Category: Flourishing

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.”

On an overcast afternoon last fall, Khaleigh Reed stood with crowds at the University of Colorado Boulder football stadium. She had transferred to the school the year before and had been feeling “kind of alien.” The game ended, and she stood talking to people she’d only recently met. As the skies opened into rain, the crowd spilled out of the stands and onto the grass, and she and her new friends joined them, laughing together and running with the large gathering of students. 

For Reed, a senior journalism major who had transferred from a community college at the start of her junior year, the moment felt cinematic.

“I’d hit it off with these two people at the game, and we were all, like, excited and happy,” she recalled. “I had this sense of relief, and with the rain and friends and community all running onto the field, it was like the feel-good end of a movie. After everything I’d been through, I was able to find some happiness.”

Months later, that memory would become an actual scene, the emotional center of a three-minute digital story Reed created as part of a pilot project housed at C.U. Boulder’s Renée Crown Wellness Institute. The project invited more than a half-dozen undergraduate students to craft multimedia narratives about their own experiences of “flourishing” — a positive term the institute uses without rigid definition.

Reed’s experience became part of a prototype for a new digital storytelling initiative being designed by the Crown Institute to be shared with educators the Flourishing Academic Network, or FAN, a consortium of universities committed to advancing wellbeing in higher education. At one level, the project was intimate: nine undergraduates meeting over six sessions, workshopping drafts and learning how to shape a story that could be shared aloud. At another level, the project was taking shape as the infrastructure of something larger. What unfolded in those rooms would eventually be distilled into a physical toolkit — a carefully designed, printable and digital guide intended to help other campuses create similar spaces for student storytelling.  

“One of our aims is to elevate youth voice,” said Michelle Shedro, a researcher at the Crown Institute who helped lead the project and design the toolkit. “Not just as an outcome, but as a way of doing the work. Tapping into youth voice is both a tool and a goal of ours.”

A Container for Voice

The digital storytelling pilot grew out of a broader question the Crown Institute has been asking for years: How do students themselves understand wellbeing?

Founded in 2018, the Crown Institute conducts interdisciplinary, participant-based research on youth and adult wellness. Its work spans maternal mental health, K-12 education, and campus-based initiatives such as Mindful Campus, a long-running program that offers courses and programming for students, faculty, and staff. But the digital storytelling project marked a distinct turn — one that placed student voice not only at the center of the findings but at the center of the method.

Rather than asking students to respond to surveys or predefined frameworks, the institute invited them to tell stories — in their own voices, with their own images, shaped through a guided but flexible process of storytelling in multimedia form.

“Digital storytelling is very adaptable to various disciplines and topics. People have many different ways of telling their stories, and it’s really dynamic and fun,” Shedro said. “So we wanted to give young people the tools to do this, and we also wanted to be able to learn from what they create around the question: What does flourishing mean to you?”

In this way, the project is both research and invitation, said Jenna Bensko, the outreach and education project manager at the Crown Institute. “When we create the container — the opportunity — and when students feel a sense of belonging, the flourishing happens.”

To facilitate the pilot, the Crown Institute partnered with faculty from the University of Colorado Denver, including Marty Otañez, an associate professor of anthropology and a longtime practitioner of community-based digital storytelling. Otañez described the work less as teaching students how to edit video and more as helping them learn how to land a story. Over six sessions totaling 24 hours, students moved through a carefully sequenced process: journaling and free-writing, story circles, writers’ workshops, and storyboarding before ever opening editing software. 

The early sessions focused almost entirely on building trust — learning one another’s names, sharing fragments of ideas, listening without rushing to respond. “The soul of the process is community,” Otañez says. “You can’t shortcut that.”

Only later did the technical work begin: recording voiceovers, selecting images, and learning DaVinci Resolve, the editing platform used during the pilot. Even then, Otañez emphasized restraint. Images were meant to deepen meaning, not illustrate every noun. Metaphor mattered more than polish. But at the core of it all was each person’s choice of a story, which for Otanez is part of the rich process of discovery and reminder to always expect the unexpected. 

“Some of the things surprised me, and this is always the case. Some students are really quiet and maybe a little reserved, and so we never know what we’re going to get,” he said. “And then sometimes their stories are just so rich because with their introversion, they’re thinking so much and so deeply, and they come up with these beautiful pieces.” 

The Crown Institute’s framing of flourishing provided a lens, not a script. Students were encouraged to ask where flourishing appeared in their stories but not required to prove that it did.

