are putting an emphasis on these experiences, often over G.P.A., it becomes our responsibility to be much more intentional about them,” Spada said.  

Lehigh360 offers a number of on-ramps to these opportunities, starting with communicating and promoting the benefits of doing something in addition to that “march to degree.” The vision for Lehigh360 is to help students find their place in the world, which includes knowing what the world needs from them. “We ask students, ‘What excites you? What really lights you up?’” Whitney said. “But we also ask, ‘What problems in the world do you want to help solve?’”

The vision for Lehigh360 is to help students find their place in the world, which includes knowing what the world needs from them.

In its most basic form, Lehigh360 is an accessible database and a toolkit that students can use to explore what opportunities exist. Students can query a number of different domains, such as travel in a certain part of the world, work internships, research opportunities, and special programs like fellowships or scholarships.  

Students are introduced to Lehigh360 in their first year and reminded of opportunities through different touch points, like academic advising, student-facing services, and classroom presentations. Student “opportunity guides” help their peers with applications and references. The school even offers a pre-orientation Lehigh360 course to get students thinking about these experiences before they matriculate and to widen their perspective of what is possible.  

Lehigh360 pre-orientation program “preLUsion” offers incoming first-years a head start on connecting with students and staff through shared interest projects.

Sometimes getting a student to participate in activities outside their comfort zone involves more than just providing good information. Roisin, a rising junior at Lehigh, is currently in Edinburgh, Scotland, working for a social enterprise that helps fund small businesses in developing countries. The two-month position follows her previous internship in Uganda, an experience she said she never would have had without Lehigh360.  

“As soon as I got the internship in Uganda, I went straight to Michelle and told her how nervous I was, and she was so helpful,” Roisin said. “She told me about the good experiences other students had had with the same program and showed me the value of doing this in my first year. She told me, ‘You will learn so much, and then you can apply that in everything you do in the three years you’re back at school.’” 

With Spada’s encouragement, Roisin went to Uganda, where she taught English to elementary students, taught the staff to play rugby, and met one of her best friends. “It was the best experience of my life — so far,” she said. 

“My experience last summer really opened up my perspective on the world,” Roisin added. “As far as teamwork and working with people I didn’t know, I just feel like I am so much more of a well-rounded person. I think everyone should be taking advantage of opportunities like these because it has honestly changed me for the better as a person. It has affected my mental health, my happiness.” 

Roisin said the equity focus of Lehigh360 is important to her. She was able to participate in part thanks to being a “Soaring Together Scholar,” which involves a full-tuition scholarship to the university and a $5,000 stipend towards an experiential learning opportunity.  

Spada believes initiatives like “Soaring Together” are small first steps in addressing the financial barriers many students encounter in even considering these programs. She and Whitney are working on leveling the playing field in this regard by connecting students to funding sources and securing paid internships for students who cannot afford to give up outside employment. 

An important part of the equity work involves getting a better understanding of who participates and why. Following up on Whitney’s informal inquiry regarding awareness, Spada has engaged a student research team called “Impact Trails” to do qualitative research to help answer questions, such as “How did you get involved?” and “If you are not involved, what were the biggest barriers?”  

The research itself is a high-impact opportunity for students and another example of how to connect learning to doing in college. “When I hear people talk about their education, I hear a lot about wanting their classwork to translate into action and into what they may want to do for the rest of their lives,” said Taylor, a rising sophomore at Lehigh and a member of the Impact Trails team. “I wanted to conduct research, and when I learned about Lehigh360 from a presentation in my first-year engineering class, I immediately looked at those opportunities.” 

As the research continues, anecdotal evidence suggests Lehigh360 is taking off. Students said most of their friends now look into opportunities on the Lehigh360 website. Alumni lament it did not exist when they were at the school. Whitney said the effort to provide a common platform for the many opportunities that exist for students has faculty and administrators eager to get their programs included.  

Still, he worries Lehigh360, like many initiatives in higher education, may be viewed as the passion of one department, as opposed to the culture of the entire university. The one thing he said he does not worry about is buy-in from the students.  

“The students that come here, or any university, are ready to thrive. They are ready to flourish. It’s our job to help them do that.”

Student Mental Health is Complex

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Whether you’ve studied psychology for four years or one semester, textbook theories often pale in comparison to the lived experiences of those around you. As I navigated the diverse and layered culture of the University of Miami — both as a student and mental health peer educator — I came to understand just how vital and nuanced mental health is for such a malleable population.

Whenever our group, Counseling Outreach Peer Education (COPE), organized classroom presentations, housing events, or tabling sessions aimed at marginalized communities, I saw firsthand how deeply mental health is shaped by trauma, identity, and the pressures of socioeconomic hardship.

While this may seem like a fairly obvious point to make, a short conversation with someone outside your own echo chamber illustrates just how detached we all are from the dynamics that feed into our mental processes. 

In the banality of it all, we have forgotten how to ground ourselves and acknowledge the emotions that come with our most difficult experiences. One unfortunate effect of an individualistic culture is the tendency to downplay the severity of our traumas.

Mental health is not a one-size-fits-all experience. It is deeply nuanced, shaped by an individual’s upbringing, identity, environment, and lived experience. It cannot be measured solely by diagnostic labels or external behaviors.

Mental health is deeply nuanced, shaped by an individual’s upbringing, identity, environment, and lived experience. It cannot be measured solely by diagnostic labels or external behaviors.

For college students in particular, mental wellbeing exists at the intersection of transition, expectation, and uncertainty. What looks like resilience on the surface may mask exhaustion, and what is labeled as disengagement may actually be emotional burnout.

