Category: LearningWell Radio

On this episode of Invented Here, Dana Humphrey is in conversation with Dr. Angela Lindner, professor and former Associate Provost of Undergraduate Affairs at the University of Florida. Lindner helped create and lead UF Quest, a 4-year signature course aimed at providing intimate, interactive learning communities within the large land-grant university in Gainesville. Part of the general education program that begins with a first year Humanities course, UF Quest engages students with questions that Lindner says “are difficult to answer, but impossible to ignore.”

This episode is a part of Invented Here, a podcast series from LearningWell Magazine and the LearningWell Coalition featuring stories of innovation in learner-centered education that fosters life-long wellbeing.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

On the first episode of Invented Here, we talk to John Volin, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of Maine, on introducing research experiences to first year students as a pathway to belonging, wellbeing and retention.

This episode is a part of Invented Here, a podcast series from LearningWell Magazine and the LearningWell Coalition featuring stories of innovation in learner-centered education that fosters life-long wellbeing.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

The following is a transcript of LearningWell Radio’s interview with Alex Kafka on his new report, “Overcoming Student Loneliness: Strategies for Connection.“You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Dana Humphrey: This is LearningWell Radio, the podcast of LearningWell Magazine, covering the intersection of higher education and lifelong well being. I’m Dana Humphrey.

Marjorie Malpiede: And I’m Marjorie Malpiedie, and we’re the hosts of Learning Well Radio. 

MM: Anyone who reads the higher ed press already knows Alex Kafka. For more than two decades, the senior editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education has been bringing information and insights on the most important issues in higher ed, including student mental health and well being. And he’s done this through both his regular coverage and his special reports.

Alex joins us today to talk about a new report he has authored that digs deep into a phenomenon that has been surfacing for the past several years. Certainly before and during and after the pandemic, this sense of loneliness, Gen Z students are reporting. His report, Overcoming Student Loneliness, Strategies for Connection, is, as the title suggests, an evidence based resource for how higher education can address student loneliness, a worrisome and, as we’ll hear from our conversation, complicated issue, by using its own built-in advantages. Alex, welcome to LearningWell Radio.

Alex Kafka: Thank you, Marjorie. I’m so pleased to be with you. 

MM: I’m very excited to have you with us today. And I’m not going to lie. I am a big fan. fan of your work. And I’ve been reading your coverage for years on this topic and others, obviously. So first question, you have covered so many topics in higher ed, including student wellbeing. What made you focus specifically on loneliness? 

AK: My editors and I were talking seriously about a loneliness special report in late 22 and early 23, even before Surgeon General Murthy brought additional newsiness to the topic with his campus tour. And the topic appealed to me because it was difficult and mysterious. And that’s what I like when I’m going into a reporting project. It’s difficult in ways we’ll discuss more later, I’m sure, but fundamentally because loneliness is such a ubiquitous but elusive phenomenon. Emily Dickinson called it the horror not to be surveyed but skirted in the dark. But she, of course, did survey it beautifully and artfully, and we wanted to tackle it too. Most everyone has felt lonely at one time or another, and if you ask just about anyone what was the loneliest time of your life, they’ll have an answer for you. But it’s a puzzle because those lonely times often are not the times when one’s alone. You can be surrounded by people, even by friends, a lover, people who cherish you, respect you, enjoy your company, and still feel lonely. And we’ve all read tragic news stories about rich, popular entertainers or athletes or influencers who, it turns out, were actually abjectly miserable. And in the higher ed space, a more specific, practical mystery, Marjorie, was why once the COVID lockdown period was behind us and students were back on campus, they were still in many cases, deeply lonely, more so than ever, according to some data. So, loneliness and isolation during the quarantine and lockdown were awful, but at least it made a kind of sense. The loneliness after that was a bit of a puzzle, and as a reporter who’d been following college mental health issues for a while, I wanted to talk to experts and figure out what was going on.

MM: So let’s get right into the mystery because I agree that this is not what people think of as being by yourself or lonely. This is a different phenomenon for this generation. So as you point out, It’s not as simple as one might think. Can you talk about the different types of loneliness that in your reporting you uncovered? And one thing that really stood out for me, the fact that loneliness is not a disease, it is a brain state. 

AK: Like a lot of primal feelings, loneliness at first seems simple. And then the more you examine it, the more variegated and complicated it becomes. So it’s widespread. There are societal influences, but it’s also subjective. If you feel hungry, you’re hungry. If you feel thirsty, you’re thirsty. And if you feel lonely, you’re lonely. Jeremy Nobel, a physician and public health expert and the author of Project Unlonely, cites work by John Cassiopo the late neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. And Cassiopo interpreted loneliness fundamentally as a craving, an important psychological and neurological mechanism that prompts us to seek connection.

And I really like this thought, it really resonated in my mind that in that sense, like hunger or thirst, loneliness is a gift. We think, Oh, loneliness, how awful, but it’s also a gift because that prompt is essential to function, to live. The problematic loneliness is loneliness that goes unanswered, unaddressed. And so in that sense the epidemic of loneliness is partly a matter of education, explaining to college students, like everyone else for that matter, that loneliness is ignored at one’s peril, literally, and more broadly at the peril of society. 

MM: So I’m particularly interested in your definition, or the literature’s definition, of psychological and societal loneliness and what that means for us in higher ed.

AK: I have to attribute properly, like a good journalist here, and say this is really Jeremy Nobel’s framing from his book that I draw from. And he’s an important source in the report. So he breaks loneliness down into three fundamental categories. Psychological, societal, and existential. And he in turn, by the way, is drawing from the book. from people before him who have been studying this for decades. He doesn’t pretend to be the creator of all these categories. So yeah, let’s briefly define them. Psychological is that basic craving for connection. As he puts it, I think the wanting of that just warm and fuzzy other human, that is a lifelong thing. Societal loneliness is feeling like you don’t fit in. That you’re excluded from a group of whatever kind. And then the third kind, and this is the trickiest in some ways, and also to my mind, really interesting is the existential or spiritual loneliness. So when you talk to Nobel and other clinicians and authors and experts who have been looking at this, they say that psychological and sociological loneliness are the predominant strains that you will see among college students. 

Then, it’s interesting when you look at recent surveys you find things that are either in or adjacent to that existential or spiritual loneliness. And that’s the fundamental human condition. The bewilderment at being alive. Who am I? How did we get here? Why are we here? What’s my purpose? What do I mean to others? What do they mean to me? That kind of thing. And when you look at what students, what everyone, but including students are thinking about and worrying about things like climate change, gun culture, political polarization, malfeasance, incompetence, war, racism, et cetera, et cetera. Existential concerns are kind of part of that stew, I think, beneath the psychological and sociological loneliness.