The nine students who participated came from across campus — political science, finance, health sciences, journalism. Few had prior experience with digital storytelling. Some arrived with clear ideas, and others discovered their stories only after listening to their peers.

Reed remembered one classmate who shared a story about a serious health crisis — hospitalization, uncertainty, learning to live with a chronic condition. “You would never have known just by looking at them,” she said. “That really stayed with me.”

The story circle, where students read drafts aloud and receive guided feedback, became one of the most powerful sessions of the pilot. “It was like journaling,” Reed said, “but with a community.”

Students learned not only how to receive feedback, but how to give it — asking questions that clarified rather than corrected and noticing what lingered emotionally rather than what could be fixed mechanically.

One thing that interested both the facilitators and the Crown Institute organizers was the nuanced way the students seemed to accept that flourishing was a work in progress, found as much in small moments as in large ones. 

One student used hair-braiding as a metaphor for independence and belonging. Another traced academic growth through mountain climbing. Others spoke about illness, procrastination, loneliness, or the quiet relief of finding a place to stand. The stories that emerged resisted tidy conclusions.

What unified the stories was their honesty, and the facilitators had to respond without an agenda. “We were very careful not to force the message into the stories,” Otañez says. “Otherwise you lose the essence.” 

That tension — between institutional goals and individual truth — shaped the project throughout. The Crown Institute’s framing of flourishing provided a lens, not a script. Students were encouraged to ask where flourishing appeared in their stories but not required to prove that it did.

“In a lot of higher ed discourse, we focus on how hard things are,” Shedro said. “That’s real. But we also wanted to create space for hope, without denying complexity.”

At the end of the pilot, the group gathered for a small screening event. Friends, faculty, and family members attended. Each film played, and each student spoke briefly about the process. Audience members noticed things the facilitators had missed — small gestures, lines that echoed, moments that felt larger than intended. The narratives developed lives of their own in the eyes, ears, and minds of the audience. 

“That’s always what amazes me about storytelling,” Otañez said. “Once the story leaves you, it becomes something else.”

Beyond the Pilot

The digital storytelling pilot at C.U. Boulder was never intended to remain a one-off experience, contained within a single semester or a single group of students. From the outset, the Crown Institute team understood the pilot as a way of learning how to design a methodology that others might eventually adapt. Out of that work, a digital storytelling toolkit is emerging, one intended to be freely available as a PDF for use across the FAN consortium. The toolkit is not a script or a curriculum to be followed verbatim. Instead, it offers a flexible framework shaped by what unfolded during the pilot itself.

“We observed everything,” said Shedro, who led the writing and design of the toolkit. “What worked, what stalled, where students needed more time, where they needed less.”

The resulting document is organized into three broad units: an introduction to flourishing and digital storytelling; guided opportunities for writing, story circles, and reflection; and hands-on production work, including storyboarding and media assembly. Throughout, the emphasis is less on technical mastery than on process — listening, revising, choosing what to include and what to leave out.

There are recommended minimum hours, suggested facilitator ratios, and sample prompts, but little insistence on uniform outcomes. That was intentional by design.

“We wanted something that could live in a lot of different contexts,” Bensko said. “A semester-long course. A co-curricular program. A student organization. It needed to be adaptable.”

That adaptability reflects a central insight of the pilot: the definition of flourishing can’t be standardized any more than the stories that attempt to capture it. Some students told tightly framed narratives about specific moments. Others traced longer arcs — from illness, from isolation, from uncertainty toward something steadier but unresolved. The toolkit preserves that openness, encouraging facilitators to resist steering stories toward predetermined conclusions.

But equally important, Shedro noted, was laying the groundwork for collaboration — the time spent building trust and guiding students in the most effective ways to be active listeners and give constructive feedback.

In FAN meetings, interest in the toolkit has already begun to circulate, though the Crown Institute team has been careful not to rush its release. For the students who participated in the pilot, the toolkit is beside the point — a downstream product. What stays with them instead are the stories themselves and the experience of being trusted to tell and hear them.

For Khaleigh Reed, soon to enter the field of journalism, the potent experience with multimedia storytelling became further evidence of all you don’t know about a person unless you ask questions and listen well.  

“You never know what someone’s going through,” she said. “This project gave us a way to see that.”

Listen Here:

California-based Jennifer Klein is a single mom and freelance sign language interpreter whose income varies from one month to the next. When her daughter began applying to four-year colleges last year, the cost to attend was always going to be front and center. But Klein is also remarried, which changes the math in the eyes of FAFSA (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Figuring out what school her daughter could afford to attend was a confusing landscape.