Understanding this complexity is vital, especially in peer support sessions, where emotional nuance is often the difference between surface-level interaction and meaningful connection.

I know the sentiment may seem rich coming from a student at a private institution, but if you look beyond the name of my university, you’ll see a community filled with students from backgrounds far removed from the monetary comfort that surrounds Coral Gables.

Many of us work tirelessly to support ourselves, trying not to place any additional burden on our families. We throw ourselves into student-led organizations to show our parents that being here means something — that their sacrifices weren’t made in vain. For some, excelling academically and remaining emotionally composed are not just goals. They are expectations. 

Within this context, peer-to-peer roles take on deeper meaning. Student leaders are not only building campus communities but also helping one another manage the weight of invisible pressures.

At nearly every event I participated in through COPE, I spoke with students facing unimaginable financial stress, complicated family dynamics, or overwhelming mental health crises — often with multiple factors compounding at once.

Although the student population is majority White, students from all backgrounds — especially those from marginalized communities — often face significant cultural stigma around mental health. In many cases, families may attempt to dismiss or hide mental health struggles to save face, or they may believe that mental illness cannot exist in a “first world” country.

As a result, some students do not seek psychiatric care and instead turn to peers for emotional support. Peer education becomes vital in these cases, offering a space where students feel safe to share difficult truths they cannot express elsewhere. These conversations are not clinical interventions, but they are deeply effective, meeting students where they are and giving them space to feel heard.

College can be an isolating experience, but in those brief moments as peer educators, we create a space where students feel seen — because they know we understand what they are going through. We are not outsiders offering advice; we are peers navigating the same struggles.

Almost every student is struggling in silence, and what matters most is knowing that both their peers and their administration are showing up with genuine support. The effort to create safe, consistent spaces is what helps prevent this generation from repeating the silence of the last.

All of this reinforces the simple but often overlooked truth: Mental health conversations and peer education are essential to building a healthier student body.

Anisah Steele graduated in 2025 from the University of Miami, where she served as co-chair of Counseling Outreach Peer Education (COPE). Starting this fall, she will pursue her master’s in epidemiology at the University of Florida, hoping to bridge psychology and public health to inform more equitable, evidence-based mental health interventions.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the University of Miami, its Counseling Center, or Counseling Outreach Peer Education (COPE).

When Questions Are the Answer 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

At Roanoke College, purpose is part of the brand. With the motto, “Our purpose is to help you find yours,” the school prides itself on guiding young people towards full and rich lives focused on doing good in the world.  

The champion of this bold expression of formative education is Roanoke’s President Frank Shushok. With degrees in education and 30 years of experience in the field, Shushok is passionate about the role higher education can play in young people’s personal and professional growth and has compelling reasons for why they should be intertwined. In this interview with LearningWell, Shushok talks about creating counter-cultures on campus in which students are frequently asked meaningful questions without binary answers.  

LW: How has your background influenced your role as a college president?  

FS: First of all, I am a person of faith, and what I mean by that is my whole life has been shaped by a sense that life is for a purpose. Believing that my own life can push forward goodness in the world is something that both centers me and compels me. I’ve also been focused on interfaith curiosity and collaboration, and along the way, that has drawn me into many conversations about how people find meaning and purpose in their lives. 

Almost all people yearn to understand why they’re here, and I find very few people who, at the end of that question, don’t believe their life should be for something good. Whether I’m sitting at a table with Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, Christians, or atheists, I have found that when we begin a conversation about how we find meaning and purpose in life, designing a life toward virtue is a really powerful connector. 

That framing says a lot about how I view higher education. I absolutely believe every student should be able to graduate and find work that can support them economically and support their families. But I also want them to find purpose in that work and to find an alignment between their gifts and talents and a need that the world has. When that happens, energy and hope abound, and who doesn’t want more of that?

I’m such a fan of the good work that’s being done on the science of hope and the idea that hope has three actionable components: goals, pathways, and agency. In short, to have hope, you need a goal you’re shooting for and practical ways to go after it. You also need pathways and a consistent belief that you can get there — agency. What I love about the agency part is some people have plenty of agency and some people are growing in their agency, and that’s the golden time when they need someone to walk alongside them until they have the confidence to make progress toward their goals. That’s our job. Fundamentally, I believe that higher education is there to inspire in students a sense of purpose, shaped by character, and that makes life so much richer for them and for everyone in their orbit — their families, communities, workplaces, etc.  

But for whatever reason, I find a lot of college students haven’t thought about how their education can be about connecting to much more than a job-slash-career. Often, it’s not a question or a conversation they’ve been having at home. And it’s not a conversation that they’ve been having in the educational environment they were in prior to college. Sometimes, they make it all the way through college and never have this dialogue with anyone, even within themselves. In fact, they mostly have had one conversation, which is about the return on investment question: “If I go to college, what should I study so I can get a certain job, so I can have a particular level of economic security?” 

Those are also good questions, but they’re much more powerful if they’re coupled with other questions like the imperatives we have in our strategic plan, which champions the exploration of purpose, the pursuit of character, and the graduation of leaders. This is a distinction of the Roanoke experience. We’ve created this entity called PLACE (Purpose, Life And Career Exploration) drawn from our old career center model, and what we’re saying here is this process is about so much more than getting a job.  

LW: Do you think these imperatives are particularly important at this moment in time?  