MM: That’s a phenomenal description. And it makes me think, and I would agree with you, that this isn’t just about FOMO, right? Although it is about that too, fear of missing out. And also who’s in, who’s out and how do people look at me, either among them or outside of them. And I know we have a lot of that in our young generation, particularly exacerbated by social media, which I do want to talk about. But I would agree, this existential feeling of who am I? What is my purpose? How can I control all of these sort of outer worldly events that are happening? I think when I talk to students I hear them worry a lot about that. So I’m glad you brought it up. 

AK: I think it’s real, that feeling that the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. And, why am I trying so hard to succeed? Why am I going through all this when things are spinning so much out of control?

MM: Yeah, let’s talk about some of the causes that you identify, and I love how you talk about social media as the Borg.

AK: I’m a big Star Trek fan, so I couldn’t help it. And I mean, doesn’t that describe social media? It’s like, when you look at all those studies about people who want to escape it, but they can’t, and they must assimilate.

MM: I have to tell you that was my favorite part of the report. The way you describe that is just priceless. And I think really spot on, to say it’s a love-hate relationship simplifies it, but you talk about, and again, you go back to the evidence and what’s in the literature. I love Jean Twenge’s work on this. We’ve all seen Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation. So You know, you’re very balanced and research based when you talk about this, but do you have a personal opinion on how onerous social media is to this problem of loneliness in Gen Z?

AK: Ah, so now, Marjorie, you’re trying to trick a reporter into having an opinion about something.

MM: I’m thinking it might be there.

AK: I’ll give that a shot, and it’ll probably get me into trouble just like when any reporter strays into opinion land. Jean Twenge, a hugely influential psychologist and author, put her fingers on a lot of this stuff a decade ago. And I think most of your listeners are well aware of the argument, so I won’t rehash it at length, but, the confluence of smartphone adoption and ubiquitous social media and then Professor Haidt and his new book, and it seems like every book on this topic has to be accompanied by an article in The Atlantic, right? So he had one of those and he’s updated Dr. Twenge’s thoughts and argument in a more activist vein, saying we should look at policies and legislation curtailing the use, particularly among younger kids, of smartphones and social media. And influential folks are obviously hearing and thinking about this debate. Just this week, a few days ago, Surgeon General Murthy proposed putting warning labels on social media the same way we do on cigarettes in California, Florida, and some other states. Interestingly, states that have overall a lot of political differences are all considering legislation that would rein in kids’ use of social media. So in answer to your question, I’ll stray from my reportorial comfort zone a little bit. 

While correlation is not causation, I think Twenge’s and Haidt’s arguments pack a real wallop, and I totally understand why Surgeon General Murthy and legislators and parents and teachers and school administrators are alarmed. And, I’ve thought a lot about the counter argument I mentioned in the report, a George Will column where he says, society always freaks out about new technology, whether it’s a radio or TV or internet or cell phones. But, I think that doesn’t quite hold up. Bill Maher did a great bit a couple of years ago, making a serious point in his entertaining way that cell phones, especially in tandem with social media. Bring a technological change, not just in quantity, but in kind. That this is really a little bit different. And besides the occasional glance at LinkedIn, or catching up with music camp friends on Facebook, I don’t really go in much for social media. I have other addictions like binging on Succession. But here’s where my ambivalence or confusion or reservations come in, and I realize it’s mealy mouthed and totally unhelpful.

But there are three points I want to make, and I’ll try to make them quickly. One, smartphones are woven into so many facets of our lives. That while it may well make sense to delay their use, and my wife and I did just that with our now 26-year-old twins that might just make them all the more enticing. I think about when I was a kid, Marjorie, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV except a little on Friday and Saturday nights, and that just made TV gleam in my imagination, like the Holy Grail. And pretty much every school day, I snuck over to my friend Bruce’s house to watch reruns of M. A. S. H. But I think, the forbidden fruit, whether it’s TV or social media, is always very appealing, right? And then Two, within social media, the categories are so wide and blurred. Yes, obviously heavy teen users staring at TikTok or Instagram or YouTube most of every waking hour. That’s a horror show and the opportunity costs are huge. Not just in socialization, but just in reading and pursuing other skills and passions. But social media, as you know, serves affinity groups, marginalized populations, people with disabilities. During the pandemic, in some cases, it was a real lifeline for students who felt just dreadfully isolated. And social media can reveal occupational possibilities, they blend with entertainment, streaming, and video game platforms, they offer marketplaces for niche skills, they do a lot. And so it’s a very mixed bag.

MM: Yeah.

AK: And, then the third point I’ll make, and then I’ll hush up on this, is that when it comes to cultural battles over tech, I think we’re often fighting the last war. And so I wonder if warning labels on social media will feel like the explicit lyrics on albums that Tipper Gore proposed. Where teens just laughed and rolled their eyes and bought the albums. Gosh, I think if we look back in 10 or 20 years at the possibilities and perils of, say, AI, and how that blends into the mix, some of these other debates will be dwarfed. 

MM: A couple things. One is, what I think is interesting, and it’s pointed out in your report that kids themselves would just as well give up social media if all of their friend groups did the same. So there may be some sort of organic resistance to it that we might see. What do you think?

AK: I think there’s a total organic resistance to it, and I love you can read, or maybe you’ve already read, about the study by economists showing that people would literally shell out 10, 20, 30 bucks a month to rid social media from their universes. Except, and this is where the Borg assimilation metaphor comes in, you can’t quit because so much of your career life or student life or Just the logistics of communicating with your team or your carpool or whatever are so wrapped into it. And so you can’t. But I think, educating students about some of the perils and addictive issues with social media, just like you do, tobacco and alcohol and sex education and education about anything else in the world, that might yield better results, but I don’t know. I think it’ll yield a lot of great dissertations in the next decade or two.

MM: What is it specifically about — again, the many trends and habits and favorites and whatnot — what is the direct linkage to why they’re so lonely? 

AK: So there’s a great metaphor that a journalist used in an Atlantic piece, and Jean Twenge in her new book actually references that, where the journalist says, look, it’s not that everyone who uses social media is lonely and miserable and it’s a more, Subtle connection, the way a sip of wine might loosen people up at a party and make them feel a little less shy and inhibited. For other people, it might make them too uninhibited or depressed or whatever that it can have or, alcoholic and addicted. That social media is the same way, that for most people a little bit of social media goes a long way and it’s probably okay, but then for some relatively small percent, It’s really problematic. And when you look at the surveys showing percentages of, I don’t have them in front of me, but gosh, five, 10, 15 percent, you’ve got a line of 10 students in front of you and one or two of them is addicted to something, whether that’s social media or drugs or alcohol or whatever else that’s a big concern. And if you’re wrapped up in social media, first of all, there’s all the potential abuse, bullying, exploitation, deep fake nudes, sex, blackmail stuff, the things you read about in the newspaper every day. There’s that, but short of that, there’s also just, gosh, if you’re staring at your phone five, six, seven hours a day there’s so many other things you’re not doing.

