Category: Perspectives

Where Did All the Good Times Go?

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

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They are familiar culprits: smartphones, social media, the decline of in-person social connection that began before, bloomed during, and held firm after the COVID-19 pandemic. A growing reserve of data and reporting raises the alarm about Gen Z’s age of discontent, always coming to the same conclusion: it doesn’t look good for the digital generation. As panic descends over what the Surgeon General has labeled a mental health emergency and, more recently, a loneliness epidemic, few accounts of Gen Z’s state of mind manage to foreground what I suspect is at the root of my generation’s distress: the shrinking of three-dimensional life, and with it, the loss of risk, adventure, and thrill.

Forty-two percent of Gen Z suffers from depression and feelings of hopelessness, a rate almost twice as high as that of American adults over 25 (23%). On the climate crisis, 56% believe humanity is doomed. Since 2010, anxiety among American college students has increased by 134%, depression by 106%, bipolar disorder by 57%, and anorexia by 100%. In a 2023 poll of college students, 39% said they had experienced loneliness the previous day, ranking it above sadness (36%). 

As our parents’ generations had fewer children and nurtured them longer, we were raised to be risk-averse. Emergency room visits for accidental injuries—falling off a bike, breaking an arm, spraining an ankle on the soccer field—have declined significantly among children and teenagers born in the early aughts. That sounds like a good thing—fewer broken arms means kids are safer, right? But while accidental, play-related injuries have gone down, emergency room visits for self-harm have increased 188% for adolescent girls and 48% for boys since 2010. We are not safer; not with ourselves.

As Gen Z grows up, our adulthood shows signs of developmental delays. We go on fewer dates and have less sex. We are getting our driver’s licenses later or not at all; we are living with our parents longer. We drink less and go to fewer parties than past generations. Our abstinence from risk is not a reflection of strict moral influences or time redirected to other, “safer” ways of interacting with the three-dimensional world—far from it, we are less likely than past generations to engage in hobbies, play and watch sports, or work after-school jobs. We are, quite simply, doing less than any generation before us. 

Chart: Zach RauschSource: Monitoring the Future Get the data Embed Download image

Social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation Jonathan Haidt argues that our increasingly two-dimensional lives are the result of “the end of play-based childhood” and its replacement with “phone-based childhood.” During a recent talk in London, Haidt asked audience members of the Gen X and Baby Boomer generations to think back to their childhoods. He asked them to remember the things they did with friends, the adventures they had, and then imagine removing 70% of those encounters – remove hobbies, then risks, thrills, and adventures where you might have gotten hurt—imagine 80% of that gone, he said. Now imagine growing up with what’s left. That is the extent to which Haidt believes smartphones gutted Gen Z’s childhood and adolescence. Our lives are now smaller, hollowed out, contained within digital software. 

“The fact that risk-taking activities like drinking are going down is a broader sign that young adults and adolescents are engaging with the world far less,” says Dr. Jessie Borelli, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Becoming an adult involves risk. Making mistakes, including through risk-taking behaviors, is practicing being an adult.” 

Moreover, she says, “Getting together in person is effortful. You have to endure a certain amount of discomfort, whether it’s the cost of leaving the house, encountering traffic, or the time it takes to put on different clothes.” 

We are not safer; not with ourselves.

For a subset of the population who grew up on social media and spent some of their most formative developmental years taking classes and interacting with peers only online, any effort at real-life interpersonal connection carries inherent risk — embarrassment, rejection, heartbreak, abandonment. When we weigh the decision of whether to engage effortfully with the world or just stay home, it’s no wonder we gravitate toward the option that involves less risk.

What that cost-benefit analysis is missing, however, is the fact that loneliness and isolation have profound consequences for not just our emotional wellbeing, but our long-term physical and cognitive health. “Social isolation and loneliness increase a person’s risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, anxiety, suicidality, and premature death,” says Shannon Vyvijal, the Communications and Programming Coordinator for the Foundation for Social Connection. The upside, Vyvijal says, is that “social connection is really both a remedy and a preventative measure. In addition to making us healthier, it makes our communities safer. Socially connected communities have lower rates of gun violence and drug deaths. It makes communities more prosperous and helps local GDP. It leads more people to volunteer in their communities. It helps us become more civically engaged. We begin to trust institutions and one another again.”

Gen Z knows it’s lonely. “Loneliness is a discrepancy between how connected we are, and how connected we want to be,” Vyvijal says. “If, like many members of Gen Z report, you are someone who wants to date and hasn’t yet, or you are on dating apps and not satisfied with the level of connection they provide, that discrepancy is contributing to loneliness.” The disconnect between having and wanting connection often sets in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the stigma of social undesirability increasing a person’s tendency to retreat from others. “The lonely brain continues to self-isolate,” she explains. 

They—we—are not content to live in a purgatory of risk-averse, adventureless post-post-adolescence.

Even as hyper-individualism in work and school swells and spills over into life after-hours, Gen Z is begging for community. We are begging for risk. Signs of our accelerating desperation occupy every corner of the Zoomer internet. In the r/GenZ subreddit, an 18-year old appeals to their peers for advice on how to make friends; a 21-year-old college student laments her campus’s lack of community; a 19-year-old worries she’s a “loser” for having never gotten drunk or gone to a party.  On Facebook, young adults post friendship applications. A Gen Z woman complains of the death of clubbing in a TikTok video that amassed over 3.5 million views. A viral dating deep-dive from The Cut shows young women crying on camera while describing their longing for partnership. 

Not far behind, tech companies roll out solutions for Gen Z to cure our loneliness without looking up from our phones. Tinder backs a new “dating app for friends.” On Bumble BFF, users swipe right on pictures of prospective friends. Still lonely? Try downloading Replika, “THE chatbot for anyone who wants a friend with no judgment, drama, or social anxiety involved.” No risk, all reward.

But Gen Z is getting older, in spite of its delayed adulthood, and making the move toward real-world community as a form of generational healing. The tide of self-isolation appears to be turning as loneliness and boredom reach a fever pitch, with a growing number of young adults taking the matter offline and into their own hands. Running clubs, singles parties, book clubs, wine nights, and self-made social events are on the rise. A new trend emphasizes the importance of third places—communal spaces like public parks, libraries, and coffee shops where people can come together and fill the time between work and home. They are taking their hobbies offline. They are volunteering more. They are urging moral awakening over self reinvention. They—we—are not content to live in a purgatory of risk-averse, adventureless post-post-adolescence.

I can’t say I wish playground injuries on kids or hangovers on college students. I do hope, however, that we will return to a margin of risk where it’s OK to fall off your bike, get your heart broken, dance badly at a party—because that’s part of the deal of living in the three-dimensional world. If we watch from a safe distance, that world will keep outgrowing us.

The Case for Transformational Education

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

Higher education is currently under enormous scrutiny. Part of this scrutiny results from the challenge of balancing the traditional roles of college in helping students “find a job” and “find themselves.” Eliminating the conflict between these goals, and indeed underscoring their interdependence, offers an excellent opportunity for higher education to take steps toward restoring public trust. To take full advantage of this opportunity, we must work harder to deliver the real value of a college education: a transformative learning experience.

For generations, traditional age students have enjoyed the benefits of college’s unprecedented ability to offer intellectual discovery at the inflection point of their personal development. This exceptional combination comes with a shift in learning that distinguishes college from primary and secondary school experiences dominated by extrinsic motivation like deadlines, teacher approval, and grades. Higher education, when done well, sets the stage for life-long learning by introducing intrinsic motivation that goes beyond knowledge and skill, shaping attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs — or “mindset.” Colleges and universities’ ability to teach students how to learn, not what to learn, is fundamental to the personal and professional success of graduates, often including, ironically, higher education’s harshest critics. 

Experiences in college can lead not only to professional success, but to a greater sense of wellbeing long after graduation. Current evidence based on measures of life-long wellbeing developed at Gallup indicates that having emotionally supportive mentors, particularly faculty, correlates strongly with life-long wellbeing. Gallup alumni surveys additionally show that initiatives that increase students’ sense of agency, through experiential learning opportunities such as projects or internships, also correlate with wellbeing long after the college years. One particular program, Purposeful Work at Bates College, produced profound evidence that a sense of wellbeing is substantially enhanced in students who find career opportunities closely related to areas of study that develop a sense of purpose and meaning.

Higher education, when done well, sets the stage for life-long learning by introducing intrinsic motivation that goes beyond knowledge and skill, shaping attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs.

The challenge facing higher education is how to achieve a broader recognition of the need to strengthen students’ transition from extrinsic to intrinsic learning and encourage experiences like hands-on learning and mentorships correlated with wellbeing at a time when vocationalism and return on investment dominate the public narrative.  Barriers such as check-box general education curricula and faculty reward systems that disincentivize truly student-centered, innovative teaching exacerbate the problem as does the underlying issue of the cost of a college degree.  