FS: Absolutely. I found a report released by the Harvard Graduate School of Education sobering. Thirty-six percent of young adults aged 18 to 25 are struggling with anxiety, and 29 percent are dealing with depression. The study reveals some likely suspects, including worrying about finances, feeling pressure to achieve, being concerned with the world unraveling, and feeling like they don’t matter to others. But the number one driver of poor mental health for young adults was a lack of meaning, purpose, and direction in their lives, with 58 percent reporting. We can’t ignore that deep yearning to understand what makes life matter.

LW: How do you go about “meaning making” with students?  

FS: There are many practices to engage, but we need practices that shape culture so that culture shapes practices. What I mean by that is we first ask good questions, which will help us get good at being thoughtful and spur us to think more deeply about better questions worthy of our time. In a way, it’s countercultural. The power of a question is a crucial thing to acknowledge. Occasionally, I experiment to see how long it takes for someone to ask me a meaningful question — a question that asks me to reveal something about who I am, what I believe, where I’m going, what’s motivating me, and why I care.

If you pay attention, you can go a whole day without anyone asking you that kind of question. I think what we can do in a place like Roanoke College or any institution of higher education is to create a culture where we teach ourselves to be countercultural and to ask questions of meaning and purpose, questions that engage all of our not-so-disparate parts: our intellectual selves, our emotional selves, our moral selves. But we have to acknowledge we live in a world where people are moving at warp speed. Technology overwhelms people, and no one’s asking them meaningful questions. In turn, they’re not developing the habit of asking other people meaningful questions. Without meaningful questions, there is little need for astute listeners. And when we don’t develop astute listeners, we’re often not encouraging thoughtful learners.

“Without meaningful questions, there is little need for astute listeners. And when we don’t develop astute listeners, we’re often not encouraging thoughtful learners.”

I have two questions that I keep at the forefront of my mind every day as I approach my work: First, what am I trying to increase the probability of occurring through my daily activities, conversations, and experiences? And second, what am I doing when I’m doing what I’m doing? See, every one of us is engaged in seemingly unidimensional transactions, but underneath them is a greater purpose. Whether you’re serving food in the dining center or you’re advising or you’re standing in front of a classroom, the kinds of questions you ask and the kinds of listening you do and the way that you view your purpose — what you’re doing when you’re doing what you’re doing — it shapes everything. So many people on a college campus don’t understand the incredibly transformational and powerful role they play as educators when they enact the important and powerful pedagogical practice of asking meaningful questions, followed by deep and curious listening.

LW: How do you get a whole campus to embrace this approach?  

FS: It’s slow and iterative, like all transformations. In many ways, the headwinds pull you away from doing these things, so you must drive into the wind. You must be committed and undeterred when the car’s shaky. Sometimes, you have to slow down a little, meaning it will take a little extra time, but it will be worth it. But if you believe that the whole world can shift by doing this, you can stay the course.

There’s a book that I’m particularly fond of by Peter Block called “Community: The Structure of Belonging,” where he talks about the small group as being the unit of transformation. You think of these movements as top-down, and they are to some degree because one of the first things you must do is declare a shift. In our case, we determined and stated that we would make the exploration of purpose, the pursuit of character, and the graduation of leaders a distinction of Roanoke College. 

But a stated plan becomes a cultural transformation at the small group level. It’s the small conversations. What new conversations do we want to have, where will we conduct them, and who at every level will start? These things happen at the micro level, and then they become exponentially more likely to occur naturally on a campus. Over time, you’ll be surprised that everything has been transformed.

My assumption about how we build people of character and shape virtue and moral fiber is that none of it happens outside the context of community, and you can’t desire community until you’ve experienced it. One of the immediate structural challenges when people enter a new environment is to help them experience community. There are a lot of young people who come to a college campus who haven’t experienced it, and they don’t know that they need it. They’re not going to look for it. We have many, many lonely young people. It’s up to us to play a structural role in creating an environment that increases the likelihood that community happens. 

LW: Would you connect this work to what employers say we need more of: people who understand people? 

FS: Yes. When you think about the technical skills that are required to build a 21st century aircraft, it requires incredible knowledge of physics, engineering, aerodynamics. But we also need people that can convene other people from different vantage points and communicate in adaptive ways that allow for understanding based on different acculturation. And look what happens from a character or virtue standpoint. If there is pressure to produce something in a particular timeframe that may not be safe, that’s not a technical question. That’s a moral question.

You really need expertise and character. You need a competent “what” and a firm “why.” You need to know what you’re doing when you’re doing what you’re doing. Are you taking care of humanity? Are you loving people? Are you looking for opportunities to lift others up? Are you viewing yourself as part of a greater community? Those are the kinds of questions, the kinds of values, that when coupled with the job that you have, make such a powerful combination.

LW: Does higher education have a role to play in addressing the polarization we are experiencing on so many levels? 

FS: Yes. I think this is why I’m attracted to this conversation of character. Most of the skills that are important in character formation are learning to listen and asking good questions, which may be as simple as forming a meaningful question, versus a question with a binary answer. You get better at these things when you’re equipped, and then you get to practice in an environment where there are people with diverse viewpoints and different backgrounds. And I think a legitimate critique of higher education is that we have preferred echo chambers and haven’t been interested in listening to and learning from some voices, and there are some good reasons why that’s been the case. But if we view leadership as growing the skill and capacity to bring people together to achieve a common goal that is good for all, then yes, we can widen the circle. And I think those who can do that most effectively must be well-informed people of character. Because that is what will keep you in a place of productivity when times are tough and conversations are hard.  

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

Student-Centered Solutions   

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Despite some signs of post-pandemic recovery, the college mental health crisis remains alive and not-so-well.