MM: And not connecting around, certainly not in a real way. Speaking of smartphones and social media I want to sneak in a question about something you reported on recently. And that was a new report, a white paper that came out on the efficacy of mental health apps for college students. Big, huge question. I was glad that you wrote this. And also glad that Our friends and colleagues actually did the white paper. This was Sarah Lipson and Dan Eisenberg and others Healthy Minds Network. And I believe the Hope Center. Alec, what do you think about that in relation to what we’re talking about today?

AK: Yeah, so what they’re doing, so these are teams from BU, UCLA, Irvine, Temple, and I hope I’m not forgetting any institution in conjunction with the Ruderman Family Foundation. And what they’re trying to do is bring some quantification and some publicly available evidence. about whether mental health apps that colleges are using are working. And there’s some evidence, they cite, for instance, a study from 2019, that the apps are in fact doing something, maybe quite a bit. But there’s not a lot of evidence out there. There’s not a lot of transparency as to how many students are using these apps, whether they stick with the apps, that’s a big question whether the apps are taking the best approaches for the student populations they’re reaching, that kind of thing. And so in this report, they first of all are pushing, I would say, college leadership to ask more questions of the app vendors as to what exactly you’re selling, how good is it, and for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we’re paying for it in some cases what are we getting for our money. And then in the longer run, they’re urging the app vendors and colleges to share their information about All those things, how effective the apps are, how many students are reaching so that people can, hopefully pick the right ones for their circumstances. 

MM: And there’s so much promise there to your point about the sort of flip side of social media and devices. There’s so much more we need to know about how it might actually benefit students. Certainly they’re using them. And it’s, there’s the proliferation of these that certainly came around in the last few years and We’re certainly accelerated by the pandemic. Before we leave the causes of loneliness, I didn’t ask you about the pandemic, Alex. There’s so much we still don’t know and analyze in that. But what do you say about that in your report?

AK: Yeah. When I was writing about student mental health during the pandemic, a lot of experts were hypothesizing/warning that there could be something they were calling an echo pandemic, which would be a post traumatic societal phenomenon. And they were looking back at previous historical examples like World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic, things like that, and saying, hey, after these things were quote, over, they weren’t really over, that there was in some cases, upticks in depression and anxiety and suicides and all kinds of things, and they were afraid that might happen with COVID too. And at least some, I don’t think it’s that clear and I don’t think it’s really a consensus, but at least some experts think we are in that eco pandemic now, when you look at the still rising rates. of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, social anxiety in particular subcategory of anxiety that we are seeing the results of those lockdown and quarantine periods and, the cognitive and emotional effects of those.

MM: And you say in your report that Gen Z students are the most lonely demographic, for all the reasons we’ve been talking about but that puts this whole issue squarely at the door of colleges and universities, particularly those who care deeply about protecting student mental health. And success, because I think you point out as well in your report, this affects how people learn, how engaged they are in their college experience, etc. I wanted to ask you about something I thought was a great point in your reporting, and that is that terms matter, right? Words matter in college student mental health. And there’s always this sense of, what is something that is a serious or acute diagnosis that has to be treated in one way? And what is, to reach back to what we first started talking about, more of a state of mind or feelings. And you talk about loneliness in a way where we need to be careful not to pathologize it, right? But at the same time understand when it becomes a problem. Can you talk a little bit about that?

AK: Sure. Yeah. As we’ve discussed, the mental health problems are all too real an unbeat of statistics from healthy mind study and other surveys, loneliness percentages in the forties or fifties or even higher, depending what you look at, anxiety and depression rates in the thirties or forties climbing rates of social anxiety. And students in psychological crises need substantial care, and they need it fast. And it’s great that stigmatization of mental health challenges has declined a ton over the last couple decades. But clinicians are also worried. That everyday stress is sometimes medicalized by students and by their parents. Being a social mammal is sometimes trying. Anyone with a roommate, schoolmate, or even just family members can attest to that, right? And there are financial, logistical problems that are very real, but not medical. Not psychological. And yet too many students, counseling center directors are saying, try to solve every problem with an appointment at the counseling center. And that can be unhelpful in a couple ways. First, the counseling center can’t help them. If the problem is finance and summer job issues, you got to go to financial aid and career centers. And second, if the misguided counseling center recessions take valuable time from students who really need them, that stretches already ragged and totally understaffed counseling centers even further. 

MM: I want to then segue into sort of what schools are doing to respond to this because I do Think that this is starting to become an acknowledgement on college campuses, you know I’ve been hearing for years counseling services can’t do everything, nor should they. And so we’re seeing the rest of the community get involved in this, which I think is a good thing. When it comes to this particular issue around loneliness, what are some of the strategies that you’re seeing that might be most effective?

AK: Oh, sure. That’s the fun part of the report. After all the depressing news about causes and whatever, is that this, unlike some things colleges can actually do quite a bit about, and it doesn’t always cost that much either. There practical, just plain old fun responses, outdoor movie nights with snacks, escape rooms, food trucks, outdoor concerts, dances. Do not underestimate, I’ve been told by a couple presidents now, how much this generation that did not get their prom and junior prom nights, how much they love dances. Speed-friending preferably in conjunction with pizza. Everything goes better with pizza. Quiet craft activities for students who just don’t go in for a lot of noise and commotion. For students who do go in for a lot of noise and commotion. Crazy traditions. The one that’s pictured on the cover of the report is the Colorado School of Mines cardboard boat race. And the precedent there is also big in the GaGaBall tournaments. I had no idea what GaGaBall was until I reported this. There’s some other things too changing expectations from the outset. So that students who have a few lonely weeks at the beginning of their first year realize Hey, that’s normal, and they are not the oddballs. They’re supposed to be feeling that way. Sometimes practical nudges, like at Bryant University in Rhode Island, they give every new student a lawn chair. And have kind of a block party that first night and going on that first week. Things going on outside, right outside their dorms every night. Social gatherings around academic programs in preparation for study abroad. And then finally I love the MIT example that I cite and especially one student who I feature, and I won’t tell you too much here and spoil it, but Students who turn those existential quandaries we talked about upside down. Why are we here? How can we better serve our fellow human beings? You know, if you’re sitting alone in your room those questions can lead to misery. But if you start, like they did, a quote, big question club and get together regularly and do readings around them and invite guest lecturers and that kind of thing, that can become a very social phenomenon and really fun. So I guess, two prongs. Humanize the campus, increase empathy and peer support, but also just make campus life vibrant and fun so that the fear of missing out doesn’t happen on your phone. It happens because, or rather it happens because you’re on your phone and you’re not out the door and actually interacting with your peers. 