Restoring the public’s esteem for higher education by promoting lifelong wellbeing and refocusing the conversation on the student experience make up the central mission of The Coalition for Transformational Education. The Coalition is a learning community of almost 30 institutions across the country dedicated to changing the ways we teach and students learn, each pursuing distinct initiatives that offer best practices in engendering identity, belonging, agency and purpose in students based on experiences known to promote wellbeing.

The Coalition is focused on promoting this transformation across all of higher education by changing the narrative about what matters most in the student experience and encouraging faculty to experiment at the undergraduate level with evidence-based interventions to improve outcomes and wellbeing, and scaling these to all enrolled students. All of the institutions that are members of the Coalition are committed to assessing the interventions they introduce and refining them over time to continually improve their long-term impact. 

All members of the Coalition are committed to producing positive educational experiences that touch all enrolled students, not simply those that are focused only on specific populations such as the talented and gifted or the under-resourced or under-prepared. The Coalition is dedicated to making all of these interventions accessible to every enrolled student, regardless of their academic record or financial resources. The Coalition has the potential to transform higher education in ways that allow it to deliver on its full promise of career preparation and personal development, ensuring that students graduate not only with broader and deeper intellectual outcomes, but also with a greater sense of who they are and who they can become.

Our Students Have Something to Tell Us

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

As the academic year drew to a close in May, I waited for my fears to be actualized. After a spring of over 3000 arrests of college students—something unprecedented in my professional experience of nearly 30 years—I found myself questioning my confidence in the core commitment I made to my students. I have always expected students to change the world, to utilize the educational experience to be, what I call “comfortably uncomfortable.” Yet, I was getting increasingly uncomfortable as encampments, protests, and arrests proliferated around campuses in the United States. I worried, for the first time, that perhaps we were afraid of our students and their calls for intervention in a time of global crisis. I saw campuses closing their gates and worried we might temper our commitment to the rigorous exchange of ideas that so fundamentally defines higher education and the joys found in this setting. 

And then I listened. Over the course of a week, I attended nearly a dozen graduation ceremonies involving countless student voices. I have gone to senior balls and hugged tearful students who, only a few weeks earlier, presented me with lists of demands. Time and again, I am reminded that our adolescents are experts in their lived experience. We fail that expertise when we presume the wisdom we gained as adolescents decades ago somehow supplants the wisdom of today’s lived experience. We need to listen and then apply our wisdom as leaders and educators. As I reflect on that remarkable spring, I am reminded of a few key factors influencing our future work together: 

Teenagers don’t “get over” a pandemic. The impact of the isolation resulting from the pandemic interrupted an important stage of adolescent development among teenagers. It has left an undeniable impact upon today’s youth and it will influence our understanding of early, mid, and late adolescence for years to come. This should not be a surprise to educators. Assessments of adolescent health and well-being clearly established a prevalence of stress, anxiety and depression that preceded the pandemic. Isolation caused by the pandemic increased loneliness and adversely impacted interpersonal skill development. For a community whose high school and early college experience was defined as “Wake up, open Zoom, close Zoom, sleep. Repeat,” learning how to meaningfully connect with others is anything but inherent. The Healthy Minds report of 2022-23 noted 42% of respondents missed companionship and nearly 70% of respondents reported feeling isolated often or some of the time. It is now normative, not exceptional, for our emerging adults to be lonely, want true friendships (not the social media kind), and are urgently seeking a sense of community. The resilience I may have learned in my college experiences in the 80s, is not the same resilience our students learned during periods of mass shootings, isolation, and the desire to be compassionate actors in a complex world. Our students are trying very hard to change the world on a stopwatch, understandable given the disruption of time, space and developmental growth caused by the pandemic.

I have gone to senior balls and hugged tearful students who, only a few weeks earlier, presented me with lists of demands.

Listen to what our students are telling us. They care. And they are learning how to show it to an older (yes, that’s us) generation that doesn’t seem to be listening. Countless encampments, arrests, and fear of a global crisis enfolded this past academic year on the heels of years of mass shootings and uncertainty. There is no better time than now for higher education to invest in our youth and engage in developing skills associated with care for others, curiosity, and, yes, conflict. Let’s remember everything we learned in high school through interpersonal interactions. Our hearts were broken and restored, we had best friends and best best friends (they might have changed often based on how the day went), and there was a “cool kids” table in the cafeteria. We learned, through interpersonal engagement, empathy by being in the 3D presence of emotion expressed without a mask on. 

In their graduation remarks at my institution, students repeatedly appealed to each other for community, dialogue, and compassion; not revolution. One of my favorite graduation speakers remarked on this theme by sharing, “We are united by…this innate desire to be interconnected and care for one another everywhere we go.” They are just learning how to do that in a world where Chicken Little, to them, is starting to look like a soothsayer. These students share our compassion but they haven’t learned as well how to express and moderate that compassion and care for others. They may protest sometimes, they may express frustration when they see horror: they are retroactively learning how to express those feelings in real time, in 3D. Our colleges and universities are well prepared to provide some calm and purpose. 

There is no better time than now for higher education to invest in our youth and engage in developing skills associated with care for others, curiosity, and, yes, conflict.

I am confident our institutions can continue to do what they know is best: educate and inspire global scholars who will transform our world. The expression and curiosity of those scholars serve as a litmus test for the success of today’s adolescence following the interruption of the pandemic. Higher education must pursue our mission in a manner that is responsive to the curiosity, compassion and isolation our students carry within them. The actions of our younger scholars are impacted by these realities and require responsive and continued commitment to their post-graduate success in a world that is complex—and eager—for their impact. Let’s listen, please, and then do what we do best.

Eleanor J.B. Daugherty, PhD, MEd, is the Vice President of Student Affairs at Georgetown University. Daugherty previously served as Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students at the University of Connecticut (UConn). 

Seeing the Unseen

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

In the landscape of higher education, student fathers face a particularly stark lack of recognition and support. A new report by Generation Hope,”EmpowerED Dads: Amplifying Voices, Advancing Higher Education for Student Fathers,” sheds crucial light on the unique challenges and needs of these individuals. As we strive for a more inclusive and equitable educational environment, it is imperative that we amplify the voices of student fathers and advocate for policies that support their success.

Student fathers often juggle multiple roles, balancing their studies with the demands of caregiving and employment. This multifaceted responsibility is compounded by societal stereotypes that frequently cast fathers, particularly fathers of color, as absent or uninvolved in their children’s lives. The report highlights that Black and Latino student fathers, in particular, face significant obstacles, including higher rates of basic needs insecurity and lower utilization of support services​.

Despite these challenges, student fathers demonstrate remarkable resilience and dedication. They are not merely pursuing degrees but striving to provide better futures for their families. However, their efforts are often overshadowed by a lack of visibility and recognition within the academic sphere. This invisibility can profoundly impact their self-esteem and academic performance, perpetuating a cycle of underachievement and disengagement.

The Need for Tailored Support

To address these issues, tailored support systems that acknowledge and address the specific needs of student fathers must be developed and implemented. Policies and institutional practices must evolve to provide flexible scheduling, accessible childcare, and financial assistance for this demographic. Additionally, mental health services should be made readily available to help student fathers manage the stress and anxiety that come with balancing their multiple roles.

As we strive for a more inclusive and equitable educational environment, it is imperative that we amplify the voices of student fathers and advocate for policies that support their success.

Furthermore, creating a campus culture that celebrates the contributions of student fathers can go a long way in fostering their sense of belonging and purpose. Universities should promote awareness campaigns and support groups that provide a platform for student fathers to share their experiences and build a supportive community.

Policy Reforms and Institutional Changes

Policy reforms are crucial in driving systemic change. Legislators and educational institutions must work together to ensure that student fathers are included in discussions about higher education support strategies. Financial aid policies should consider the unique financial pressures faced by student parents, and academic policies should offer greater flexibility to accommodate their schedules.

Generation Hope’s report underscores the importance of including student fathers in the broader conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. By advocating for policies that recognize and value the experiences of student fathers, we can create a more equitable and supportive educational environment for all students.

A Call to Action

The journey of a student father is marked by resilience and a deep commitment to their families and education. It is time for us to recognize and support their efforts. By amplifying their voices and addressing their unique needs, we can help student fathers achieve their academic goals and secure better futures for themselves and their children.

Brittani Williams is the Director of Policy, Advocacy and Research at Generation Hope.

Generation Hope engages education and policy partners to drive systemic change and provides direct support to teen parents in college as well as their children through holistic, two-generation programming.

Democratizing the Liberal Arts

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

As part of his listening tour, Matt vandenBerg, the new president of Ohio Wesleyan University, created a YouTube and TikTok video of himself not listening to a legendary superstition that stepping on a seal outside of University Hall would bring bad luck. In the hilarious parody, vandenBerg cautiously steps, then stomps, dances, and jump-jacks on the seal before he is beset by a series of calamities that have him appearing at a university function sporting tattered clothes and a black eye. 

@ohiowesleyan

POV: your university president decides to test fate and steps on the seal – bad luck level: Presidential Edition!