Given a lack of easily accessible information on college affordability, Klein and her daughter did what many families do: applied to schools of interest and hoped for the best when it came to scholarships and aid. “I told her to apply wherever she wanted and we’d see what happens,” Klein said. “I just jumped in and filled out FAFSA, having no idea if that was helping or hurting.”

Klein’s daughter is a high-performing student, so they had that in their corner. After whittling down her list and sending out applications to colleges in the West Coast region, Klein’s daughter received good news: The University of California, Davis offered her the prestigious Regents Scholarship, worth $7,500 per year. The state of California also chipped in $7,400 through its Middle Class Scholarship, bringing the $46,000 sticker price down to approximately $30,000. Additionally, Klein took out a Parent PLUS loan to help round out the remaining costs not covered by savings and income.

In the grand scheme of things, the Kleins had an easy ride. But for lower-income and first-generation students who have had little to no exposure to the complex college affordability equation, there’s often a sense of helplessness. High schools may not have the resources to adequately inform these students about monies available to them. Left with not much more than the sticker price they read on a college website, many students give up and fall through the cracks, never knowing what funding might be available. 

According to the National College Attainment Network, these students left $4.4 billion in unclaimed Pell Grants in 2024, which represents an increase of $400 million from the class of 2023. “So much comes down to students and families knowing what to expect from college costs so that they can prepare for the future,” said Brendan Williams, vice president of knowledge at uAspire, a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the economic mobility of underrepresented students by creating financial solutions to diverse postsecondary pathways. “When they miss out on understanding the funding available to them, these students and families think college isn’t affordable.” 

Even when introduced to some of the funding avenues, students and their parents can find the FAFSA, financial aid, and scholarship applications processes confusing. Most people, according to an NCAN survey, significantly overestimate the cost of both public two- and four-year institutions. 

“Most first-gen students assume they can’t afford college or that they’ll have to go into massive debt to afford it,” said Shellee Howard, C.E.O. and professional certified college consultant at College Ready. “There’s also a lot of negativity surrounding college affordability on social media, which discourages students before they even have a chance to succeed.”

There’s also the issue of language barriers in some cases, which adds an extra hurdle for some first-gen students and their families. The result is that too many students are missing out on opportunities. At a time when recent research points to the fact that by 2031, 72 percent of jobs  will require post-secondary education and/or training, that’s a giant loss for students — and the economy as a whole. 

A Landscape of Confusion 

In an ideal world, all high school students and their families would receive detailed information and assistance about the costs of college and ways to make it affordable. The government’s Federal Student Aid website would be easy to navigate and FAFSA/the student aid index easily understandable. But that’s not the world in which students live. 

“The system is broken,” Howard said. “It’s a huge problem and has existed for years.”

Howard was a first-gen student herself and today is the parent of four children who have all navigated the college application process, graduating debt free with her help. “If a family has an education and the finances, they hire a consultant to help them,” she said. “But if they are first generation, they have a long runway to start the process and don’t know what resources exist.” 

For lower-income and first-generation students who have had little to no exposure to the complex college affordability equation, there’s often a sense of helplessness.

One federal resource, housed under the Department of Defense Education Activity and designed to help students with college readiness, is the AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program. Its stated goal is to support students in the “academic middle” —those who have the potential to succeed at increasingly higher levels but may need additional support to fully realize their potential. The program’s centerpiece is a toolkit to support future-ready skills like time management, organization, and critical thinking. It also touches on financial literacy, with 85 percent of students who participate submitting FAFSA, compared to an average of 61 percent in the 2023-2024 academic year. 

At its best, AVID is a nationwide program facilitated by high school guidance counselors that students can take as a subject or in a study hall. According to Howard, however, not all AVID programs are created equal, and many are not integrated into curriculum. “At some schools, you may have a very motivated teacher who ensures AVID is easily available, and those students have a big advantage,” she said. “At others, students have to seek out the program and assistance.”

The affordability problem — or lack of financial literacy surrounding it — extends beyond first-gen and low-income students, however. Evelyn Jerome-Alexander, a college counselor with Magellan College Counseling, frequently works with middle-class families. “The families who hire me and my team generally appear on paper to be able to afford the somewhat obnoxious sticker prices of the most well-known colleges,” she said. “Many just grit their teeth and ‘find a way’ to pay for college. My focus is helping them realize there are so many opportunities for their kids to get a great education without taking money from their retirement accounts.” 