MM: The other thing I love that you talked about, and if you have anything else to add, please do, but this idea about, so activities are terrific, right? Some people go for it, some people might not. But this kind of cultural change where everyone on campus is sort of acknowledging the reality of this, right? Not everybody has a friend group, or friends. And professors talking about that and staff talking about that. I think that’s really cool.

AK: Yeah, I do too. That strain of the argument came from Gary Glass, I think, at Emory University. And he was saying, yeah, this generation, they’ve grown up watching syndications of friends and other sitcoms where not only do you have a couple good friends, but you’ve got a circle of six or eight of them and they’re all witty. And there’s always some. Funny story arc going on that you’re all part of. And of course, people know, hey, that’s TV. It’s not real life. And yet, when you combine that with that parallel universe on social media, where everyone looks happy and healthy and thin and smiling, that can have in the long run kind of weird effects on what you expect from your social life. 

MM: Fantastic words of advice with chock full of evidence and some great best practices. So this is definitely a report that should be read and it should be read now at a very important time. I want to make sure that our audience knows how to get the report. 

AK: Go to chronicle.com, which you should check out anyway, because it’s awesome. But then go to the store button at the top of the page on chronicle.com, and then you will see on the drop down menu reports or featured products, as well as other things like data collections, back issues. And this will be under, at the moment, I think it’s under reports and featured products. But anyway, you’ll find my report. You’ll find brilliant reports by so many of my colleagues at The Chronicle on all kinds of urgent and important issues.

MM: Thank you so much, Alex. This has been a real treat to have you on the show. Thank you so much. And we are looking forward to more from you.

AK: Great. I’ve had so much fun speaking with you and thank you Marjorie.

MM: Take care.

Ian Elsner: This has been learning while radio, a production of learning. Well, for more information about our work, go to learning well mag.org. And if you like what we’re doing, leave us a rating or review. Thanks so much for listening.

The following is a transcript of LearningWell Radio’s interview with Wendy Suzuki on her book “Good Anxiety.” You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Dana Humphrey: This is LearningWell Radio, the podcast of LearningWell magazine, covering the intersection of higher education and lifelong well-being. I’m Dana Humphrey.

Marjorie Malpiede: And I’m Marjorie Malpete, and we’re the hosts of LearningWell Radio.

DH: Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a neuroscientist at New York University, where she also serves as Dean of the College of Arts and Science. Her primary area of research is neuroplasticity, and recently her work has focused on understanding how aerobic exercise can be used to improve learning, memory, and higher cognitive abilities. She’s the author of Healthy Brain Happy Lice, a personal program to activate your brain and do everything better, and Good Anxiety, harnessing the power of the most misunderstood emotion. She’s had appearances on CBS This Morning, WNYC, Big Think the Moth, she has a TED talk, and now she’s joining us on LearningWell Radio. Wendy, thank you so much for being here today.

Wendy Suzuki: Thank you for having me, Dana. 

DH: Good Anxiety discusses how we can make everyday anxiety work for us rather than against us. And we will definitely talk more in depth about that. But the last time I saw you was at the Coalition for Transformational Education’s conference in March,

where you gave an electrifying presentation on the effect of exercise in the brain. It really set the house on fire. I have never had that much fun during a presentation at a conference. We all stood up, we went through some of the exercises that you have your students do during class. So I just wondered if you could give a bit of background on that. Why did you decide to start bringing physical activity into your classroom, and how did that process go? Were the students receptive? Did you notice a change in how they learned or how you taught them? 

WS: Yeah, this all started when I got interested in the effects of exercise on the brain because I had I had realized I wasn’t moving at all in my life and I was feeling run down and stressed and also I didn’t have friends outside of my own lab and I said I don’t know how to gain new friends but I do know that I can go to the gym and at least feel more physically strong and so I went to the gym and I ended up really changing my regular workout habits and I felt really great. And right about that time, I needed to teach a new class and I thought, oh, wouldn’t it be fun to learn about the effects of exercise on the brain since I’m noticing all these great effects on my life,

on my mood and on my memory and on my focus and it wouldn’t be fun to really dive deep with the students. And so I at developing that class. But then I found the thing that really gets me going is going to the gym and finding a great class and moving with a whole bunch of people. And so I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to actually bring exercise into the classroom? And so I immediately ran to my departmental administrator and said, hey, could I get some money for to hire an exercise instructor so I could bring exercise into the classroom? And they said, no, no, you’re you’re the teacher, you teach the class. And so I went back to my desk a little dejected and I thought maybe I’ll train to be an exercise instructor and I will teach the exercise part of the class too. So then I went back to my administrator and I said, “Hey, would you pay for me to go train how to teach exercise at the gym and then teach in the classroom?” And they said, “Yes, we will.” And so I went and I took training fitness,

uh, teaching class at the gym, and it was so much fun. And, and I, at the same time, I was developing this new class and, and I thought, wow, make, I could turn this into a study. Maybe I could test the effects or test their baseline effects of mood and reaction time before and after this class and see whether our regular workouts, which were going to be once a week, did any difference. And so this turned into a class that I called “Can Exercise Change Your Brain?” And you asked me whether it changed the classroom. I will never forget the very first day of that class that I ever taught.

It was in a classroom where I taught for 15 years, a typical classroom with lots of seats in it. All the seats had been pulled out, it was a completely empty classroom. I walked in, I was worrying head to toe Lululemon, which I usually don’t do in classroom. And I was feeling really nervous because while I’m very comfortable lecturing, I had to actually teach an exercise class to these students for the very first time. And I’ll never forget all the nervous laughter. I think they were quite scared when they saw me walked in the classroom in Lululemon and they realized, oh my God, I have to work out with her. But I must say that completely transformed to that classroom. It eliminated that invisible wall that’s always there between the talking head at the front of the classroom and all of the hopefully learning heads in the rest of the classroom. And we had such a great time. And so that’s what made me realize, oh my gosh, I’ve got to do this in my lectures. There’s no better way to, as you say, electrify or dries a room than to make everybody stand up and they don’t know exactly what’s going to happen and then they have to do a little dance to Taylor Swift.

That’s how that came to be. 

DH: It was so much fun at the conference. It really left such an amazing impression and there was quite a bit of nervous laughter when we were going through the exercises as well. Although I think it was all based on, “Gosh, I’m going to look so silly doing this.” But it was so much fun. As you alluded to, and you talk in the intro to your book about how your own anxiety about how you were feeling led you to try and experiment with ways to feel better, including exercise and nutrition. But it also led you on this path to exploring the difference and distinction between good and bad anxiety. So anxiety has bad rap. Can you explain how anxiety can be a force for good in our lives? 

