Author: Mollie Ames

Ethan Barden spent most of his life striving to be a person of good character without thinking about it in those exact terms. He grew up the youngest of four children, with a mother who often reminded him he didn’t need to be older to lead by example. He’s also an army brat, whose frequent moves across the country and overseas acquainted him with the world as well as service and sacrifice. After high school, he imagined participating in the Reserve Officers Training Corps program in college and, one day, becoming a physician in the army.

At the University of Dubuque in Dubuque, Iowa, good character became something Barden could pursue with new intention. Not only did he join the R.O.T.C. program but he got involved at the Presbyterian university’s Wendt Center for Character and Leadership, which offers students a formal opportunity to reflect on and develop their character. While the Wendt Center launched more than 20 years ago, Barden, now a junior, arrived at a time when the program was turning a page. With a change in leadership has come added avenues for young people, like Barden, to begin realizing who they want to be long after they graduate. 

More colleges and universities have recently begun launching character education initiatives, but far fewer are dedicating entire centers to the work. That U.D. carved out this focus decades ago means it now occupies a well-known space not only on the physical grounds but in the spirit of the school. The Wendt Center’s location on campus right next to the president’s office indeed reflects its support from the highest levels of the university. From the top down, U.D. is cultivating a culture of holistic education with character at its core.

Multiple members of the faculty and staff said they chose to work at U.D. because of a distinct sense that the school invests in its students and employees as people, not just academics. That’s what drew in Liza Johnson, who is now in her second year as the director of the Wendt Center. “What makes us so unique is that it’s not just a mission,” she said of U.D.’s emphasis on whole-person education. “We actually live that out.” 15 years ago, Johnson arrived to work in career services before taking on a role of her own design as the director for personal empowerment. She created this position and program after participating in a professional development workshop that focused on emotional intelligence, living purposefully, and modeling those capacities for students. Over the next decade, she crafted similar opportunities for U.D. faculty and staff as well as a course for students, which can now fulfill a general education requirement. 

For Johnson, taking the reins at the Wendt Center has been an opportunity to pull from her expertise in personal empowerment to deepen the impact of character education. She’s pinpointed four primary “pursuits,” or outcomes, that emphasize both individual and communal growth to serve as the Wendt Center’s new pillars. They are: seeking knowledge and insight, supporting wellbeing, strengthening community, and serving others. “Those four things have to be part of the culture — have to be part of what we are doing as a community to be able to cultivate good character,” she said.

Essentially, the plan is to imbue character work into every element of the college experience.

Johnson is also taking a fresh approach to implementation. She doesn’t just want students to know in their heads that it’s important to exhibit good character. She wants to empower them to feel it in their hearts — for the lessons to take root in ways of thinking and belief systems that last far beyond graduation. She’s betting this kind of resonance will only be possible through programming that is particularly relational and experiential. “We’re not just having them sit and listen,” she said. “We’re actually creating experiences for them so that they can really feel and live what we’re trying to inspire them to do.”

Essentially, the plan is to imbue character work into every element of the college experience. On the academic side, Johnson and her team have ramped up work with faculty to assess and support infusing character into coursework. One example is the inclusion of character-focused curriculum in the World View Seminar series, which is also a general education requirement. Meanwhile, professors like Rafic Sinno, who heads U.D.’s business and accounting department, have led efforts to bring character topics relevant to their field — emotional intelligence or ethical behavior — into their classes. “That’s been an intentional development across the whole curriculum,” Sinno said, “where we really emphasize some of those soft skills that make all the difference in the business world.”

Outside the classroom, the long-standing Character Scholar program selects 11 to 12 students from each class and engages them in in-depth character development work, including weekly activities, mentorship, and service work. These scholars also receive an annual stipend of $3,500. For all other interested students, Johnson will be launching a co-curricular program called Pathways to Purpose. Additional offerings include faculty and staff-focused character discussions, programming, and training; cross-campus awards for upstanding character; and lectures on character for the U.D. campus and wider Dubuque community. 

“It’s all sorts of different little activities,” Barden said of his work in the Character Scholar program. “But at the end of the day, it’s always about inward reflection and how we can change our mindset, perception, or our actions in hopes to grow our character and evolve, I guess, as humans.” In their weekly Monday meetings, the scholars might practice mindfulness, discuss a book they read, or hear from guest speakers. Barden’s been especially focused on embodying compassion and leadership, as those are the capacities he sees himself needing not only now — as a student, friend, and, most recently, husband — but in his future career in the military. He doesn’t take that responsibility lightly. 