♬ original sound – Ohio Wesleyan University

There is much to unpack here. First, it takes a certain level of confidence for a new president to humble (vandenBerg might say “humiliate”) himself in front of his students, and on their own medium at that. It is also refreshing to see a college president bringing some levity to a position that, certainly of late, is not perceived as being much fun. His inauguration on April 19 was another opportunity to depart from the implied rules. In referring to Paul Revere’s famous ride on the same date, vandenBerg evoked a rebellious spirit in laying out nine new initiatives the school would be taking on, including partnerships with the community and other institutions that would increase access and affordability. In his speech, vandenBerg rejected a number of “unhelpful” conventions in higher education – the idea that faculty and administrators are naturally at odds, that host communities are either competitive with or overly-reliant on their university partners, and, perhaps most importantly, that the liberal arts are for the fortunate few and will not bring the kind of return on investment Americans are looking for in a college degree. 

In our interview, President vandenBerg talks about that speech, as well as what drew him to Delaware, Ohio, how he plans to distinguish OWU’s mission from “what everyone else promises,” and what new college presidents might learn from the public’s current frustration with higher education. 

LearningWell: You were most recently at Presbyterian College in South Carolina. What made you leave there and come to OWU? 

MV: My family and I were committed to staying at Presbyterian College for a good number of years, but serendipity hits in your life at times, and for us, serendipity hit in the form of an old friend calling me to say, “I know you’re not looking for a new job opportunity. I just need you to pick up the phone and listen.” This friend happened to be leading the search for the presidency of Ohio Wesleyan University, and I realized that from that short conversation with her, I didn’t just want to know more about Ohio Wesleyan; I needed to know more.

So much of the spirit of the institution, its situation in the higher education landscape, and its aspirations resonated with me. But I also thought it might bring some important enhancements to the life of my family. After a consultation with my wife, I decided to throw my hat in the ring, and the rest is history. 

We had some trepidation, but in the end, moving my family to Delaware, Ohio, was a no-brainer, primarily for three reasons. Number one, the people. The students, faculty, staff, trustees, alumni, and the community members that we met were really special. They wanted to do big things. Together, we were going to be able to do transformative work to elevate and amplify a tremendous institution. 

Number two, the community. The city of Delaware, in Delaware County, loves its university. It was evident to us at first blush. There’s been a bedrock of trust built over decades between the institution and the community. That stands in stark contrast to where a lot of small, private, residential liberal arts institutions are situated. They are often in struggling communities and are the sole anchor that is relied upon to drive the local economy, to bring all of the artistic and humanistic enhancement to the community. That’s simply not the case with Ohio Wesleyan University and the city of Delaware and Delaware County. This is a healthy place looking to go from great to phenomenal, and that is always a charge that I get excited about. 

The third thing that got me so excited to come here was the transformative impact that OWU has on the lives of young people. I believe that in higher education we often focus on the transaction: How much does it cost? What degree do you graduate with? What is your first-year salary? Are you seeing that immediate return on investment? To me, if done well, higher education is not a transaction. It is a transition into adulthood, and it is supposed to be transformative. Ohio Wesleyan University intrinsically understands that. It’s baked into the ethos of this place. They’ve got 40,000 success stories to showcase that impact. So, that’s how I went from not looking for another position to realizing the calling of my life was to come to this spot in Ohio. 

LW: You recently had your inauguration. Tell me a little bit about what you said that day. What was most important for you to lay out in terms of your vision for the school?

MV: We wanted to be rebellious in terms of what an inauguration actually is. They are often kind of boring, stuffy — too focused on the new person getting the job. I believe that an inauguration should be an inflection point in an institution’s trajectory. It should be an opportunity to celebrate the past and everything that brought us to where we are. It should be a chance to grapple earnestly and honestly with the challenges and opportunities that we have today. And then it should also be a way to galvanize ourselves around an exciting future. 

If you’re a college president and you’re not leveraging the concerns and criticisms for self-reflection and self-improvement, you’re missing a big opportunity. 

That day, we made the case that we need to seek and secure distinction in this overcrowded higher education landscape. We were pretty direct in tackling that head-on. Not only will we not thrive in the future if we don’t figure out what it is that makes us distinctive, but we’re also doing a tremendous disservice to students and families by not pointing out the meaningful differences between institutions. We all tend to sell ourselves the same way using the same tired cliches: “Come here because we have small class sizes, faculty who really care about you and who know your name. We have tight-knit communities. We have beautiful campuses. We have successful alumni. We’ll give you a job or an internship. You’ll learn how to apply what you’re learning in the classroom to an external context.” Those are things that every institution is saying right now, and it can contribute to this sense of white noise that students and their families have when they go on different campus tours.

I want Ohio Wesleyan University to be able to answer the question of what makes us truly unique. The title of my inaugural address is “What’s in the Water?” — What is it about Ohio Wesleyan that we offer to students that they can’t or don’t or won’t get anywhere else? And how do we channel our energy, our resources, and our focus in the same direction so that our unique, meaningful, defensible value proposition truly shines? 

We invoked the spirit of 1842, our founding year, and we connected that to the historic spirit of the day on which the inauguration actually occurred. It was April 19th — the day of Paul Revere’s ride and the day of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.  That day sparked the American Revolution. So, we invoked the spirit of rebellion of that day to discuss how OWU began and to proclaim with confidence and joy where we were going. 

In 1842, a local Methodist minister went door-to- door, just like Paul Revere did, to rally the countryside in a call to do something important and in service to a greater purpose. That was a fun message to deliver, but it had a serious undertone. The idea was to apply a sense of rebellion to the way we move forward, and that means categorically rejecting all of the things in higher education that are broken, all the things that we think are supposed to be truisms but that are absolutely not. For example, the understanding that faculty and administrators are supposed to be at odds with each other — we categorically reject that notion. The idea that the liberal arts are not inherently valuable as an educational model, that they don’t lead to good careers, that they are a poor choice if you’re looking for return on investment. We categorically reject those notions. And lastly, we wanted to showcase that at OWU, we don’t just talk about things; we do them. Our love language is action. We made nine significant announcements that day, and they all boil down to three different things. One is investing in people, especially our students, faculty and staff; two is building community, especially through investments in our infrastructure; and three is changing lives through innovative partnerships. 

LW: Can we talk a little more about that third goal? 

MV: Establishing partnerships is a big part of what we want to do. We want to radically expand affordability and accessibility and build equitable pathways that help students get to where they want to go in their lives. We want to deliver on the student’s timetable, not necessarily just higher education’s timetable. So, we announced a few new ways of doing just that. 

Columbus State Community College is the major two-year institution in central Ohio. Together, we launched a powerful three-part partnership to help community college students realize that there is a viable pathway for them to a four-year degree at a liberal arts institution. The first component of our partnership is called “Preferred Pathway.” It’s fairly common for community college students to want to pursue a bachelor’s degree once they graduate. The problem is that, at many institutions, their credits don’t always fully transfer and they don’t maintain their hardfought status in their major.  They are promised this two-year pathway to a bachelor’s degree, and then they discover that it’s going to take them longer and cost them more to graduate than they were told. It can feel to them like a bait-and-switch. Moreover, for a lot of students, including those transferring in from a community college, just the idea of going to a private liberal arts college can sound expensive – perhaps even out of reach, financially. We knew we could improve that experience for students. In partnership with about 25 different professors, we hand-built transparent, hassle-free two-year pathways for students across 20 different majors. It’s the most comprehensive pathway program that Columbus State has among national liberal arts universities.

The second part of the partnership attacks the real and perceived cost issue, head-on. For up to 25 students with at least a 3.5 GPA at Columbus State, we have a tuition match program, so they actually pay the Columbus State tuition rate to attend and complete their Ohio Wesleyan University degree. The tuition match program means that students now not only have the logistical means to succeed, but they now have extraordinary financial support as well. No other university, public or private, can match that commitment.

We want to democratize access to the transformative benefits of a liberal arts education.

The third part of our partnership addresses a vexing national issue – and certainly one that affects our region as well. It’s the looming teacher shortage and the dearth of people entering the teaching profession. We don’t think that we can solve that problem on our own, but one of the things that we can do is begin to reduce the barriers to entry for people who do have an interest in the teaching profession. How do we encourage those students who feel a calling toward this work to get their credentials and degrees without saddling them with crippling debt?

In partnership with our local Delaware County school systems and Columbus State, we found a new way to deliver extraordinary value and encourage more teachers to enter the system. Using the College Credit Plus program in Ohio, students in their junior year of high school are able to earn credit toward their associate degree from Columbus State. By the time they graduate from high school, they get not only a high school diploma, but also an associate degree, and then they can jump seamlessly into Ohio Wesleyan University and complete their bachelor’s and teaching certificate in just two years. This program cuts the time to completion in half and reduces their costs dramatically. 