Young people passionate about their own and their peers’ mental health continue to sound the alarm on college campuses, while institutions across the country devote their own staff, resources, and time towards interventions to the same end. 

But are the two groups missing something or, more specifically, each other in the process? 

The Coalition for Student Wellbeing, a new student-led mental health advocacy group, is founded on the premise that the most authentic and effective solutions to student mental health issues will come from ensuring those making the decisions hear from those affected by them. 

Unlike other student groups that focus on issues within their institutions, the Coalition unites members across colleges nationwide to address a broad range of mental health concerns. The goal is to ensure that the student voice is part of the policymaking process, whether on campus or in Washington.

“The college student experience is so unique and dependent on the person,” said Carson Domey, the founder and executive director of the Coalition. “We need to tailor systems of care but also systems of education so that students are involved in these policymaking conversations at all levels.”

“We need to tailor systems of care but also systems of education so that students are involved in these policymaking conversations at all levels.”

Domey has never been one to sit on the sidelines. A rising senior at the University of Texas at Austin, he started the Coalition in August 2024, having been active in youth mental health advocacy for years.

He entered the world of policymaking and politics well before he could vote. By 11, he had been carted back and forth to hundreds of doctor’s appointments for a rare form of Crohn’s disease and began pushing for legislation in Massachusetts to expand access to telemedicine.

When a close friend died from suicide three years later, the scope of Domey’s advocacy grew. Since high school, he has pursued state-level mental health changes, like adding the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline to student IDs and expanding the definition of physical education to include mental health. 

At U.T. Austin, Domey makes time to be not only a full-time student and director of the Coalition but the chair of the Texas State Policy Council at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. His combined advocacy efforts regularly shift him between the Massachusetts and Texas legislatures.

Domey called the Coalition’s mission “purposefully ambiguous.” The broad purpose is “to bridge the gap between students and decision-makers,” though he didn’t set parameters around the type of “decision makers” members should target, nor the specific actions they should take to reach them. 

He likened the group to a sort-of universal puzzle piece, ready to fit in wherever needed.  

Raising awareness around student perspectives on mental health is one key focus. Members utilize a variety of platforms, like Substack, to publish their ideas on concerns, from suicide prevention and basic needs support to combatting loneliness.

A new webinar series the group launched similarly promotes young voices, and also puts them in conversation with experts. In June, the first webinar centered on the importance of K-12 mental health education to set up students for success in college and beyond. The second, airing in August, will be a “town hall” for students to share their thoughts on “the state of higher education going into the fall semester,” Domey said. 

But being a piece of a larger “puzzle” also means finding ways to compliment the efforts of other existing organizations and individuals, hungry for a student-informed edge. 

One example of this kind of collaborative advocacy is the group’s fall 2024 visit to the White House to contribute to a roundtable discussion on suicide prevention. 

Members of the Coalition for Student Wellbeing traveled to the White House in fall 2024 to participate in a roundtable discussion about suicide prevention.

Then, this spring, the Coalition teamed up with Active Minds to produce a toolkit of resources to help students advocate for printing the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline on student ID cards — an extension of Domey’s work in Massachusetts. 

The response from those the Coalition hopes to influence has been promising, as many leaders embrace the importance of including students in mental health policymaking on campus.  

The group’s advisory board comprising top administrators and advocates, including President Domenico Grasso of the University of Michigan and President Mark Gearan of Hobart and William Smith College, offers insights and expertise to help the students refine their advocacy efforts.

Gearan said he believes the student-inspired nature of the Coalition makes it both unique in the higher education space and valuable for administrators like himself. 

“It’s not that everyone can always agree with students, but the North Star is what is best for the student experience,” he said, adding that the diversity of the Coalition’s national membership is an added advantage.  

Domey has lost track, he said, of “the amount of times that I’ve just sat down with either a president, a provost, a dean of students, and really tried to get to know their role and their perspective more to make us a better organization.”

“We’re so much better for being able to have those resources,” he added. 

Domey expressed similar enthusiasm about the quality and connectedness of his student council. “There’s honestly a very small amount of students that I would say work on youth mental health nationally,” he said. “The pro is we’ve all gotten to really know each other, and it’s a really cool community of people spread throughout the country.”

While members may come from a range of backgrounds, they share a passion for mental health and, in many cases, impressive advocacy records.

Domey met Ela Gardiner, soon-to-be sophomore at Hobart, when they were both in high school in Massachusetts and already education advocates on the state stage. Gardiner had been elected one of her high school’s delegates to the Student Advisory Council of the Board of Education. 

She also struggled with anxiety and depression, an experience that spurred her mental health advocacy in the transition from high school.

When Gardiner discovered she could no longer see her Massachusetts-licensed therapist at college in New York, she dove into trying to adjust licensure policies and ensure students don’t lose crucial support at a vulnerable time. Along the way, she joined the Coalition. 

Shira Garg, a rising junior at the University of Georgia, connected with Domey and the Coalition through an internship involving research on college student mental health screening tools. Now, her pre-med focus not only grounds an interest in wellbeing but helps spearhead the Coalition’s assessment of gaps in the mental health space.

For the Coalition’s members, the collective dedication to mental health is a major motivator.

“All the students that are involved are so passionate about the topic, and I think that in itself kind of propels each one of us to want to do more and more and more,” Garg said. “When you surround yourself with peers that really want to make change, you also follow in their footsteps.”

The objective moving forwards is recruiting more members from new backgrounds and strengthening the foundation further, Domey said. 

“It all goes back to reflecting the stories of others and really trying to be that voice for as many people as you can.”