WS: Yeah, so I think first and foremost, it’s really important for people to realize that anxiety is a normal human emotion. We all have it. There’s nothing abnormal about anxiety. It’s one of the more uncomfortable emotions, but in and of itself, it is part of our natural human set of emotions. But the other second thing, it’s a little bit better, is that anxiety evolved not to annoy us, but in fact, you might be surprised to learn that anxiety evolved to protect us. And good anxiety is the idea of getting back to the protective aspect of anxiety and trying to leave the bad rap, as you say, of anxiety on the doorstep. And the first important step that I’m sure everybody’s thinking about is, oh my God, there’s no way this can be good. It’s just so overwhelming. And I totally agree. Anxiety in our society today is overwhelming. The level is too high. And in fact, for most of us, too high to be protective or helpful. So a lot of my book is first showing us how to turn down the volume of anxiety note that I never say I’m going to get rid of it because you can’t it’s a normal human emotion but there are so many approaches and techniques and tools that one can use to turn the volume down and that is the first step And I think that can be helpful to everybody listening to listening to this

podcast So a few years ago. I’ll just go in a little aside here for a it. I had the opportunity to work with somebody who I, it was sort of a coach and I took a bunch of personality tests and one of the personality tests came back that I had high access to anxiety. And you get these results back and you’re reading through them and I’m like, that doesn’t sound very good. But I was walking through them with this coach and they were talking about how it actually was a good thing that it’s eyes and ears for danger that you’re talking about that when something is not quite right,

you see it, you’re expecting it. So it wasn’t all bad. So I was thinking about that so much as I read through this book about that experience of learning that anxiety can be a good thing.

DH: So, as you know, LearningWell is focused on issues around college student well-being, including student mental health. And I was struck when you were in the book talking about this relationship between stress and anxiety and resilience,

because I think resilience is a term that gets thrown around a lot when we talk about Gen Z mental health or the younger generation, they don’t have resilience, yadda yadda yadda. Can you talk about the relationship there, between stress and resilience? 

WS: Yeah, I think that’s such an important relationship because we all have stress. And I think the key element is that the stress that we all go through in our everyday modern life, that is actually the building block to our resilience and talk about flipping a bad thing into good. So the stress that you go through that you get through that can instead of just wearing you down think of it as building up a wall to your resilience and being able to get through next time even a harder thing because you got through this medium hard thing And that really points to another topic that I talk about a

lot in the book, which is mindset. How we approach our stress and our anxiety -provoking situations in our life is so strongly influenced by the mindset that we have.

Is this a terrible burden or is it a challenge that I’m going to give myself today to see whether I could reach that challenge. And in reaching it, really celebrate.

That is an achievement that I was able to attain. There’s so much in my life that I have switched in terms of just the mindset that I approach it with. It is transforming in the way that you wake up in the morning and that you approach the world. But that’s the core right there, switching your stress response into a building block for your life’s resilience.

DH: Yeah, I loved that. I think we all talk about moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and I think that’s a pretty well-known term, but I loved this idea of this activist mindset that you brought up, that you can choose to change the things in your life. 

WS: Absolutely, and it is activist, positive that I think if you’re saying, oh, I don’t know how to do it, the other way you can ease into it is use your friend and relationship network. There are, I guarantee there are people in your life that on both sides,

some that are negativity things and some that have a wonderful mindset, maybe not about everything, but about certain things and maybe about things that you have as a challenge in your life? Can you look around? I’ve had so many kind of mindset models, particularly in my science career. Being a neuroscientist is really competitive and there’s a lot of pressure around grants, but I’ve always admired those scientists, really that had fun with their science that approached everything about their work with this sense of curiosity and joy, and use that as a model if you’re not finding it easily in yourself. And I guarantee, just look around, be a little bit observant, and you will find those people to be your activist mindset /positive mindset role models.

DH: Yeah, I love that. And it’s so funny. I think it comes so naturally to some people and there are other people, probably myself included, where you definitely have to work at it. As our listeners are largely in academia, professors, student affairs professionals, administrators, those who work with students, how can they take the wisdom from your book and apply it to their work with students? 

WS: I think number one tool is particularly in the book Good Anxiety, the last third of the entire book is a toolbox to decrease your anxiety, to lower the volume on your anxiety. And all of you out there, advisors, people in student affairs, deal with stressed out, highly anxious students. It’s the age that we are working in. And they need tools to approach it. And these were designed and they were written to be actionable. And yes, all of them are science-based, but some of them are easy to use. One of my favorites that I use often in my own life is call your funniest friend.

Call the friend that makes you laugh or go visit them in their dorm room. Things that you know will put you in a better mood. That’s the quickest way to flip your anxiety.

Maybe that’s too social if you’re too deep into your anxiety, but that’s where you can turn to your favorite music, your favorite show, things that make you smile,

things that make you laugh. I even bring this into my Instagram feed that has a large number of puppies and kittens and beautiful pictures of locations and art. And no, I don’t stare at people that have better houses and better cars And I do. I stare at beautiful locations and puppies and kittens that always make me smile.

DH: I love that idea. I think one of the things that we hear all the time and we’ve heard in our work for years is specifically around faculty feeling uncomfortable about having these conversations about mental health because they are not mental health professionals and they don’t want to cross a line. One of the things I love about this book is the framing of everyday anxiety and taking that away from the clinical anxiety. I think there is this tendency specifically now with the young adult mental health crisis to pathologize normal feelings that we all have. And I think that this book does such a good job of taking that back and taking that idea of anxiety is a normal feeling that we all have. And how do we deal with it on a normal level instead of immediately taking it to a clinical perspective?

WS: Yeah, I think of it as closing the door on that clinical perspective. I don’t have an MD, so I cannot speak to clinical anxiety, but I could speak to everyday anxiety because I have plenty of experience with that. And what I would encourage all the professors and all the administrators that counsel those professors is to be personal. Have you dealt with anxiety? Maybe you dealt with certain kinds of anxiety when you were a student. Share those experiences. Nobody’s asking you to diagnose and treat somebody with clinical anxiety. But the ask is that we all need to show a higher level of empathy, because there’s much more of it out there than there ever was either when we were in school or even just five years ago, for example. And everybody can do that. Everybody can be empathetic. Everybody can share their own experiences with anxiety, funny, or serious. Both are useful. And it’s just a challenge to to think about how can I find an appropriate way to help these students? Because I know each and every faculty out there wants their students to learn. And sometimes it requires some creativity around the levels of anxiety that comes up around certainly exam time. 