Another partnership, the Delaware County Promise, is a great example of our vision for the future. Delaware County is considered the healthiest, wealthiest, and fastest-growing county in the state of Ohio, and the unfortunate truth is that not everyone participates equally in that prosperity. We can prove over and over again that higher education is the great social mobility agent, but a lot of people who are from disadvantaged backgrounds, even in Delaware County, don’t think about going to their local liberal arts college, because they dismiss it as being out of reach. This was one of the earliest problems I remember thinking about when I came here. I started talking with city and county leaders, and we came up with an exciting program to tackle that problem, which we announced at the inauguration. “If you are from Delaware County or go to school in Delaware County, and you earn a 3.5 GPA in high school and your family makes $100,000 a year or less, you can now go to Ohio Wesleyan University absolutely tuition-free.” We worked out a way, through our own investments in financial aid, to make that possible and then partnered with the community and the Delaware County Foundation to make it happen. 

Ultimately, what we really want to do is to democratize access to the transformative benefits of a liberal arts education. We want to be able to reach anyone for whom the liberal arts can be a life-changer. We want a student’s personal choice to determine where they attend college, rather than financial barriers, social constraints, self-confidence constraints, or other challenges. We want personal choice and fit, as decided by the individual, to be the ultimate determinant. 

LW: Major change, as opposed to tradition, is not something we often associate with higher education. What are your thoughts on that?

MV: Higher education certainly features some significant strengths. For example, shared governance, academic freedom, and free speech strengthen what we do and how we do it. But we can improve in some areas.  Among our relative weaknesses is our sense of toxic egalitarianism — the idea that we have to do everything with the same amount of effort, that we can’t give anything we do more attention unless we give an equal measure of attention and investment to everything else. Most people who start a business, or run a business, understand that that is no way to succeed. We need to know our distinctive value proposition and make disciplined and strategic decisions accordingly.

Moreover, higher education has tended to have an incremental approach to mustering its way through challenges by adding a few programs here or there, adding a few more students, and reducing operating expenses a little bit. My abiding notion is that this moment in our history is not a time for incremental strategies alone. We should be thinking about continuous improvement — how we can be better and better at what we do — but if we don’t start breaking some of the implied rules about what higher education is and what it is supposed to be, we are going to miss the mark as our society – and students’ needs – continue to change at unprecedented levels.

LW: Do people ask you why you wanted to become a college president at a time when higher education, and presidents in particular, are under such scrutiny? 

MV: The presidency of a college can be a hard job, no doubt, as I said to a group of aspiring vice presidents and presidents in Washington, D.C., last week. I told them, “If you’re thinking about a presidency simply because it gives you a fancier title, because the pay is better, because you think people will respect you more, or because you receive more visibility, this job will eat you alive.” 

One underrated quality of liberal arts institutions is that we’re fundamentally good for democracy.

You have to want to do this work because it’s a calling. I’ve known I wanted to do this job since I was 20 years old. I know that is an oddly specific sense of vocation for a 20-year-old to have, but I have always believed in the value of higher education and particularly in the power of liberal arts colleges to transform lives. I don’t think liberal arts colleges are for everyone, but I do think they are for a lot more students than who currently realize it. That is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Religious connotations aside, I see myself as a liberal arts evangelist, helping to bring the word of what we do to more people who would benefit enormously from this important educational philosophy and delivery model.

Without a doubt, higher education is under attack by some, and many in our society question the value of a college degree. The truth of the matter is that going to college brings enormous financial and other benefits over the course of one’s career. An educated populace also benefits humanity writ large. But affordability concerns, rising costs, political rancor, the alarming deterioration in our public discourse, and other factors sometimes cloud how people understand that value. Nevertheless, for many, perceptions are reality. So, our job is to educate others and clarify what we do and why it matters. It seems to me that, for higher education leaders, now is a time for us to listen, to reflect, and to respond. I try to use what I’m hearing to become a better leader and to help OWU to improve. If you’re a college president and you’re not leveraging the concerns and criticisms for self-reflection and self-improvement, I think you’re missing a big opportunity. 

One underrated quality of liberal arts institutions is that we’re fundamentally good for democracy. We promote and engender in our students an appreciation for civic participation, free speech, intellectual inquiry, and service to others. And in these fractious times, we think it’s critical for our institutions to serve as an antidote for the deficits we see in our society’s discourse. Our educational approach is uniquely effective at training students to engage in constructive dialogue, especially amidst disagreement and difference. We believe that more people need to learn how to be productively engaged citizens who understand how their government works and who can work to address problems in ways that bring others together, rather than in ways that exacerbate divides. In the coming months, OWU will seek to amplify its role in that vital work. We think it’s essential to our democratic republic. And that work is just one more example of the vital role of higher education.

Posted in Q&A

The Jed Foundation at 25

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

The Jed Foundation (JED) annual gala in New York City never fails to impress. The beautifully choreographed event at Cipriani’s in Lower Manhattan draws participants of all kinds, from celebrities and well-heeled patrons to behavioral health advocates and young people from across the country. But behind the production and couture is a non-profit start-up with a remarkable influence on the mental health and well-being of high school and college students — and one of the country’s most significant and little-known success stories.  

This year’s gala was particularly inspirational, breaking records in attendance and fundraising while featuring personalities such as TV anchor Savannah Sellers and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who bestowed a lifetime achievement award on his friend and former college classmate, Phillip Satow. The gala honored the twenty-fifth year of the country’s leading non-profit dedicated to protecting emotional health and preventing suicide in young people, as well as the retirement of Satow, its co-founder, who has moved from Chairman of the Board of Directors to Chairman Emeritus and Board member. 

Phil and Donna Satow launched The Jed Foundation in 2000 in acknowledgement of the life and sudden death of their youngest child, Jed, who died by suicide two years earlier when he was a student at the University of Arizona. What the Satows chose to do with their unimaginable grief would change how colleges and universities view their role in protecting their students from tragedies such as Jed’s.

JED’s work in the past twenty-five years has not only provided an evidence-based model for suicide prevention, it has brought to the surface the important and sensitive truth that, for many, the college years are the most developmentally challenging of their lives. 

In accepting his award, Satow told the story of when, shortly after Jed’s death, the president of his son’s university asked him and his wife Donna the question that would lead to the launch of the Foundation. “What can I do to improve the safety of my 30,000 students?” Satow, who was already a highly successful pharmaceutical executive, responded in the best way he knew how: he and Donna devoted themselves to finding an answer to the question. 

Satow’s first “kitchen cabinet” was made up of medical professionals, suicide prevention experts, and business colleagues. After years of raising awareness and developing JED’s Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health Promotion and Suicide Prevention for Colleges and Universities, the organization began offering JED Campus. Launched in 2013, the program engages colleges and universities in collaborative work with a dedicated JED Campus Advisor over the course of four years. After conducting an initial needs assessment, the Campus Advisor draws on the data to create a strategic plan with actionable opportunities that span seven domains: develop life skills; promote social connectedness; identify students at risk; increase help-seeking behavior; provide mental health and substance misuse services; follow crisis-management procedures; and promote means safety. 

In April 2024, JED published an impact report detailing improvements to student mental health at schools that completed JED Campus titled A Decade of Improving College Mental Health Systems: JED Campus Impact Report. A decade of data (2013 to 2023) from JED Campus schools and the Healthy Minds Network survey were analyzed and found schools that completed JED Campus saw statistically significant improvements in student mental health at the end of the program. Students at participating institutions were 25% less likely to report a suicide attempt, 13% less likely to report suicide planning, and 10% less likely to report suicidal ideation. Students whose schools make more progress on their JED strategic plans are more likely to demonstrate improvement. 

JED Campus is now in over 450 colleges and universities in the United States, reaching 5.6 million students, with the core of its programming expanding into high schools and school districts throughout the country. In 2022, JED received a $15 million grant from Mackenzie Scott, which Satow hopes will triple the number of students it reaches over the next several years, someday reaching more than 50 percent of colleges and universities. JED has recently doubled its staff from 40 to 95 to cover its expanding programming, which includes webinars and trainings, original research and reports, consulting services, public awareness campaigns, youth mental health resources, and policy, advocacy, and government relations work on the local, state, and federal levels. 

Shortly after the gala, Satow spoke with LearningWell about these accomplishments, including living up to expectations, proving the organization’s impact, and finally being able to answer the University of Arizona president’s question. 

LearningWell: Did you believe back in 2000 that the Jed Foundation would grow to this size and scope?

Phillip Satow: In many ways, yes. This was a hope that I had after I lost my son, when I thought about how many other kids were in similar situations and how many other families would be affected by a loss like ours. And here was a college president, obviously a very bright man, and he had no constructive idea what to do. And it dawned on me that we could have an incredible impact if we could establish a safety net under thousands of kids across so many campuses.

Shortly after Jed died, I brought together a number of experts and posed the question that I was asked by Jed’s college president.  They responded by suggesting the applicability of a model, sourced from the U.S.  Air Force and published in The British Medical Journal, with outcome data that showed it actually reduced suicide. So we had a model with evidence, and when we first started, one of the things we thought about was how broad our approach should be. Should we think horizontally or vertically? Should we bring this information to one school at a time, or should we bring awareness to all campuses in the United States and let them know a prevention model like this could really work to reduce suicide on their campuses? We ended up going horizontal, and even though we were small, we wanted to make sure that as many college counseling centers we could get to would have this information. I really did have that dream.