You can reach LearningWell reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Learning Together at Florida Atlantic University

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Five years after the onset of the pandemic, concerns about the lasting impact of quarantine on the way students engage with each other and in the classroom linger. For some universities eager to intervene, one promising approach to boosting student interaction is peer-assisted learning.

At Florida Atlantic University (FAU), the Learning Assistant (LA) Program hires and trains undergraduates previously enrolled in a course to support students in subsequent semesters. Opening these new channels of engagement is improving not only the student experience but learning outcomes, too.

“In today’s day and age, students don’t talk to other students in the classroom. They go in, and they’re on their phone; they’re on their laptops,” said Jennifer Bebergal, FAU’s associate dean for academic support and student learning and leader of the LA Program. “This is an opportunity for them to build that connection.”

These connections form on multiple fronts: Beyond bringing in additional support staff, the LA program requires faculty members to redesign their course to prioritize student collaboration. In classes typically involving two-hour lectures, for example, the second half gets devoted to group work. 

In 2001, the University of Colorado Boulder developed the LA “model” in an effort to prepare students to become high school physics teachers, which the state was lacking. From one department at one university, the program has expanded to more than 120 across the country and globe.

FAU’s approach is distinct because the institution designates an administrative office to oversee and expand implementation. It gives stipends to faculty to compensate them for their redesign efforts and enforce cross-campus standards. At most schools, Bebergal said, academic centers or department heads are responsible for their own initiatives, primarily in STEM fields.

Across all institutions, though, three features of the LA Program stay the same: pedagogy, preparation, and practice. Pedagogy refers to training the LAs receive to support other students; preparation happens at weekly meetings between LAs and the professor to improve and tailor instruction; practice is what comes alive in the classroom.

LAs are not meant to teach course material but rather support the learning process. They don’t provide solutions to problems but coach students along the way.

“That’s something that we learn a lot about during our pedagogy sessions — to try to not just give them the answer but more lead them through the thinking and logically arriving at the answer,” said Sebastian Hernandez, a rising junior and repeat-LA. 

Tito Sempértegui, senior instructor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, helps lead the LA Program with Bebergal. As a professor of courses with LAs, he said he appreciates the added support in the classroom but especially how LAs provide unique insight into students’ understanding of the material.

“There’s a barrier between the students and the faculty members that is overcome with the presence of the Learning Assistants,” Sempértegui said. “Students are more likely to talk to them, and they do.”

The relatability of LAs may also help students envision their own success. “They see students who look like them, whether it’s race, gender, ethnicity,” Bebergal said. Something as simple as sharing an interest or club with an LA could help students feel more comfortable and capable in class.

Deepened classroom engagement is often the by-product. When relationships become a defining feature of the classroom experience, peers notice each other’s absences. “It builds that sense that the students matter in their experience here, and we care that they’re in class, and we care that they’re learning the material,” Bebergal said.

Connecting with an LA in his first-year math class is what led Hernandez to want to become one himself. He had arrived at FAU hoping to pursue environmental engineering, but the prospect of taking calculus was daunting.

“I had a lot of self doubt that I was actually going to be able to do it because of the math,” he said. “Later I realized that it wasn’t really that I was bad at it or there’s something wrong with math specifically.”

The support of his LA was key. “She helped me a lot, and she made the concepts seem very easy, and she even made it look exciting to the point where I really got into calculus,” Hernandez said. “So I just wanted to do that for other people.”

“She helped me a lot, and she made the concepts seem very easy, and she even made it look exciting to the point where I really got into calculus. I wanted to do that for other people.”

While taking into account anecdotal affirmations, Bebergal and her team assess learning outcomes for students in classes with LAs. As of fall 2022, the DWF (drop, withdrawal, fail) rate in both Calculus I and II had dropped by about half since the introduction of LAs in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Meanwhile, the percentage of students earning As in the courses significantly increased.

Outside class time, LAs offer office hours for students who either can’t make it to the professor’s sessions or prefer the lower-stakes environment of meeting with a peer.

As a student in class with LAs, Hernandez said LA office hours could be even more useful than receiving in-class support. “At least me, I feel a little intimidated to go to my professor’s office hours. I think he’s busy and stuff like that,” he said. Conferring with another student, he said, felt “a lot more welcoming.”

Professors take different approaches to incentivizing visiting LA office hours. In his first semester as an LA, Hernandez said, students could earn extra credit by completing a worksheet and explaining the concepts to their LA outside of class. In another course, attending LA office hours was a requirement baked into students’ final grade.

In addition to the students in the classes, LAs themselves stand to gain from the program. First, it offers paid, on-campus employment for the FAU population, one-third of which is eligible for Federal Pell Grants for exceptional student financial need.

For LAs, teaching also presents its own confidence boost, Bebergal said. “Our new LAs come in really nervous. They have imposter syndrome: ‘Yeah, I got an A in this class, but I’m not going to be able to help others.’” Over the course of the semester and into their subsequent turns in the role, she said, “you just see them grow exponentially.”

LAs aren’t just benefitting from helping students, though. They have more time one-on-one with the professor and their LA peers, too.

Hernandez said he sees the payoff on at least two fronts: “It’s very rewarding to be able to help someone,” he said. “But also, it really solidifies my own learning because I think the final step in mastering a concept is being able to teach it to someone.”

“It’s like a win-win.”

Florida Atlantic University is a member of the LearningWell Coalition. To learn more about the program, please contact Dana Humphrey at dana@learningwell.org.