DH: Sure. And I, you know, another thing I just loved is when you talk about good anxiety can lead you to do all of these amazing things. It helps push you. And there was this feeling in the book of you can harness that anxiety, that good anxiety. 

WS: Exactly. What I like to describe is a three-step process to get to good anxiety.

One is to learn how to turn the volume down in your own anxiety. Nobody can function particularly well when anxiety is too high. So that’s where the movement, walking,

a great walk is a quick, immediate way to decrease your anxiety levels. And this is not a wives’ tale. This is from clinical studies showing that a 10 -minute walk can decrease your anxiety levels, breath work is one of the fastest ways also to quell your anxiety, and then all the tools in the last third of the book. Second, we haven’t talked about the second step of good anxiety and it’s a really important one,

which is understanding why you might be having these feelings of fear or worry that is the definition of anxiety. And when you ask yourself that, where does that get you? That flips you over to the reason for that worry, which is your values, the things that you hold dear. So I might be super, super worried about money and my next paycheck and whether I’m gonna pay for college or can I buy house that I want to buy and you could be subsumed with anxiety, but it says that your kind of financial stability is very important to you. There’s nothing wrong with that. And it’s, in fact, it’s useful to understand what you hold very dear to you, whether it’s financial stability, nothing wrong with that, your relationships, maybe there’s a lot of anxiety around, around friends or family members, whether it’s your job, of course, that means worry about job, means that you want to do your job, that you want to be seen, and you want to do a great job. Often on the flip side of that worry is something beautiful that you hold dear, and that also was my personal realization as I was writing the book, and it really does help me flip the story on that fear or that worry. That still comes up normally, I’m a normal human being, but it’s, oh yeah, I have always just needed a certain level of financial stability or a certain kind of group of friends to feel good.

And then the third step is to transform your anxiety into a gift or superpower and that is the flip to good anxiety. And the easiest example is turning a catastrophizing what if list that we all have had in our brain into a to -do list.

And this takes advantage of the fact that your what if lists aren’t about irrelevant things. They’re about very relevant things in your life. And flipping it to a to do list makes you more productive and uses that worry about things that you hold dear and puts it to use.

So that’s my favorite and easiest-to-apply superpower of anxiety, which is turning a what if list into a to do list. 

DH: I definitely will be using that one because first of all, I love the word catastrophizing. I used it all the time, but I have a tendency towards that. I will definitely use that going forward. I also love lists, but I just wanted to quickly circle back because I think this idea of reflecting and understanding yourself and who you are and what makes you tick is such an important piece of this. So I really appreciate everything you said about that and what drives you and what drives your anxiety. But overall, I just really want to say thank you so much for this book. It was such a wonderful tool, and I will definitely be passing it along. I encourage all of our listeners to read it, but also to look at your TED Talk and, self-promotional plug, to watch your incredible presentation at the Coalition for Transformational Education’s conference because it was truly a highlight. Thank you so much, Wendy, for coming to join us on LearningWell Radio. 

WS: Thank you so much for having me, Dana. It was a pleasure. 

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

The following is a transcript of LearningWell Radio’s interview with Dan Porterfield on his new book “Mindset Matters: The Power of College to Activate Lifelong Growth.” You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Marjorie Malpiede:

This is Learning Well Radio, the podcast of Learning Well Magazine, covering the intersection of higher education and lifelong wellbeing. I’m Marjorie Malpiede, the editor of Learning Well and your host. Today, Dan Porterfield is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a global organization committed to realizing a free just and equitable society. He’s also the former president of Franklin and Marshall College, where from 2011 to 2018, he led the achievement of a number of student-centered milestones, including tripling the enrollment of low-income students and expanding student wellness and career services. Dan’s new book is called Mindset Matters, the Power of College to Activate Lifelong Growth. He joins us today at Learning Well Radio to talk about how higher education can achieve its promise to shape mindsets that enable students to thrive in an uncertain and rapidly changing world. Dan, welcome to Learning Well Radio.

Dan Porterfield:

Thank you, Marjorie, and thank you for that description of my book. It’s better than I could have done on my own.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I’ve got to tell you, I loved your book. Are you ready to give us some highlights?

Dan Porterfield:

Sure thing.

Marjorie Malpiede:

First, I wanted to ask, and it’s so obvious from the first page, this book really comes from a place of deep experience for you in terms of your mentoring students. Can you talk about those experiences first and how they may have led you or compelled you to write the book?

Dan Porterfield:

Oh, thank you, Marjorie. I was fortunate that I was exposed to education and great educators from the time I was growing up in Baltimore City as a child, which included having great coaches and mentors throughout all the different experiences I had playing sports in Baltimore, going to Loyola High School, later going to Georgetown University. I have a huge list of caring adults from my developmental times who played important roles in my life by setting an example, investing in me, listening and caring, encouraging me, sometimes challenging me or criticizing me, all those different kinds of experiences. But when I was younger, I coached basketball, I worked with court supervised youth, I worked with immigrant families in their homes in Washington, D.C., I taught in prisons and I had a set of experiences in my twenties that allowed me to be an educator, and that motivated me, inspired me to pursue a PhD and to envision college education as the place where I would develop my career. I got into working at the college level, having already both benefited from mentorship and been a mentor many times over. And so I do bring that joy to this book and everything I do.

Marjorie Malpiede:

Well, it comes through in the pages. The other thing I want to ask you, Dan, you were a college president. You were also particularly attuned to the students’ development in a way that you don’t always see in the president’s office.

Dan Porterfield:

I don’t know what to say about how other people get into this role of leading a college and university and what experiences they have, but my life has been so enriched by being a teacher and a mentor and a coach. So one of the things I’ve always looked for is more when I was at Georgetown University, I was senior vice president for strategic development and also an English professor I taught most semesters. But about five years into my experience at Georgetown, my wife and I chose to move into a residence hall with our three daughters who at that age were six, five and zero. And so, for eight years before going to F and M, we lived in the ground floor of Copley Residence Hall and were the faculty family. I was teaching, I was working at the senior level and I was living on campus, and all those roles were complementary of course, but the opportunity to be present 24/7 to the student experience at Georgetown was just so enlightening and inspiring to me. It made me want to be a president that was in close touch with the student body.

Marjorie Malpiede:

The book is called Mindset Matters. Great title by the way. And you start by describing growth and fixed mindsets, with a conclusion that encouraging a growth mindset is one of the major goals of higher education. Can you elaborate on that with an eye towards why, as you argue in the book, it’s more important than ever?