It would be very hard for many presidents not to feel obligated to call on JED, because we know we can indeed make a difference on their campuses.

LW: For a non-profit, JED is very entrepreneurial. You started outside of higher education and now serve so many colleges and universities and high schools. Do you ever think about how what you built can be applied in other scenarios? 

PS: I do, often. The idea for the model was far-sighted in many ways. In boundaried communities, you have leadership in a position to say, “Here is our policy that I am asking you to follow.” If you look at suicide in general in the United States, so many occur in boundaried communities like prisons and large health care systems. I believe there is something to our model that allows it to be applied more broadly than in colleges or in other academic spaces. We now consult with corporations and other organizations like national fraternities and even professional sports organizations. 

LW: What were some of the big milestones for you in JED’s 25-year history?

PS: I think there were a few things that really changed our growth trajectory. The decision to put “boots on the ground” made a big difference. At first, we put our model out there, but it was up to the schools to implement it. Over time, we decided it was important to have people assigned to schools and committees formed that we could collaborate with. That became the JED Campus program. Another major milestone for us came about due to the pandemic, which of course made things difficult for us, as for everyone, but it did bring the JED message alive – that mental health was an important priority for schools. And the third area that really distinguishes us is our data collection effort. We have an extraordinary amount of data that we can continuously display as evidence of our impact. From the beginning, we were always looking to collect support data for our impact framework.  I think that’s what sets us apart.

LW: When did you feel as though you had an answer to the question Jed’s college president asked you? 

PS: We had a subjective feeling as we were rolling out the JED Campus program into hundreds of schools but in the last couple of years there’s been real evidence of this. The American Council on Education released a survey in 2021 that showed that over 70% of college presidents reported that student mental health was their number one priority. Our impact report really shows how the needle has moved. Students at JED schools were 25% less likely to report a suicide attempt. This is all real data that shows how much has changed since 2000. 

LW: What directions do you see JED going in now?

PS: There’s much more to do in the college space. I think that, with the data we have, it would be very hard for many presidents not to feel obligated to call on JED, because we know we can indeed make a difference on their campuses. There are also around over 20,000 high schools in the United States, and we have a lot of work to do there. We’ve just launched a partnership with AASA, The Superintendents Association,  with the goal to help many K-12 school districts implement a comprehensive approach to mental health and suicide prevention

I think we will end up expanding significantly, but at the same time, we don’t want our success to hamper us. I know from my business career that if you take on too much, you may not do anything very well. And when we’re talking about kids’ lives, you’ve got to do everything superbly. So, I think the real challenge will be how we successfully assure high quality control in all those thousands of high schools and colleges. I don’t think anyone wants to see JED, as we continue to expand, be an organization of hundreds of employees.  We’ll need to use the latest technology in every way possible in order to provide excellent support in each school we serve.

LW: What do you think has been the secret to JED’ success?PS: First of all, it’s the people, starting with John MacPhee, our CEO for 12 years. Also our medical and clinical personnel, and of course, our excellent development department. We have also used leverage very well to scale our work – our partnership with AASA, The Superintendents Association, is an example. We are not just doing this one-school-at-a-time, and that has really benefited us. And the last thing would be our focus on outcomes data. Most organizations in the mental health field don’t have the data to prove that what they’re doing works. I think the fact that I came from the pharmaceutical industry (as did John) was helpful in that regard. We know that, in the health care world,you can’t promote anything that doesn’t have data to support it. I think that’s been a highly important concept that has been transferred to our work at the Jed Foundation. 

Building Support for Student Parents

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

One out of every five college students is a parent. As with most students, student parents are balancing many and often competing demands on their time, including classes, studying, and work. Unlike their peers without kids, student parents also have to manage the complex scheduling puzzle of childcare responsibilities on top of everything else they handle each day.   

Parenting students are trying to succeed, while receiving limited support from higher education and financial aid systems that were not designed with them in mind. It is long past time for policymakers to recognize the need for targeted support to help this group flourish. Decision makers must pay more attention to parenting students with inclusive and specialized efforts. It will take better data collection, holistic wraparound services, and building trust through consistent action over time. 

This is especially important as colleges face enrollment challenges created by changing demographics. By supporting parenting students, and adopting student-centered policies, colleges and universities can become environments where student parents feel welcomed and supported to succeed—a win for student parents and for colleges trying to alleviate the enrollment crunch. 

Supporting parenting students is more than just a matter of fairness. It is also an issue of economic development and mobility. After all, when we ensure student parents succeed, we ensure their families succeed. As policy leaders are considering supports to retain historically undersupported students, student parents should be at the top of the list. Juggling the responsibilities of parenthood and being a college student is hard enough, the way in which our systems and policies are structured shouldn’t make it even harder.

Several states, including Texas, California, Illinois, and Oregon, recognized the need and enacted legislation to support parenting students in higher education. These state-level policies aim to dismantle barriers by mandating data collection, support services and accommodations on college campuses. And, while progress has been made, more needs to be done in acknowledging and addressing the unique challenges faced by parenting students.

Why support parenting students?

The landscape of higher education is rapidly evolving, and institutions must adapt to the needs of the increasingly diverse student body encapsulated by the incredibly diverse student parent population. Student parents are more likely than non-parent students to be people of color, women, and veterans, all groups that are entering higher education at increasing rates but often face barriers to success.

Research from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and Ascend at the Aspen Institute shows that parenting students face significant challenges in completing college compared to their peers without children. Only 37 percent of parenting students graduate with a certificate or degree within six years of enrollment, in contrast to nearly 60 percent of students without children. 

Parenting students encounter obstacles related to childcare, basic needs insecurity, time constraints, financial insecurity, and mental health, which can disrupt their path from enrollment to graduation day. We know that one of the fastest paths to economic security for a family is for a parent to gain a degree or other credential. Given these statistics, supporting student parents is not just the right thing to do—it also makes economic sense by creating opportunities to increase household incomes, reducing reliance on public benefit programs and ensuring a well-educated workforce to help drive economic growth and development. 

Supporting parenting students is good for colleges and states

Targeted support for parenting students can also help states meet their postsecondary  attainment goals. States need to increase the proportion of individuals with postsecondary credentials, such as degrees or certificates to help provide the skilled workforce that drives economic growth. State and federal governments should invest in students because that investment confers important community and societal benefits as well as individual benefits.

Without addressing the barriers faced by parenting students, states risk leaving behind a substantial portion of their population and falling short of their attainment targets. By creating a more inclusive and supportive environment, colleges and universities can attract and retain a diverse pool of students, thereby mitigating persistence barriers.

Mitigating persistence barriers for parenting students starts with better data collection at the state and federal levels. Evidence suggests that targeted support can enhance the success rates of parenting students. However, the lack of comprehensive data on this group creates a significant gap in colleges’ ability to address their needs effectively. The absence of data is a missed opportunity for the federal government, states, and institutions to improve student outcomes and underscores the need for greater attention to the unique challenges faced by students with children.

Parenting students encounter obstacles related to childcare, basic needs insecurity, time constraints, financial insecurity, and mental health, which can disrupt their path from enrollment to graduation day.

Targeted support needs for parenting students are equally important for mitigating persistence barriers. In our work at Generation Hope, we have seen targeted and direct services and supports make a massive difference in the success of students. This is why federal policymakers should integrate wraparound support services, such as counseling, mentoring, and access to resources like housing assistance and healthcare, to address the holistic needs of parenting students to help them increase degree attainment. 

Moreover, recognizing parenting students’ diverse backgrounds and experiences is crucial in designing effective support programs. Federal and state policy leaders should employ culturally responsive and trauma-informed approaches that consider the unique needs and challenges faced by parenting students, creating inclusive and supportive learning environments where all individuals feel valued and empowered to succeed.

If policy leaders and influencers do more to provide support for groups with the most complex needs, they can also make life easier for all students who face similar challenges like managing conflicting work and school schedules and struggling to provide for their basic needs. When we smooth the path to college completion for student parents, we make it just a little bit easier for other historically under-supported populations to get from enrollment to graduation day.

Brittani Williams, Director of Policy, Advocacy and Research at Generation Hope.

Generation Hope engages education and policy partners to drive systemic change and provides direct support to teen parents in college as well as their children through holistic, two-generation programming.

Edward Conroy, Senior Policy Advisor, New America Higher Education Policy Program. 

New America’s Higher Education team focuses on creating a higher education system that is accessible, affordable, equitable, and accountable for helping students lead fulfilling and economically secure lives. New America’s Student Parent Initiative conducts research, policy analysis, and advocacy work in the student parent space.

A Joyful Enterprise

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

Professor Tarek Masoud found his work the object of dissent across the political aisle earlier this year when he organized a Middle East Dialogues series featuring voices on both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate. In six one-on-one conversations, Masoud, the Director of the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, invited figures with opposing but similarly divisive politics to explain and defend their stances. 