Another major part of the scholar program — and Johnson’s relational approach — is mentorship. Nathan Hough, an associate professor of psychology, serves as a mentor for close to a dozen scholars, including Barden. Once a month, he hosts his students in his home for dinner, as do the other mentors. The personal setting, he’s found, is more conducive to deeper conversations among the scholars about their lives and struggles. “I think it’s vital when you’re looking at character development that you have someone who can mentor you and help you process and talk about it. ‘These are the parts of me that I need to work on and to improve on so that my character is where I want it to be.’” 

Indeed, character work isn’t easy, and students and faculty alike may need some handholding to get their footing. In certain academic departments, the connection to character education can be less clear. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. “If you look at someone in a math class, they still have to look at things like tenacity and work ethic and honesty and openness,” Hough said. He is a member of the Wendt Center’s advisory board designed to steer the way forward and galvanize support from all corners of campus. 

For Barden, who has been learning about character for more than a year now, the process has never been easy, but it has been worth it. “I think character is probably the hardest thing to teach — definitely one of the hardest — because it’s a lot of judgment and individuality that comes into character,” he said. “But to me, it’s a journey of self-discovery.”

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

In their book, “The Real World of College,” Harvard Graduate School of Education researchers Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner discovered something concerning about how today’s students view the world. After interviews with over a thousand students at 10 diverse campuses, they found that students had said the word “I” eleven times as frequently as they said “we.”  The researchers took that to mean that students had a preoccupation with themselves and less of an interest in, well, “us.”  

“As a result of that research, we became very concerned that students were so focused on themselves — their grades, their resumes, their getting that first job — they had little interest or time to think about any campus problems, local challenges, or world-wide issues,” Fischman said.  

While there are many in higher education, indeed in the country, who share that concern, Fischman and Gardner are exploring how college experiences might address it. Their new research initiative is aimed at understanding what it takes to broaden students’ perspective so they might consider how their actions influence those “beyond the self” — from the student down the hall to the wider world.  

All of this work is part of Project Zero, a research center at Harvard dedicated to understanding and nurturing human potentials, such as learning, thinking, ethics, intelligence, and creativity. Characterized as a study of “character education,” this latest research involves rigorous interviews with students and alumni from schools that make character a priority, particularly through efforts that encourage caring for others. These may span strong missions and first-year seminars to service-learning capstones and reflective courses. Fischman and Gardner’s goal is to understand if any are having an impact — both for students over the course of college and for alums beyond college — in moving the needle from “I” to “we.” 

Fischman believes the research fills both a need and a void. “There are a lot of resources and efforts ostensibly focused on character education, but we don’t know what actually works, what endures over time,” she said. “What we are trying to do is to understand what students and alums take away from these messages, initiatives, and missions, so we can begin to understand which are most effective. More importantly, with empirical data, we may be able to show that higher education makes a difference in how individuals think about, act toward, and possibly make a difference in the lives of others.”

Evaluating how well colleges produce good citizens might seems like an “off-trend” effort in a world seemingly obsessed with financial and employment metrics. But given that this easier-to-get hard data has dominated the debate over the value of a college degree, the researchers believe that providing strong evidence of higher education’s more enduring outcomes, including awareness of and empathy for others, is more important than ever.  Without this pursuit, Gardner asks, “What is the point?” 

“If universities and colleges simply have as their goal helping students to get jobs, they will either become vocational institutions or will cede their whole raison d’etre to the private sector, which can train more quickly and less expensively,” Gardner said. “Institutions of higher education should have a broader goal. And especially in the U.S. at the present time, helping others in the community and in the broader society as well as helping oneself would seem highly desirable on all counts.”

Beyond the Self

The Harvard team’s “I” to “we” work is closely aligned with another related finding reported in “The Real World of College.” In their analysis, Fischman and Gardner discerned mental models among students that included a transactional view of college (do what is required to get the degree) and a transformational view of college (question and reflect about one’s own values and beliefs with the possibility and aspiration of being changed, hopefully in constructive ways.)

The researchers identified a measure called HEDCAP (Higher Education Capital), defined as intellectual capacities that students gain as a result of going to college — skills they use to analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate about issues, ideas, and perspectives. For many like Fischman and Gardner, HEDCAP is the ultimate metric on which to gauge the value of a college degree, but currently, it is very difficult to demonstrate. 

“With empirical data, we may be able to show that higher education makes a difference in how individuals think about, act toward, and possibly make a difference in the lives of others.”

Shortly after the release of “The Real World of College,” Fischman, Gardner, and their team embarked on a project called “Beyond the Self,” aimed at understanding how a more transformational college experience, involving engagement with community, might move the “I” to “we” student needle. With 150 students on three different college campuses, they piloted the program aimed at “nudging” students to become more sensitive to campus problems and ethical dilemmas, recognizing that their responses, behaviors, and actions meant something. 