Dan Porterfield:

Yes. So first of all, Carol Dweck is the brilliant psychologist and professor of psychology who came up with the concept of growth and fixed mindsets. When I read her book Mindset years ago, it influenced how I taught my students at Georgetown and later at Franklin and Marshall, because Professor Dweck came to see through her research that people adopt a view about their capacity to handle change and to be able to grow in the face of change, to meet new challenges, to learn new skills, to climb new mountains, to develop new capacities. And she found that people tended to adopt either the mindset, I can do it, I’m a learner, or the opposite: I’m not good at that. I found myself as a professor and as a leader on Georgetown’s campus, so inspired by the idea that my actions as the professor, as the faculty and residents could directly influence a young person’s lifelong perception of their capacity to take on new challenges, to lead their learning, to be able to expand their capability. This idea that our capability and our talent is malleable and not fixed is I think first of all, absolutely true. And secondly, a great resource for educators because it reminds us if we can ignite in our students their capacity for self-development, if we can help them think of themselves as equipped and able to lead their own learning, we are giving them the gift of themselves for life. Be the person that ignites, in a younger student, their self-confidence that whatever may come, they can take responsibility for leading their learning. 

Marjorie Malpiede:

And to be on the receiving end of that, Dan, is so hopeful, and I got to say unusual in terms of the way many of us went through our education, which is What are you good at? Oh, okay, you’re good at that. And I think that’s just such an interesting insight, to think, You know what? I don’t really know what I’m going to be or do until I explore it more. And to your point, college is the place to do it.

Dan Porterfield:

Well, I think that also just for anybody listening, think about the educators in your life who were most influential. Almost always, the ones you lean on were the ones that said, You can do it and let me help you be able to know you can do it. Let me challenge you, instruct you, motivate you, and then express my faith in you. And I got that sense of educators having faith in me all across my learning journey from third grade on, but especially the Jesuits who taught me at high school and at Georgetown University who has a set, and I had at least 10 or 12 different professors or teachers who were Jesuits again and again, their worldview, their understanding of the human person was that we were beings in development, and that their job was to foster and nurture that developmental process, not to limit it.

Marjorie Malpiede:

In the book, you talk about five different kinds of mindsets that are critical to this holistic approach, which again is the Jesuit way of looking at learning, and you illuminate these with stories about students themselves. It’s one of the things I love most about your book because it was the best way to illustrate your point by talking about the students’ journeys. Can you describe those five mindsets and maybe tell us a little bit about the students that for you sort of characterize the best of those.

Dan Porterfield:

So overall, I believe that growth mindsets express themselves in certain directions. What I explored was how the residential college experience fosters in students growth mindsets for discovery to be the one that can look for answers. No one’s thought to look for creation, the one who can make something that didn’t exist before for mentorship, the one who can give mentoring so that another person can develop what’s great inside of them for teamwork, for collaboration, for working as a part of a group in a way that advances the power of the collective. And then for striving. And by striving, what I mean by that is that we drive our growth in a way that the growth is in pursuit of what we value most, that our values and our growth are reinforcing. So those five growth mindsets I think are exceptionally valuable in today’s economy and today’s society. 

The reason I say that is because as I think we all know, there’s so much change coming faster and faster. What is the cause of that change? A lot of it is technology, the rise of artificial intelligence being only the latest example. All of our jobs are evolving constantly because of technological change and because of the plethora of new knowledge, there’s also change happening demographically. There’s change happening in terms of the climate, the ecosystem, and there’s change happening in terms of communications technologies which connect people in far-flung places so much more easily. So if you think of the individual human being making her way in a world of rapid change, more change faster and faster and faster change, what is it that can allow for coherence and a feeling of empowerment? It’s that you think I have the capacity to thrive in change because I can be the one that discovers because I can create, because I can partner with people to do something together because I can learn on the go as a mentee and because I can pursue my values, my growth and my values, not just do what somebody else tells me to do. And so I find this notion of growth mindset is even more empowering if you think about being in a very dynamic sort of turbulent, disruptive ecosystem and economy because it centers the individual on our ability to adapt, to learn, and to grow, to meet new challenges. Now then explicated these five mindsets by telling the stories of the learning journeys of students I knew very well at Franklin and Marshall College.

“Their understanding of the human person was that we were beings in development, and that their job was to foster and nurture that developmental process, not to limit it.”

Marjorie Malpiede:

So one of the things that struck me is let’s start with the striver. I’ve got to say that sort of interested me the most. I love that term. You gave the examples of Julia and Aisha, amazing women with great stories to tell. So, again, in your mind and from your experience with them, they have achieved this striver mindset. Can you give us a little bit of what it means to be a striver, how these particularly young women sort of personified that?

Dan Porterfield:

So for me, a striver is first of all the person that’s always relentlessly looking for new experience, for new opportunity, for growth, for the chance to have a different kind of experience because they’ve got a new interest that sparked their curiosity. The strivers are the people on a college campus that are constantly raising their hand and saying, Yes, I’ll join in. Yes, let’s try to do that. They’re the ones that are inventing new events for people to attend or new clubs for students to grow where they’re the ones who are connecting what they’re learning in class to what they might do over the summer. They’re trying out and adopting new possibilities all the time. And the key though for striving is that they’re doing it not simply to achieve a job or to get an award – they’re doing it because they value that growth.

So in the case of Julia Ramsey, she came to Franklin and Marshall College with a deep yearning to be the student who would do it all and achieve the best grades and be the top one. But then she got sick and she was suffering from a condition that essentially affected the tissue in her muscle, very hard to diagnose. It made her exhausted. After a very strong freshman year, she came back for sophomore year and she simply couldn’t stay awake, she couldn’t keep her head up to study, she was lethargic all the time, and while rehearsing for a play she actually collapsed. She was diagnosed with a condition called EDS. She went through a process of trying to get better using all of her willpower. She was always the kid who could work harder, work longer, came back to school, collapsed again. And this time when she went home, she had to have treatment and medical care for more than 18 months.

And so this goal, she had to be the top student, was dramatically disrupted by this condition. And so instead she began to ask herself and talk with her family about: What do I value most, even more than being the number one student, which is kind of extrinsic; what’s intrinsic? What do I value now, as I’ve had so much taken away from me months and months lying in bed, unable to do anything? And she basically came to realize that some simple everyday pleasures like walking around on a campus and taking in what’s around her or having meaningful conversations with people or feeling that she could set her own schedule, that those things were even more important and more true to her than being the number one student in the school. And with the help of a who advised her try to do everything you can, just 5% better than you were, she gradually came to realize that she could control her illness a bit by dialing back the amount of time she spent on studies and dialing back that idea of being number one and dialing up a kind of learning and a growth that was speaking to her experience of being a human being enjoying life in and of itself.