You can reach LearningWell reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

The Mindful Professor 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Lindsay Baker tended to be uncomfortable with conflict, a trait that extended to her professional life as an instructor at the University of Rochester. So when she heard about the new Mindful Professor Training Program available to the school’s faculty members, she saw an opportunity to address her aversion to engaging in difficult conversations.    

“After Covid, I wanted to stay involved with learning and professional development, and this program offered the chance to focus on things related to mindfulness that I haven’t looked at in awhile,” said Baker, an instructor of opera and arts leadership. “So I started asking myself, ‘How can I be more present in a conversation that might be challenging? What’s my own stuff I can take care of and shed before tense situations, so I can be open to better conversations with students and colleagues?’”

Launched in 2023, the Mindful Professor Training Program is a semester-long initiative that guides faculty through the principles of mindful leadership, helping them not only tend to their own wellbeing but also shape healthier, more supportive classroom environments. According to a 2021 study from the Healthy Minds Network (HMS), 21 percent of faculty surveyed said supporting students in mental distress had taken a toll on their own mental health — and 61 percent believed it should be mandatory for faculty to receive basic training in how to respond to students in distress. The Mindful Professor Training Program comes out of more than just post-pandemic urgency: a deeper recognition that the mental state of those who teach affects those who learn, and vice versa. 

“If we want to support students, we have to support the faculty and staff with these tools,” said Rebecca Block, director of the program and the university’s health promotion specialist. “We’ve known that students benefit from mindfulness. But what about the faculty? They’re the ones setting the tone.”

“We’ve known that students benefit from mindfulness. But what about the faculty? They’re the ones setting the tone.”

The inspiration for the Mindful Professor program took root in the years surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty across higher education found themselves suddenly navigating Zoom classrooms and working with students in emotional crisis without training beyond empathy and instinct.

Research bore out what many were feeling intuitively. The 2021 HMS study showed that while 80 percent of faculty had spoken with students about mental health, only half felt equipped to identify emotional distress. “That was an eye-opener,” Block said. “We realized we needed a new kind of training as national data keeps on getting worse. We have to think differently because what we’re doing is not working.”

Block teamed up with consultant Lisa Critchley, whose background in mindful leadership in business settings brought a complementary expertise. Together, they created a curriculum that bridged personal mindfulness with leadership skills.

The result was a first-of-its-kind program in higher education: eight weekly workshops that combine meditation, discussion, applied classroom practices, and leadership skill-building. Critchley begins each session with a grounding meditation — breathwork, posture awareness, gratitude practices — before guiding faculty through exercises in mindful communication, self-regulation, and mentorly insight.

Lindsay Baker enrolled in the program in spring 2024 after spotting it in a faculty newsletter and joined a cohort of participants from a wide range of academic disciplines. 

“I used to have a really solid meditation practice, but it had fallen off,” she said. “I was curious whether this would help jumpstart it again and whether I could bring some of it into the classroom.”

She found that she could. From the earliest sessions, Baker was struck by the value of pausing — “arrival practices,” as she calls them. “I started incorporating little rituals into my acting classes: a breath before entering the studio, a moment of grounding before auditions. It’s simple, but it changes the space.”

Baker also found herself applying the lessons offstage. As she juggled multiple productions during a particularly intense semester, the program’s emphasis on resisting urgency helped her avoid spiraling into panic. Perhaps even more powerful was the community that the program fostered. Faculty came together across disciplines — from vocal coaches to mathematicians, from nursing faculty to researchers — that didn’t ordinarily have an opportunity to share substantive conversations.

“There was just this sense of acceptance that there is no one single way and we’re there to support each other,” Baker said. “Some people were hardcore meditators. Others said, ‘Hey, I remembered to breathe today — that’s a win.’”

Mindful Leadership, Not Just Mindfulness

What sets the Mindful Professor Training Program apart from traditional wellness offerings is its focus on leadership. While mindfulness courses for educators have existed for years, the University of Rochester’s program explicitly teaches participants how to show up for others — a skillset that can have tremendous impact on the tenor of a conversation and its outcome.

Mindful leadership equips faculty with emotional regulation skills that ripple outward. “How a teacher shows up in the classroom — whether calm or frazzled — actually influences students neurologically,” Block said, referencing the role of mirror neurons, which cause our brains to “match” the emotional state of those around us.

A teacher who brings a calm presence into a tense classroom doesn’t just feel better, Block said. They set a tone. They create an environment in which students feel more grounded, focused, and able to learn.

“Faculty who’ve gone through the program are better able to regulate their own emotions to be thoughtful when they speak, and they say it can impact the way the conversation goes,” Block said. “If you show up for a stressful conversation with a student in a calm way versus a stressful way, it’ll really affect the way the conversation goes and the way the student feels supported.”

Early results suggest the program is having an impact. Post-program surveys found 100 percent of participants incorporated mindfulness into their daily lives and teaching practices. The majority reported they’d experienced greater confidence in supporting student wellbeing and managing their own stress. And 85 percent said they were either “extremely” or “moderately” confident in their ability to use mindfulness strategies to support student wellbeing.

The program’s success has caught the attention of researchers and peers nationwide. Block and Critchley have presented their work at over a dozen national conferences and, last month, published a study in the peer-reviewed “Journal of American College Health” on the program’s measurable benefits.

To meet growing demand — and logistical challenges — the university is expanding its reach to make it easier for faculty to participate from different physical corners of the campus. This fall, a full cohort will be hosted at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Next spring, the team hopes to bring the program to the Eastman School of Music. A fully asynchronous version is also in development, aimed at increasing access for faculty with demanding schedules or at satellite campuses.