Jerome-Alexander finds that most high school counselors don’t have the bandwidth to help students go beneath the surface with college affordability because much of the equation is highly individualized. One issue is the federal student aid index (S.A.I.), she said. “The S.A.I. sees an income level but doesn’t understand your expenses and what you have to spare for education.” 

One family Jerome-Alexander worked with, for instance, had a nice six-figure income. After going through the S.A.I. via FAFSA, they received no financial aid. On the surface, this would appear logical and realistic for such a high income. “But they also had a special needs child that requires very big expenses and will well into the future,” she said. “FAFSA doesn’t care about that or about how much you spend on education.”

This was a case where Jerome-Alexander’s guidance to complete the College Scholarship Service Profile application — which colleges and universities use to award non-federal institutional aid — made a big difference for the family. 

But families who can access counseling services like Jerome-Alexander’s and Howard’s are the lucky ones. Lower-income and first-gen students depend on their schools, web searches, books, and more resources they may not realize are available.

Programs to Help 

Like uAspire, MyinTuition is a non-profit with a mission to help mid- and low-income students understand the cost of college and find their most affordable option. Created by Phillip Levine, a professor and economist at Wellesley College, the organization runs on the theory that there’s an information problem when it comes to college costs. “To make a good decision about college, you need to know how much it will cost,” he said. “We haven’t made that easy in America.” 

While the federal government requires that all public higher ed institutions post the cost of college on their websites, the truth is that very few students actually pay full price, Levine said. “If you have a very high income, you’ll pay that number,” he said. “But most people are not in that category.”

Most people, however, don’t understand that fact. Net price calculators can be difficult to find and use; there’s a good deal of confusing jargon in college-cost speak; and even FAFSA can deter people nervous about sharing their tax information. This is where community-based non-profits hope to fill in the gaps. 

MyinTuition has created its own fiscal tools to help aspiring college students understand their real costs. Right now, the organization is partnered with about 70 colleges and universities. “It’s not perfect, but it provides a ballpark estimate and range, which is a huge advantage,” Levine said. 

Getting tools and information dispensed to students and their families will continue to be one of the biggest barriers, and Williams from uAspire sees lost opportunities here. “I can’t reiterate how important it is that college costs are family conversations,” he said. “High school is a time when you have a captive audience, but often, even when there are informational meetings, they take place when many low-income parents might be working.”

Today, uAspire operates in Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area, working alongside high school counselors. Where they don’t have a physical presence, Williams and his team are deploying to high schools in a “train the trainer” format. Williams hopes to keep building out his model, continuously working to close the financial literacy gap.

An Uncertain Future 

The wild card in all things related to college affordability is change at the federal government level. Step by step, the Department of Education is shutting down. The department, which has long administered the federal student aid program, is transferring the TRIO programs, for instance, which provide post-secondary education services for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The D.O.E. is also offloading the Title III Part B program, which provides grants to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, as well as the Gaining Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs.

The $1.5 trillion federal student aid program will likely land with the Small Business Administration, which has no experience managing the program and has experienced its own 40 percent staffing cuts this year. 

And then there is the Big Beautiful Bill. “The bill is vague and there are many misconceptions surrounding it,” Howard said. “It has both advantages and disadvantages.”

In the plus column, Howard believes, is the fact that the bill allows more flexibility for 529 plans. Families will now be able to use 529 plans for credentialing programs and trade certifications. They will also be able to apply funds to tutoring, testing fees, and continuing education programs required to obtain or maintain professional credentials. 

Yet as it stands, the bill is also gutting $300 billion from higher education, eliminating the most affordable repayment options on student loans. By some measures, the bill will mean that a typical college graduate will pay nearly $3,000 more per year in student loan payments. 

Other changes from the bill include the elimination of Grad PLUS loans, which cover expenses for graduate-level programs, and new caps on Parent PLUS loans beginning in 2026. Klein, who is using a Parent PLUS loan, remains unaffected, as the program grandfathers in borrowers prior to July 1, 2026. 

While the future remains uncertain, Levine said there is some bi-partisan agreement that understanding college costs is too complicated and creating a significant barrier to entry for too many eligible students. Whether this results in any sort of reform in today’s environment is anyone’s guess. For now, however, Levine has this thought: “At the end of the day, we want students applying to schools that are the best fit for them academically and geographically. If their decision is based on affordability, that’s a constraint. If they can afford it and don’t realize it, however, that’s a failure in the system.”