The students were asked to keep portfolios of different dilemmas and problems they had heard about, learned about, read about, or observed and to document their thinking about them through writing, illustrations, or news clippings about them. The researchers talked with the students four times a year about their reflections and were pleased with the results they gathered after the first year.

“We were able to demonstrate that this approach made a difference. We were able to move students from just thinking about themselves to also thinking about others,” Fischman said. 

With evidence of their intervention, Fischman, Gardner, and their team were poised to implement the program at other schools, but a number of factors led them to change course. There were already a myriad of character-based programs and messages in schools throughout the country. Adding another, albeit a promising  one, seemed redundant. Instead, the team focused on what was missing: a larger assessment effort that could show the efficacy, or lack thereof, of these efforts.  

“When we began to ask people how they knew their programs and missions were working, we’d be met with blank stares,” Fischman said. “To our knowledge no one was evaluating or assessing the longer-term impact of efforts that focused on helping student think beyond themselves.” 

With continuous support from the Kern Family Foundation, the team’s new research initiative aims to examine character programs that have a specific outward perspective, not just those that develop individual dispositions such as humility, intellectual curiosity, or honesty, though there is a fair amount of overlap. The researchers are now working with about 30 schools — some with a religious orientation, some with strong public service programs, most with a well-defined mission about doing good in the world.  

The launch-pad question is always the same: For those institutions that make character and ethics a priority, what is the value-add? This exploration leads into three follow-up questions: “Does an institution’s mission, programs, and/or courses on character, ethics, and leadership deepen students’ and alums’ understanding of their role as workers and citizens? Do these initiatives shape students’ perspectives and development over the course of college — and, if so, how? Can we find evidence that these efforts have a lasting impact on students’ and alums’ professional and civic lives?” 

This is not the kind of information one can get from surveys, and it’s certainly more difficult to obtain than economic data like first-year earnings. To meet this challenge, Fischman, Gardner, and their team employ a qualitative method that brings deep, iterative reflection to the analysis, something that has become their signature contribution to the field.   

“We meet with students for 45 minutes to an hour in in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews,” said Sophie Blumert, one of the lead researchers on the project. “We never tell students what we are looking for. We ask them a wide range of open-ended questions, so it feels like having a good conversation with another person but someone who isn’t connected to your school. So students feel more free to open up.”  

Fischman said the approach involves listening carefully to what students say and what they don’t say. “When we ask people about their college experience, what they are getting out of it, and what they want from it, if they don’t mention these efforts, those are data.” 

The third-party nature of research means that they are able to go beyond just “self-reporting” to make sense of what the students are telling them. For example, they ask questions about the news as an unobtrusive way to understand students’ and alums’ interest in others beyond themselves. The prompt might be: “Do you stay informed about current issues in the news?” And then: “If so, how? If not, why not?”

The team also asks about mission with open-ended questions such as: “From your perspective, do you think that your school has any particular goals for its students? How do you think your school makes these goals known?”  

Understanding how well students comprehend their school’s mission is a reflection of an existing theory on the negative effects of what Fischman and Gardner coined “mission mishmash.” 

“Schools have so many priorities and so many aspirations for students that mission becomes all over the map,” she said. “And in the wake of that, students are forced to make assumptions about what is most important themselves. When all they hear about is jobs and resume building, then that’s what they focus on.” 

The inclusion of alumni in this work is particularly important. Interviewing graduates who are one year out, five years out, and ten years out about how their experiences in college influenced who they are as people can show whether these programs have any effect on the older adults who once participated in them as students.  

If Fischman knows the answer, she won’t yet reveal it, as the team is in the midst of taking on new schools, continuing to collect information, and analyze the data. She did, however, mention that in analyzing HEDCAP relative to mental models, she’s seen that students with transactional views of their college experience are more likely to have a lower score of HEDCAP, whereas students with a transformational mental model are more likely to have higher HEDCAP.  

Fischman said findings like this give her hope, and perseverance. 

“We can develop higher education capital. We can move students from a transactional mindset to a transformational one. We can get students to go beyond themselves, but we need to show that higher education can do this with empirical data, and, currently, that doesn’t exist.” 

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

Khaleigh Reed stood onstage recently at the University of Colorado Boulder introducing an author she admired: Ibram X. Kendi, the writer of “How to Be an Antiracist.” The event was the keynote of the university’s five-day Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, and the role was an honor for the senior, president of the Black Women’s Alliance. 