“Our goal is to meet people where they are. Sometimes the biggest barrier to participating in wellness work is just making it to the building,” Block said. “So we’re adapting.”

A Wider Movement Toward Educator Wellness

While the Mindful Professor Training Program is unique in its scope and integration of leadership training, it is part of a broader shift in higher education toward acknowledging the mental health needs of faculty.  

The University of Rochester’s broader “Well-being for Life and Learning” initiative offers an array of workshops focused on student wellness, and many faculty who complete the Mindful Professor program continue with follow-up coffee hours, self-care seminars, and classroom innovation labs.

With six cohorts completed and more than 60 graduates to date, the Mindful Professor program is gaining wider interest. Block receives regular inquiries from institutions looking to replicate the model, and when she speaks about it at conferences, she said she’s encouraged by the growing interest.

“We’re still growing,” she said. “But if our faculty feel more grounded, more connected, and more equipped to support students, that’s a win. They can really support not only student wellbeing, but their own teaching efficacy.” 

Inside the classroom, Baker is able to recognize that efficacy in the moment. “I’ve been able to identify and experience what we were talking about in the program in terms of that self-regulation and the ability to let some things go,” she said. “In those heightened moments of urgency or stress response, now I recognize what it feels like, and what I can do.”

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

Deconstructing ‘Climate Anxiety’

Posted on by Mollie Ames

On April 8, 2025, the Trump Administration announced the end to $4 million in funding for research programs at Princeton University exploring risks associated with climate change. At the time, it was the latest instance in an ongoing wave of federal cuts to environmental initiatives. But this case sparked interest for another reason: According to the press release, at least one of the programs was eliminated because it was allegedly “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.” 

Environmental experts were quick to denounce the idea that the solution to anxiety about climate change would come from avoiding research on the topic. But it’s not the first time the phrase “climate anxiety” has been summoned for political gain, on either side of the aisle. The truth is the term gets used to describe all variations of distress over the state of the Earth. Parsing out the possible interpretations is an important exercise for educators, practitioners, and students themselves. 

A 2024 study of “climate emotions” in 16- to 25-year-olds found that up to 85 percent are “worried” about climate change and its potential impact; and for around 38 percent, these worries negatively affect daily life. Concern over climate change has become so widespread among young people that it’s affecting how they vote, whom they choose to work for, what products they buy, even their decision to have children. But are young people’s responses to climate change a clinical issue to be treated? Or do they fall in line with those to most social problems, just with a catchier, more damning name?

The framing of “climate anxiety” presents something disordered in need of a cure, but from a clinical perspective, there is a distinction between an anxiety disorder and experiencing some sense of anxiety. After all, the vast majority of young people may feel worried about climate change; the majority don’t have an anxiety disorder.

“Anxiety or worry on its own isn’t necessarily a problem or something to be treated,” said Kaitlin Gallo, a Boston-based psychologist whose practice focuses on young adults and college students. She said she’s encountered a spectrum of concerns when it comes to climate change. Even among her patients who tend to have clinical-grade issues, their climate concerns do not necessarily map onto an anxiety disorder. “Oftentimes, the worry is occurring outside of the context of an anxiety disorder, and it’s just what I might call sort of a normal or understandable worry given the state of the world,” she said. 

“Anxiety or worry on its own isn’t necessarily a problem or something to be treated.”

It’s when the worry becomes “hard to control or to move on from” that it could begin to signal a deeper anxiety disorder demanding a more clinical response, Gallo said. Even then, the end goal may not be to try to get rid of the concerns.

“I think sometimes when worries are realistic, then there’s just a different way to deal with them,” she said. “Sometimes it might not be reasonable or helpful to change the thought, but rather to think about how you want to live your life in the face of that concern.”

People who experience an anxiety disorder are certainly susceptible to dark fears about a fiery end. For others, particularly young people who have more time on the earth, climate distress, even fear, may be an unavoidable part of living. 

Olivia Ferraro, a 25-year-old living in New York, said dismissals of climate change are what really makes her crazy.  

“To watch business as usual go on around you with very little recognition of how distressing the state of the planet is can be really confusing. Because you’re like, ‘Am I insane?’” she said. “This feels like a problem that we should be moving to solve with World War II urgency. Everything needs to be mobilized to prevent catastrophe.”

When she first started experiencing more acute distress about the state of the climate and its future, Ferraro was surprised at the lack of sympathy she met from family and friends, especially those she expected to understand. If anyone had asked them, she knew they would say they cared about the environment.

Realizing her regular network might not be able to give her support she needed, she started exploring other options. She was especially interested in talking to people her age, given climate change, she said, “is a threat felt uniquely the younger that you are.”

“I wanted to be with people who could share that experience of, ‘I’m freaked out because I don’t know if I’m going to have a child anymore,’ or ‘I will be my parents’ age when a lot of these predicted catastrophic shocks happen. How can I think about my life when I’m 50 where I can’t get water from the tap?’” Ferraro said.

“I wanted to be with people who could share that experience of, ‘I will be my parents’ age when a lot of these predicted catastrophic shocks happen.'”

The support group she ended up finding was one she had to help create. Eager for an in-person space in New York, she started hosting “climate cafes,” or listening circles that bring together people with environmental concerns to share how they’re feeling. 

A grassroots initiative, climate cafes have popped up with chapters nation-wide. Ferraro said they can offer relief from advocacy-related burnout or help someone who doesn’t even identify as an “environmentalist” learn about new ways to contribute to the cause. On the website for Climate Cafe NYC, the branch refers to itself as “the social home of NYC climate action.”