None of Masoud’s guests may be strangers to controversy, and neither is he. Reproving posts and concerned colleagues didn’t dissuade Masoud, whose choice to examine unpopular opinions on stage mirrors his teaching philosophy in the classroom. His experience leading students in intense, often tense debate and his belief they appreciate it nonetheless led him to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Students Aren’t the Obstacle to Open Debate at Harvard.” He goes on: “It is us: faculty and administrators who are too afraid—of random people on social media, hard-core activists, irritable alumni, assorted ‘friends’ of Harvard—to allow a culture of open debate and dialogue to flourish.”

So how does the expert on democracy and governance in the Middle East approach concerns about student safety and belonging in the classroom, while encouraging pupils to confront topics and opinions they disapprove, even despise? Unease about pervasive mental health challenges on college campuses has fed debate over whether exposing students to objectionable content facilitates wellbeing by cultivating resilience, or puts them in harm’s way by leaving them feeling unsupported and disrespected. With LearningWell, Masoud discusses challenging students through argument, empowering them the same way, and his overriding conviction that learning, in all its discomfort, poses “some of the most joyful activities in the human experience.”

On LinkedIn, you posted about how the classroom should feel more like the gym than like home — that universities should be encouraging student discomfort, as opposed to a commonly talked about value, which is belonging. Can school be a gym where you also belong? 

I think school can absolutely be a gym where you belong. It can be a place of very rigorous inquiry that you nonetheless feel a very deep attachment to and feel deeply connected to. But the connection of the student to the community should be based on the right foundation. It should be based on the fact that we are here as a community of learners and teachers, who are engaged in this very difficult but very fruitful task of expanding the limits of human knowledge, testing what it is we think we know against what it is that others think they know. I want people to belong to Harvard. I want people to feel that they are home at Harvard, but not because we’re part of something called “Club Harvard,” not just because we’re the random people who happen to get lucky to be chosen by admissions officers, but because we are people who have this very deep commitment to this very important value of dedicating all of our energies to the task of open and honest inquiry.

In your own classroom, are there ways you try to foster both of those things, discomfort and belonging, with student mental health in mind? 

I think I have a high degree of confidence in my students. And I think student mental health is extremely important. And we as instructors obviously need to be very careful that what we’re doing is strengthening our students and not weakening them. I’m constantly thinking and rethinking about how I’m teaching to make sure that I’m not putting students in situations where their mental health is at risk. I strive not to put things in the conversation that are gratuitous and that aren’t going to serve any educational purpose except to shock and cause people to feel uncomfortable in ways that don’t advance the learning mission. So for me, the kind of uncomfortable position I might put my students in would be to read somebody whose views they don’t agree with. 

I teach in graduate school, which is also a little bit different. The teaching environment I’m in is one where sometimes I wish my students would think about my mental health because I will get very vigorous and rigorous pushback. I might say something that I think is completely anodyne, and some student will, in a very sharp way, show me all of the ways in which it reflects some less than noble aspect of my positionality. But in all of these places, we need to remind everybody that this is an institution of learning. And if I, Harvard, am prioritizing your comfort and I am making it possible for you to avoid discomfort and not strengthening you so that you can face discomfort and defeat it, then I’m not doing my job for you. You’re paying me an inordinate amount of money, and my job is to make sure that you come out of this place much stronger and much smarter. And I guess what I’m saying is there’s no way of avoiding, then, the discomfort. And what I think the institution needs to do is really help our students learn to manage discomfort, to transcend discomfort, and even to seek it out in the rest of their lives because they know that’s how they get stronger.

You touched on this in terms of graduate school versus undergraduate, but do you think that this approach would be effective, or come with different risks, at a school that isn’t Harvard and struggles more with things like retention and completion? 

First of all, in any institution, we as faculty need to be in touch with our students as persons and not just as disembodied brains into which we’re pouring information and with which we are having arguments. We always have to be attuned to our students as persons. And I probably have, in many cases I know I have, over the course of my career gone too far and had students say, “I felt that you were pushing too hard on me or not respecting me as a person.” So we should never allow the situation to get to that point. I would be distressed if somebody interpreted my call to center learning and debate and argumentation as somehow being a call to ignore the fact that we’re teaching human beings, and human beings have emotional reactions to things. 

The point is I want our students to come away with a feeling that they have a great deal of power. And there are arguments out there that they might deem to be harmful, that have caused them to conclude that they don’t have a lot of respect for the holders of those arguments. But you have a lot of power and a lot of strength to confront those arguments. And so I just want our students to develop a powerful sense of their own efficacy that is born fundamentally from the fact that these are super highflying and bright people.

And in terms of empowering students intellectually and otherwise, is that coming back to the idea that instead of being something that turns people away, this kind of debate could actually boost people’s interest in their own education?

So that’s the theory. I’ll also just tell you some empirics. A few years ago, I had some undergraduates take my class and ask to meet me. And I was fairly certain that what I was going to be told was that there was a feeling of a lack of safety in my classroom because I really do try to engage in rigorous argument and get people to argue with each other. And these students never agreed with anything I said. So I met with them. “So how are you finding the class?” And the ringleader said, “Oh, this is our favorite class. You are the only professor we’ve had at Harvard who is not afraid of us.” And I said, “Well, actually, I’m quite afraid of you. I just am not very smart, and I have low impulse control.” 

“I want our students to come away with a feeling that they have a great deal of power.”

I really do feel that our students want to be treated as adults and that means disagreeing with them sometimes. I really do have that belief, as long as they understand that the professor’s goal—this is very important— as long as they understand the professor’s goal is not to preach some gospel, rather to teach them and to make them stronger. So I think one thing students definitely get out of my classes is they’re like, “Tarek Massoud is not trying to convince me of anything. He is not trying to convince me of what he thinks.” In fact, I would be horrified if my students came out of my class as little copies of Tarek Masoud, spouting Tarek Masoud-isms. What the students, I think, come away from my class believing, and I do say this always, is that “What Tarek wants me to do is really know why I think what I think and to be able to defend my position.” And so I’m trying to make you the best version of yourself. I’m not trying to make you a version of me. And it doesn’t come out of any kind of strategy. None of this is terribly theorized in advance. It’s just kind of who I am. It’s why I got into academia. I got into academia in part because I’m not sure of what I know, in part because I love to argue, in part because everything I’ve ever learned, I learned by first arguing with it. 

Your comment about students enjoying this kind of debate more than people might expect reminds me of the article that you wrote for The Wall Street Journal. In that article, you place the responsibility more on faculty and administration, rather than students, for not cultivating these debates. I wonder, for other faculty who are interested but maybe hesitant, do you have advice for how they can establish these kinds of dialogues in their classrooms?

Look, I think it’s not easy. And I would certainly not say that every faculty member needs to do that. But my view is that those of us who do want to foster this space for open debate and inquiry should not find the administration of the university to be an obstacle to that. What I don’t want the administration of the university to do is tell us to do anything. I would not like the email from the administration of the university that says, “You must now foster debate on this.” I think we’re a heterodox enough institution that there are those of us who want to do that. And there are others who would prefer to have more comity in their classrooms in order to maximize the possibility that people learn. We teach different classes, different things, et cetera. So my plea is really for administrators to help those of us who want to expand the space for debate and discourse on campus, but not to say that everybody needs to be like me. I think that would not be a recipe for a healthy institution.

“I’m trying to make you the best version of yourself. I’m not trying to make you a version of me.”

And for faculty who are interested in leaning more into this kind of debate or dialogue, you mentioned taking a personal approach to it. What do you mean by that? 

I think, again, about the things that I mentioned earlier, number one being you can’t just foster this culture of debate without being attentive to your students as persons. And so you have to have that front of mind. The other point I would make is that one must also have a sense of humor. And I do think that one of the ways in which I am lucky is that I don’t take myself too seriously. Somebody wrote about me that I had a Midwestern sense of humor. It’s actually an Egyptian sense of humor. And I do think that helps, as well, because it reminds students that we are actually engaged in a very joyful enterprise. And we are among — “we” being people attached to universities, not just people attached to Harvard University — we are some of the most fortunate people in the world, engaged in what should be some of the most joyful activities in the human experience. And just reminding ourselves of that, from time to time, with smiles on our faces, with periodic reflections on how lucky we are to be in communion with each other, I think, is also helpful. 

Have you also encountered students who don’t like this culture of dialogue or have negative feedback about it? How do you help them through that discomfort?

Without question. Typically, it will express itself in the following way, this discomfort with dialogue. It will express itself with students being aggrieved that I platformed a certain position that they believe is unworthy of being even discussed at Harvard. It comes from actually quite a noble place that our students have very deep commitments to conceptions of what is just and what is right. And it grieves them when they see a professor who’s a figure that they should respect at a place like Harvard, no less, who is platforming these views or who is making people read these views that they believe should be consigned to the ash heap of history. 