It was a moment she could not have imagined just a few years earlier, beginning community college in her hometown of Colorado Springs. At the time, applying to a four-year university felt out of reach with the limited scholarships available to her. But after a few years of deliberate academic and financial planning, Reed found herself not just introducing Kendi onstage but nearing completion of a bachelor’s degree and considering jobs and graduate programs beyond.

“The transition from community college to Boulder wasn’t always easy, but this is the way it worked for me,” said Reed, a senior. “Now I’m in a great place. I’m a very different person than I was then, and I saved a lot of money.”

Reed’s journey from a local community college to a bachelor’s degree represents one of many ways to achieve career credentials. The latest figures for higher education show a small uptick in enrollment and underscore the significance of community college — as well as students’ growing awareness of their diverse options. Overall enrollment figures from fall 2025 show a 1 percent increase, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Within that number are micro stories: The community college sector experienced a 3 percent increase, the lion’s share of growth, while public four-year colleges went up 1.4 percent. Private for-profit and nonprofit four-year colleges saw a decline of 2 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively.

The figures reflect more than the current crisis of affordability, said Martha Parham, senior vice president of public relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, though there’s that. They affirm the tactical, versatile ways community college helps students achieve their career goals — whether that involves gaining transfer credits affordably, training to join a manufacturing workforce, or testing one’s chops in the arts.

“The strategic use of community college is just a smart way when we think about the student loan crisis and excessive debt,” she said. “Community colleges are responsive to the needs of their local communities, they’re accredited, they’re affordable, and they’re accessible.” 

What appears to be fueling growing interest now is their role in the conversation about return on investment and students’ strategic appreciation of the ways they can customize offerings for their own goals.

There is a well-documented history of prominent Americans who’ve attended community colleges. Jackie Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became the first athlete to letter in four sports. Steve Jobs took classes at De Anza College after leaving Reed College. Arnold Schwarzenegger studied business at Santa Monica College after immigrating to the United States, his accessible entry point into American entrepreneurship. Designer Eileen Fisher, chef Guy Fieri, and performers Queen Latifah, Halle Berry, and Tom Hanks all credit community college with giving them their starts.

About 40 to 45 percent of all undergraduate students in the United States are enrolled in community college, a figure that swelled to its current levels dramatically in the late 20th century and has been fairly constant since. What appears to be fueling growing interest now is their role in the conversation about return on investment and students’ strategic appreciation of the ways they can customize offerings for their own goals: for dual enrollment (high school students taking courses), associate’s degree and certification programs, and affordable credit attainment en route to a bachelor’s degree. 

High Schoolers in Higher Ed

Of the added 3 percent of students who enrolled in community colleges in fall 2025, almost one third of them were 17 or younger, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — meaning, they were still in high school. This “dual enrollment” status enables students to earn transferable college credits before they graduate. What was once a niche option for advanced students has become a more mainstream pathway, a way to reduce college costs and accelerate time to degree. And in some communities where high schools are under-resourced, community college can be the only way students can take the courses they need to pursue more challenging or specialized paths.

When Emily Harmon attended high school in a rural corner of northeast New York, her small school didn’t offer many science options. A single K-12 building served about 330 students, didn’t offer any Advanced Placement or honors classes, and had limited electives. She wanted to pursue engineering and, throughout her junior and senior years, took classes at two community colleges. After graduation, she attended Cornell with a full scholarship. 

In this way, dual enrollment blurs the boundary between secondary and postsecondary education, reframing college credits as something students can work toward directly while in high school — for a cost, Harmon noted, not much more than the price would have been to take the A.P. exam toward college credit.

“In the world of underfunded rural public education, it was decent setup,” she recalled. “I think it’s always a good thing to show that you took the most advanced classes possible in your situation, and in my case, that’s how I could do it. And if I went to a New York state college or a less stringent private university, I could’ve placed out of a lot with those credits.” Cornell did not accept the credits for her science classes taken in high school. But Harmon notes that one of her classmates who took the same science classes was able to enter the State University of New York at Albany with the credits of a mid-year sophomore. 

Certifications and the Pipeline to E.M.T.s, Apple, and BMW

Two-year degrees and short-term certificate programs — many designed to be completed in months — draw students to community college seeking fast, practical routes into the workforce. These programs are often built in close partnership with regional employers and tailored to labor needs.

This workforce focus is not incidental; it is foundational. Many of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. economy now require education beyond high school, but not necessarily a four-year degree. Community colleges occupy that middle ground, translating employer demand into credentials that are short, targeted, and relatively affordable. They train the majority of the nation’s nurses and first responders, as well as workers in fields like advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, and logistics — roles that keep regional economies running but rarely feature in the public’s image of higher education.