“A lot of it is holding hands with people as they kind of walk into that unknown, knowing that you’re doing it together and that there are other people who are experiencing this,” Ferraro said. 

Part of the purpose is helping each other avoid hopelessness. “We can be sad, but to be despaired is a totally other feeling. That’s when you’ve given up,” Ferraro said. “We want to help people avoid despair and avoid nihilism and really, even though it’s very hard work, stay openhearted and willing to connect with people and understand how we can work together.” 

The need for these kinds of outlets is evident in the many students who are bringing their climate-related concerns to school with them. Professor Sarah Jaquette Ray said the emergence of this distress in her classes pushed her down a path towards a new expertise: emotions and the environment. Now she’s chair of the environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt.

As recently as a decade ago, Ray said environmentalists were trying to ramp up concerns about climate change, with what she calls the “scare-to-care” approach. Opening young people’s eyes to the devastation that could come, the thinking went, would inspire them to act, before it was too late.

The strategy may have worked, but too well. Ray said she saw students becoming more enthusiastic about climate-related issues, but they also seemed more despairing. “I was noticing my students were not coping very well with the material,” she said. “I didn’t think my teaching was changing, but something was changing about the students.”

Up to that point, Ray had felt like her students were taking the issues in stride, embracing problem solving. With time, she said, “It felt more like an existential crisis for them.” She decided part of the problem was that students were learning a lot about what was going wrong and a lot less about how to manage their own response to the problems. “They weren’t learning all that stuff alongside coping skills or emotional intelligence or any kind of cultural frame as to why these things might be getting worse,” she said.

She set out to fill the gap. Research into the spiritual and therapeutic tools activists have used in other social movements became the basis of an understanding about how to deal with climate concerns. This mental health-forward approach to environmental issues also appears in her book “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.”

Still, Ray continues to wait for the day when higher education institutions have integrated trauma-informed instruction and emotional intelligence into environmental education. That component “is just beginning to percolate on the edges of the tipping point,” she said. 

William Throop, professor emeritus and former provost at Green Mountain College, is also interested in activating a more personal dimension of environmental studies. For the philosopher-by-training, with a background teaching environmental ethics, it’s important to not only present possible climate change solutions to students but equip them with the life skills to enact them. This is an approach he views as part of “character education,” which he said prioritizes “the student as a person, not just as a collector of information.”

By learning what he calls “skillful habits,” Throop said, students stand to become “better critical thinkers, better ethical thinkers and actors.” In his book, “Flourishing in the Age of Climate Change,” he discusses a set of “hope skills” particularly helpful for confronting climate issues.

“Hope communication,” for example, is a skill Throop suggests could be particularly pertinent for tackling climate change. “How do you describe in a clear way the facts of a situation which are problematic and yet don’t turn people off?” he said. “How do you motivate people who address those facts in the way you communicate about them?”

Teaching hope, Throop said, might sound “like something a psychologist ought to do.” He thinks otherwise. “It’s something that should be embedded in curricula addressing these issues.”

As some faculty become more in tune with how students react to learning about climate change, students continue to turn towards each other to process the emotions they are experiencing. 

Eva Salmon, a rising junior at Barnard College, said she doesn’t usually struggle with anxiety in other facets of life; yet concerns about the climate are a constantly “simmering undertone” in the back of her mind. “In general, seeing everything happening in the world, it feels like my heart is constantly breaking, and I’m constantly experiencing a sense of betrayal.”

“Anytime it’s relevant, I can feel the grief. I can feel the anxiety. It really is there,” she said.

Compounding these emotions for students is the sense that their institutions are leaving them to lead the way alone. That’s the consensus among many members of Sunrise Columbia, the Columbia University branch of the Sunrise Movement, a national youth climate activism effort. 

Because it’s independent from the university, Sunrise Columbia can hold the administration’s feet to the fire in ways a club receiving school funding can’t. The student-run group conducts its own investigations into the university’s use of funds from fossil fuel companies to fund climate research. 

“Complicit Columbia” is the 53-page report the students published on their findings that the university accepted at least $43.7 million from fossil fuel companies between 2005 to 2024. More than a third of the funds benefitted the university’s research hub, the Center on Global Energy Policy.

Salmon, one of the student authors of the paper, said she takes issue with the fact that students, rather than university personnel, were the ones to take on this initiative. “The university needs to be more attuned and aware and doing its own research into these things. But for now, this is what we have,” she said.

The group of friends Salmon collaborates with has been key to keeping her motivated despite her frustrations. In general, she said she believes “a lot of the bad that’s happening in the world” is the result of “not prioritizing community” and disconnect among people. It’s a problem she feels grateful not to have. 

“To have found community and the space in the way that I have really has brought me a lot of peace and joy,” she said. The sense of support pushes her activism to the next level. “I think I would’ve done it regardless, but I don’t think I would’ve felt quite as empowered and impassioned.”

“At the end of the day, even if all this is happening around us, we have each other. And that feels like a very powerful, powerful thing,” she added.

Salmon’s overriding objective is to stay positive, to concentrate on the friends that are supporting her and the work they do together that bring her relief. “I really try and focus on recognizing the beauty in every step I take or recognizing things I like around me and just expressing gratitude for that,” she said. 

Olivia Ferraro, the climate cafe host, has adopted a similar outlook. While “climate anxiety” may be more apparent in her life than it was a few years ago, that discomfort has fed a deeper appreciation for the time she has left and a desire to make the most of it. It’s a guiding force that has changed her approach to relationships and decision-making.

“It’s been really freeing, honestly,” she said. “I like my life a lot more now than I ever did before.”