And what I try to convince my students of is that I’m not platforming the views so much as I’m platforming them. I’m trying to give the student the opportunity to develop the most powerful arsenal against these arguments that they find to be unworthy. I’m starting from the premise that I believe you, the student, have valid reasons for thinking that this is unworthy. I want you to bring them to my class because there are other people, by the way, who don’t know, and you may convince them. Or, in the process of trying to convince them, you may detect where there are some gaps in your knowledge or argumentation. You either fill them, or you’ll change your mind. There isn’t a way in which this is bad for us, if our goal is to expand our knowledge, to become smarter, to know why it is we hold certain views.

What do you think about the perception that so-called “Wokeism” has radicalized this generation of students more than those before it?

I really don’t like the term “Wokeism” because it doesn’t take seriously the constellation of very deeply held values that I think animate a lot of our students and indeed our colleagues. And I think these values have been quite a constant presence throughout the academy. I saw a whole front page of The Crimson from the 1960s, and it literally could have been written today. I mean, did they use the term “structural racism”? I don’t think so. But they talked about the phenomenon, and the students were very angry and wanted the curriculum to be revised in ways that our students today say. So I don’t feel that this is a new phenomenon that has emerged out of the inundation of the students with a particular set of newfangled ideas. These are very deeply held ideas that emerge from, frankly, a kind of liberal belief in the primacy and value of humans and individuals. And I think it’s part of what makes students such a joy to interact with because they’re motivated by these ideas that are quite valorous. 

What has changed, probably, is there is more of a sense of the university and the classroom as a place for the playing out of public conflict and the classroom as a kind of public space in which people are taking stances and positions that will be or are public, as opposed to part of a private learning experience. Part of it is the move in our culture where everybody thinks of themselves now as a brand, as a social media presence, as an influencer. And so consequently, if all of this is happening in public, it’s much harder to change my view. I have always argued, “Look, the very best technology for increasing the quality of our pedagogy is not using clickers in the classroom or some newfangled program that tracks students doing this or that. It’s having a small class size.” And that is the original safe space. Because a small class size is where we can first develop the relationships to each other as persons that make it possible for people to venture with difficult and maybe even sometimes heterodox arguments. And it’s also small enough that the feeling of embarrassment and the imperative of winning and defeating one’s opponents is minimized.

“Be Prepared to Be Lucky”

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

As graduates consider the next chapter of their lives, a new book provides inspiration and guidance through the unfolding story of a career well spent. Paul Grogan was a student at Williams College when the anti-Vietnam and civil rights movements set the pathway for his life and career. “What, if anything, can I do about this?” said his younger self. Mentors, who saw something in him he couldn’t see, encouraged him to become a “change agent.” It was a term that was unfamiliar to him at the time but one he would live to embody in his fifty years in public service. 

In “Be Prepared to be Lucky,” Grogan imparts lessons about leadership, mentorship, and agency as relevant today as they were when he and his co-author Kathryn Merchant were both young graduates working to make a difference in the world. Among his many roles, Grogan has been a political staffer, a CEO of a national nonprofit, and a giant in philanthropy. His career is capped by his presidency of the Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest and, arguably, most successful community foundations, providing a unique combination of policy and philanthropy that has shaped what Boston is today. 

Readers follow along as Grogan tells the story of his ambitious career: a combination of opportunity, intentionality, and grit. From navigating the emotional politics of the desegregation of the Boston public schools; to building public/private partnerships to save American cities in the 1970’s and 80’s; to helping heal the town/gown tensions between Harvard and Boston, Grogan provides powerful examples of how to make a positive impact on your community, and in turn, how to live a meaningful, fulfilling life. 

MM: Paul, you’ve spent your whole career devoted to public and community service and this book has so many lessons about that from your decades of experience. But let’s start by talking about the young Paul. You went to high school in a very small town, Clinton, New York, and then went off to Williams College. How did your college experience influence your career choices? 

PG: My father was a lifelong educator — a public school teacher and administrator throughout his career — so I had a lifelong interest in education and education policy. And then two giant phenomena, the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, brought me to that path of service. Growing up in a very small town with zero diversity, I was not anywhere close to these issues except through the nightly newscast. It was a religion in our family to sit down and watch at least one of the national newscasts, and I continued that habit throughout college. Obviously, the news was just devastating for much of that period. It led me to ask,  “What, if anything, can I do about this?”

A pivotal conversation I had was with an uncle of mine who was a dear counselor throughout my early adult life. He said to me in one of our long talks, “It really sounds to me like you ought to think about being a change agent.” I had never heard that term, but we talked about it, and I came to understand what it meant. It was not just reading the newspapers as a knowledgeable person or voting as an involved citizen. I wanted to do more than that. And I was excited about that prospect.

MM: What experiences in college helped you develop that part of yourself?

PG: We had a number of quite powerful faculty student committees at Williams in those days, and I ran for office and was elected chairman of one of them. We took a proposal to one of our meetings with the faculty as a whole to stop grading creative writing courses as a limited experiment. But Williams is a conservative place, and this was quite a debate which ultimately occurred in front of the entire faculty of the college. It took place in a hall, one of these double decker halls with a balcony going all the way around. Some of the faculty were down on the floor and many of them were up above me, and I had not said anything in the discussion, which was not going terribly well. Finally, the chairman of the committee, a psychology professor, leaned over and whispered, “If you don’t speak, this is going down.” So I gave a speech. It went extraordinarily well, and the faculty went from a unanimous no vote to a unanimous yes on the proposal. I think it was one of my first brushes with public speaking that mattered and seeing that we came back with something and won the day, that was a tremendous experience for me. 

MM: Were there other people – like your uncle – who believed in you back then? 

PG: Yes, and it was so important, particularly in college where, if you’re intimidated by the whole experience, not sure of yourself, you wonder how you’re going to do and you think you’re probably not going to do very well. Certainly, that was confirmed by the grades I got my freshman year: horrendous. But in fact, you almost always know more than you think you do, and other people see things in you that you may not see in yourself. In this case, there were two history professors who took an interest in me — I couldn’t have told you why, but they did. And they became my mentors through the rest of college and early in my career. I gained a new level of confidence as a result. They pushed me to do an honors thesis, which I had not thought of before, which became my first book, and it just put me on a higher, more ambitious path.

MM: Kathy, what’s your take on that?

KM: I just want to add that things can be very different depending on where you go to school. I went to a very large public university – there are 40,000 people who go to Indiana University in Bloomington — and finding a mentor is like hunting for a drop of water in a rainstorm. I think the point of encouragement here is also: Don’t wait for a mentor to find you – go looking for one. 

MM: Why did you choose the title Be Prepared to be Lucky? 

PG: “Be prepared to be lucky” is an adaptation of my favorite quote that originated in 1949 with E.B. White, the famed essayist and poet. He was talking to a young man who was about to go to New York City to make his fortune. White said to him, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” And the first time I heard that, which I think was in college, it just stunned me as a unique insight into how the world really works. It wasn’t just good luck, it wasn’t bad luck. It was an acknowledgement of a complex process, which is not controllable, but which can be harvested in a certain way. And so we adopted that and we tried to apply it. Certainly, if I look at my career, I can see time after time where being alert, being watchful for opportunities, led to great things, not every time, but often enough to really justify that kind of state of mind. 

“You almost always know more than you think you do, and other people see things in you that you may not see in yourself.”

MM: If I’m understanding the interpretation, it’s a combination of luck, fate, and being open to opportunities that may come your way. And it’s about agency too, correct?  

KM: The agency part is really important. When Paul and I were both still very young in our careers, we were often given responsibilities that were way beyond what we were probably qualified to do. As we say in the book, “always say yes, even when you want to say no, and then you’ll open up opportunities for yourself.” 

PG: I call it “the virtue of hanging around.”

MM: There’s a lot that you thread through the story of your career: working for two city mayors, running the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), resolving town/gown issues between Harvard and Boston, and then transforming the Boston Foundation – you mention the importance of ambition, leadership, and courage. What are some other big lessons from all these experiences? 

PG: I think just about everything you’re asking about has to do with how ambitious you want to be in the world. Certainly, the social and community service world is full of wonderful organizations doing great work. Much of that work though, is confined to a small space because those institutions lack the resources to take their idea to scale. The people I attracted to work with me, we wanted real impact at scale. We didn’t just want to feel good about having helped some people. We wanted to look at some of these institutions that were greatly important in the lives of people and say, how could this be different? How could we be doing much more than we are currently doing?

MM: I love that point. As a message to young people, focusing on impact is different than just developing your purpose or working on something you care about – it is actually working towards outcomes. You seemed to reach a lot of outcomes through partnerships. Can you give some examples?

PG: One example is when I got into the housing field. When you looked at the landscape, you had federal housing programs, state housing programs, and local housing programs, and they were not coordinated in any way or were directed at a particular narrow goal. Everybody had their own idea about it. But we managed to put together a new partnership, which became a permanent institution called the Boston Housing Partnership and had as its aim fostering collective and cross-sector efforts to improve the housing situation. Then to execute, you have to figure out how to get everybody credited for their support and participation. Particularly in the public sector realm with elected officials, they need to get credit for doing good things. And that’s where the non-politicians have to be attentive to their political partners, not by being political or partisan, but by understanding that politicians are dealing with a different kind of accountability than regular citizens. And there has to be a sophistication about making it rewarding and accountable for elected officials.