To get a sense of what’s available, prospective students need only call their local community college, which in many cases, has programs aligned with other communities and states, as well.

“There are thousands of different programs across the country that speak to a local workforce with global computing skills, like an Arizona school with an environment to train cyber security experts mimicking real hacking scenarios,” said Parham of the A.A.C.C. “But we also have very local programs that service the local workforce with curricula that align directly with available regional jobs. South Carolina has a program for certified BMW mechanics. Tesla does in its backyard. I’ve seen slot machine repair technicians come out of programs in Nevada. Community colleges are responsive to local business needs.” 

The appeal of these programs extends beyond recent high school graduates. Community colleges enroll a disproportionate number of older students — parents, midcareer workers, and people returning to school after job disruptions — many of whom are balancing education with work and family responsibilities. For them, short-term credentials offer a quicker return on investment and a clearer link between education and employment than traditional degree programs.

Community College as On-ramp to a Bachelor’s Degree

When he was a high-performing high school junior in Massachusetts, Robert carved out a unique way to enrich both his academic path and his passions while saving money. After he graduated high school, he spent one year taking core courses at a local community college while performing gig work in a regional jazz ensemble. A year later, when he was accepted into the University of Massachusetts Amherst Commonwealth Honors College, he was able to focus exclusively on his joint degree in math and computer science. 

“Community College allowed him to knock out all prerequisite courses,” said his mother, who is a youth career coach. She praised the excellent adjuncts at her son’s community college, where teaching was grounded in real-world experience. “Financially, the cost for the year was 10 percent of a residential private or out-of-state public four-year college. And the wider age range of peers really helped younger students see how adults process a day of mixed learning and work, which was a great model for being organized and serious.”

This use of community college as a low-cost on-ramp to a bachelor’s degree is a popular one. Like Khaleigh Reed, students accrue basic credits at a local community college for a year or two, then plan to transfer to a four-year institution — maintaining a minimum G.P.A. to take advantage of transfer-guarantee and articulation agreements that allow students to move seamlessly into public four-year institutions. Programs such as California’s Associate Degree for Transfer and the New England Transfer Guarantee are designed to remove uncertainty from the process while dramatically reducing the cost of a bachelor’s degree. Currently, about 31 states have some form of transfer program to ensure and ease transition to the state’s public universities.

All of which sounds good on paper. But life has a way of being complex, particularly for students whose family, financial, and work circumstances made four-year college difficult in the first place. An estimated 80 percent of community college students begin with the intention to pursue a four-year degree, a transfer process often called the “2+2 pathway.” In actuality, about 30 percent do transfer to a four-year school within six years, and roughly half of those complete the bachelor’s degree, according to a joint report by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University; the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program; and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.  

“Priorities change. Life gets lifey. I had all the best intentions of finishing or trying something new, but fate throws you a few curve balls,” said Yvette, a single mother and social services administrator in Rhode Island. “Sometimes your workaround ends up being fine after all. What I do is rewarding.” 

Education is, after all, a course of discovery, and a lower-priced school lowers the stakes if the path ends up not being the right one. Knowing that outcomes can be mixed makes the price point especially important. What is the harm in of venturing to take a basic class in computing, or introduction to acting? 

Tom Hanks is a case in point. He took some classes at Chabot Community College, where he first began to study acting, then transferred to state college for a year before dropping out to pursue acting full-time. “That place made me what I am today,” he wrote in a New York Times opinion piece and love letter to the appetite-whetting possibilities of community college.

The experience, he wrote, was formative not because it pointed immediately to a career, but because it allowed him to experiment without the financial pressure to decide too quickly — an approach he later credited with shaping how he thinks about storytelling and creative work. 

“Classes I took at Chabot have rippled through my professional pond. I produced the HBO mini-series ‘John Adams’ with an outline format I learned from a pipe-smoking historian, James Coovelis, whose lectures were riveting,” he wrote. “High school graduates without the finances for a higher education can postpone taking on big loans and maybe luck into the class that will redefine their life’s work.”

Hanks, for one, is a big fan of free community college, some form of which is available in about 35 states. These programs, many called College Promise or Reconnect, often offer two years of free tuition for eligible in-state students who meet certain conditions, like G.P.A. requirements and income limits.

His hope, he wrote, is that free community college will lower obstacles to veterans, mothers, workers who have been out of the job market, and high school graduates without the finances for a higher education who might luck into the class that will inspire their life’s work.

“Many lives,” he wrote, “will be changed.”