Many of the politicians that we were dealing with around the country had a zero sum mentality. They assumed that if a “such and such” nonprofit was getting their name in the paper in a positive way, then that would take away from the opportunity for the elected official to get recognized. What we were able to demonstrate after a period of time was that these partnerships were a way to add value that wasn’t there before. So you didn’t have to take something away from somebody in order to get their cooperation. 

MM: Speaking of partnerships and politics, tell us more about your experience at Harvard.

PG: Sure. Well, as we all know, Harvard is sort of the college and university capital of the United States, the pinnacle of higher education. But the whole Boston area or indeed New England is populated with just an enormous number of institutions of higher education. So it’s a big issue for the future of Boston and for the region. And despite the importance of those institutions and the need to make sure that they are going to be healthy going forward, the relationships that should have developed between the colleges and universities and cities and state government, and the corporate sector for that matter, really hadn’t developed before the turn of the last century. They were out of sync with the reality of it or they didn’t acknowledge how important these relationships were. So relationships that should have existed — strong, cooperative, knowledgeable relationships between government and higher ed, for instance — were just truncated in some way until there were problems.

One set of problems, but not the only one, is the whole question of land and value. Because when institutions of higher education get land, it comes off the tax rolls and gets used primarily for the higher ed community. So that’s where there is the kind of thinking that if this land is going to go to the universities, it’s going to be taken away from the community. And, particularly in the low-and moderate-income neighborhoods, there was a real fear that people were going to be forced out of their homes by the rising value of the real estate. So there was one particular transaction where the university was trying to acquire a very large plot of land in Allston, which is a neighborhood of Boston, to create a major new science and technology district. 

This was hung up for years because the city was refusing to approve the sale of this land, which was held by a railroad company. And it was just stuck as the years went by and the university didn’t seem to have the wherewithal to do anything about it, which you’d think is so odd. These institutions are so big and powerful. But in Harvard’s case, they really hadn’t made any real effort to understand the local political scene in order to engage people who might help them. But that finally did happen. A couple of very active Harvard trustees went to the president of Harvard and said, we have got to have a capacity developed here at the university to relate to the mayor (then Thomas Menino), to relate to folks who are going to be important to this process. Knowing I had a long-standing relationship with the mayor, Harvard asked me to help with this and I built a department focused entirely on external issues like this. After that, the meetings just went to a different level of seriousness and purpose, and with relative ease, we secured the approval. 

MM: Here’s a question from the last chapter of the book. Why would you encourage students to go into either public service or community work, besides just it being a good thing to do? 

PG: Well, again, I come back to this word impact and a sense of what you want your life to be about. Are you going to be a change agent? To be willing to dwell on those questions with trusted friends, advisors, and family members is a very important thing to do if you have friends and family who are willing to do that. So I think that’s a big piece of it in terms of why do it, it really has to do with what you want your life to be about. Senator John McCain was very fond of saying “believe in something larger than yourself.”

I think this is really fundamental. I’ve met too many people throughout my life who have been very successful in conventional terms but have just a sad feeling that they haven’t done anything that’s really helped anybody else or been an effort to lift someone else up. It is a uniquely satisfying thing to do and it makes society healthier at the same time. So I think it does come down to that kind of existential construct you decide to devote your finite resources to.

KM: An important point to add to that is that working in public service doesn’t have to be forever. If you have other things that you want to do, the skillset that you acquire working in those sectors are increasingly attractive to the corporate world. The opportunity to make partnerships and the fungibility of being able to move from one sector to another throughout a career is very valuable. 

MM: My last question is related to the fact that a lot of the impact that you have made in your career was largely based on listening to the other side. That appears to be a very big problem right now. Is there any advice that either of you would give to the graduates of today on that? 

PG: I think everybody should move to Massachusetts. That’s the fastest way to reduce polarization.

MM: Well, Massachusetts does have an out-migration problem, so that would be good.

PG: I’m only half kidding. We have a huge stake in the immigration outcome. It’s not something that would just be nice, it’s something that is absolutely essential. If we don’t do a better job of attracting young people and convincing people not to leave the state, things are going to be very dire in Massachusetts. And one of the positive things about Massachusetts bears directly on the ability to do the kind of partnerships that we’ve been discussing — the lack of polarization. There are conflicts, but they don’t involve the bitter, divisive, and hateful politics that we see in city, county, and state after state. Our elected officials of whatever party seem to find a way to work together, although they too need to be more ambitious than we’re being. But it is a fundamentally different environment. 

KM: Call me a Pollyanna, but I think that what we’re experiencing right now, this too shall pass. We’re now old enough that we’ve seen cycles and waves of this over time where there’s divisiveness and an inability to listen and act together, and then that calms down and we can get more things done. So I really don’t know how to stop what’s going on right now. It’s alarming. Very scary. It seems worse than it’s ever been, but every moment that’s been like this seems worse than it’s ever been. I am going to borrow Paul’s phrase, we need to practice defiant optimism.

Adopting Education For Life as a Guiding Principle for Health Professional Education

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed seismic transformation in education, particularly for Health Professional Education (HPE). Following a decade of imaginative innovations, the pandemic disrupted education systems everywhere, accelerated adoption of online technologies, forced major institutional rearrangements to accommodate hybrid instructional models, and laid bare pre-existing inequalities in access to educational resources within and among countries.

In the report “Challenges and Opportunities for Health Professional Education in the Post-Pandemic Era”, recently published by The Lancet, my co-authors and I evaluated how transformative developments have emerged, including in competency-based education, interprofessional education, and especially the large-scale application of information technology to education.

By tracking institutional and instructional reforms, we pose two crucial questions: What has happened to Health Professional Education over the past decade, and how has the Covid-19 pandemic altered the education process?

While the pandemic did not initiate such transformations, it greatly accelerated them, and they are likely to have a long-term impact on HPE. These educational developments converge with broader societal shifts exposed and fostered by the pandemic. 

The challenge is not merely to adapt to a new normal, but to proactively build a better normal. The first step in this endeavor is to develop novel ways of conceptualizing the models that could shape Health Professionals Education in the post-pandemic era.

Two main forces are driving this transformation. First, advances in educational technologies rooted in cognitive sciences are revolutionizing how we teach and learn. Second, the rapid evolution of health systems, marked by technological and organizational complexities, demands a more dynamic approach to education. The traditional notion of completing education before entering the workforce is no longer viable, as new jobs emerge and existing ones evolve faster than educational programs can keep pace.

This means that initial instruction is not sufficient to assure successful performance, either in terms of professional proficiency or of personal well-being. At the same time, new educational technologies make it possible to extend competency development beyond the traditional confines of formal full-time instruction, thus blurring the borders between the previously separate life stages of learning and work. 

Taken together, the two drivers of change demand a strategic shift in higher education towards a model that could be called Education for Life, with profound implications for both instructional and institutional design.

Based on our assessment, we offer three core recommendations, the first of which highlights the importance of adopting Education for Life as a guiding principle for health professional education. The concept of Education for Life encompasses three dimensions—learning throughout life, learning to promote and restore healthy lives, and learning to live one’s own life.

The challenge is not merely to adapt to a new normal, but to proactively build a better normal.

Learning throughout life refers to education that lasts a person’s entire lifetime, rather than merely during a defined period. Traditional educational models divide the life course into separate stages for learning, work, and retirement. Closed educational systems that front-load the content and cost of education before learners enter the labor market should be complemented and eventually superseded by open systems designed to meet the evolving needs for new competencies along the entire career trajectories of health professionals.

Learning to promote and restore healthy lives is at the heart of the substantive content of HPE, which centers on developing the competencies to preserve and improve the lives and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. In other words, this is education to help the lives of others through the technical expertise and service ethic of health professionals.

The final dimension, learning to live one’s own life, highlights that part of the educational experience should enable learners to preserve their sense of purpose and mental well-being. This involves learning to balance work life and family life. It also means learning to cope with stress and adversity. Preventing burnout, however, is not only a matter of developing these individual capabilities but also of learning how to transform the organization of work in ways that promote the well-being of all team members, while promoting equity among the different categories of the health workforce.  In the face of increasing workloads, adequate staffing is essential for freeing up time to manage the stress and pressures that compromise wellbeing. 

If institutions providing HPE are to effectively implement the three dimensions of Education for Life, they must face the challenges and leverage the opportunities presented by technological innovations and health system disruptions, which were already present before the pandemic but have since become even more crucial drivers of change.

Health Professional Education will continue to be challenged to respond to societal concerns over health equity and to strengthen a new professionalism that incorporates concern for the individual and the community. Meeting these challenges while nurturing the core values of the healing professions should remain a vital goal for health educators.

Julio Frenk is a global public health expert and president of the University of Miami.