And so she didn’t lower her expectations for herself. She re-centered her expectations on what was most valuable. Then her professors helped her because when she came back to school after that 18 month time on leave, now that her classmates, some of them had graduated that she started with, she eased back into school. She was able to balance what her body could do with her yearning for everyday experience. She graduated then over a course of a couple years with this feeling, even though she wouldn’t have chosen that path of struggle, she was glad it happened because it put her in touch with the values that she wanted to live well beyond college. I look at that story as a way of reminding people that if we can encourage students to strive for growth, but to do it with a deep appreciation for what they value most, we’ve got a great shot at helping students experience fulfillment. And that’s something so many college students today are struggling to feel a sense of fulfillment, sometimes going deep to just ask yourself what is it that really matters can help us focus on the inherently meaningful instead of the more performatively meaningful, if you will.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I am so glad of your explanation of that, and I realize this in the book, but one of my follow up questions to you, I think you’ve pretty much have answered because one of the things you think of when you think of strivers, I mean a lot of strivers are striving themselves into unhealthy situations and from the work that we do in covering student mental health, a lot of, in fact, I think it’s the number one identified source of stress on campus is reaching these academic milestones or making sure that you’re in every kind of leadership position that you’re stacking your resume, all these things that are kind of connote striving, but you are talking about something different, right?

Dan Porterfield:

Absolutely. So in the case of Aisha – and Aisha is a pseudonym – she was a remarkable achiever who came to America from West Africa at the age of, I think it was about 13, was reunited with her father and a stepmother in New York had to learn English on the fly, was expected as the eldest daughter to perform many household duties. And her father really was not comfortable with her even going to college. She had a bit of a battle royale with her father to have the opportunity to leave home and go to Franklin and Marshall, and he was very concerned that she would lose her identity as his daughter, that she would be inauthentic to how he understood she should live her life as a woman, which to him meant she’d returned to Africa for a marriage that he would arrange. And so Aisha at Franklin and Marshall College was this incredible, super engaged student with extraordinary learning, constant leadership and growth.

But when she went home to New York, she had to subordinate all of that. She had lived two identities because that school identity at home would’ve been deeply, deeply threatening to her father. And one of the things that she came to recognize is that she deeply valued having a relationship with her younger siblings and her father and stepmother, even though her father held these constraining views, these kind of older worldview, that she was willing to negotiate two identities and two lives because it’s so mattered to her to have her younger siblings in her life. She was an amazing student. She went on to win a George Mitchell scholarship and to study in Northern Ireland. She’s doing great things with her life now, but for her striving meant finding some kind of a measure of peace with being a bridge person with a foot in two worlds, not having to choose one or the other, and that striving is going to be her life calling basically to have both parts of her identity alive in her, not to have to choose one or the other.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I loved both of those stories and both of them, and I think all of the stories that you tell eliminate another important lesson, which is all of the mentors and supporters along the way that they encountered in college. So I want to turn next to some of the advice that you provide. I think that some of the most important messages here actually come from your subtitle, right, the Power of college to activate Lifelong Growth, many schools throughout the country, and you talk about what it takes to really, and I would say again, back to your examples, really have those interventions with the adults on campus that will lead to this growth, this amazing growth in the mindset that you talk about. So what has to happen, I know it’s a huge and perhaps simplistic question, but what would you say has to happen to change higher education in order for it to fulfill this promise? It has,

Dan Porterfield:

I guess I’d like to say let’s double down on what’s working in terms of what really to ignite growth mindsets in 18 to 23 year olds, which is another way of saying to help young people claim control of their own future, to believe that they have a greatness within them that they can develop and they can apply whatever they do. What’s needed is one, to have caring adults, mentors of various types, including definitely faculty members active in their education, and lots of research has shown the power of caring and involved faculty in the development of young people. It’s probably the number one thing that people remember about their own college experience along with their close friendships. So that happens with faculty that help to inspire students to push themselves academically. It happens with faculty who serve as mentors and as guideposts to give students a place to come to reflect together on what they like to do with their lives or what they’re encountering as challenges.

It also happens through writing centers, through career centers, through coaches, through people that work in residence halls and facilitate collective learning that way. The most important thing I believe, to develop the talents of young people and the confidence they can keep developing those talents is educational relationships with adults. The second next thing that I think critically matters is strong peer experience recruiting and encouraging students who want to be active learners and who want to take the constant opportunity to say yes to growth. And there’s a lot of students out there that really want to go to college, really want to grow and develop themselves, and the single biggest barrier to those students going to have those opportunities is finances. And I really believe that the investment our institutions need to make is in faculty mentors and in student financial aid. Those two investments above all others will unlock opportunity.

A third thing that’s worth thinking about is how we can help students to sequence their learning so that they have the experience of yes, learning something and then knowing they’ve learned. So it’s both learning, documenting, seeing that you’ve learned, and then the third step is learning how you can do it again, and then finally learning that you love it and those are the elements of a growth mindset or that you sequence learning, you see that you’ve learned, you know can learn again and you know love learning. And when that comes together, it comes together often not because of single magic moments, but of a series of well sequenced learning opportunities. And I saw that over and over at Franklin and Marshall College throughout every level of the curriculum, the faculty were so committed to helping students sequence their learning. I tell four stories in the chapter on the mindset for discovery about students named Charisma Lambert and Eddie Alena and a student named Morgan, a student named Wyatt, and how in each case individual faculty spent the time to help them make the incremental learning that then builds for the next incremental learning and the next incremental learning.

And all that adds up to a tremendously powerful wave of understanding that I’m a learner.

Marjorie Malpiede:

And Dan, that leads to a very strong point you make in the book about post-college lifelong learning, and we don’t think about that enough, and I know just for my own sons who’ve gone through college, they all think about the milestones of graduation and they think learning sort of stops there when in fact what you’re describing is it’s a mindset that continues forever. Correct.

Dan Porterfield:

Well, success in today’s workforce and certainly tomorrow’s requires constant learning and the beauty of a great college education is that you will take away from that the confidence that you can drive your own learning in the future, and that’s critical in almost any field because the field itself is going to change constantly and also your responsibilities as you progress are going to grow. So you’ve almost got to keep learning. I think that the colleges could do maybe an even better job of helping not just providing learning experiences, but helping students document through portfolios or through different ways of developing resumes so that resumes aren’t achievements but more they are a record of continuous progression.

Marjorie Malpiede:

Reflection can help with that too.

Dan Porterfield:

Reflection is essential to a growth mindset because you have to not just learn, but know you’ve learned and know you can learn again.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I’m really glad that you mentioned affordability and access, the financing conundrum of whatever reforms we’re trying to make in higher education. So when I noticed a lot of the examples in your book were of students who were low income or first gen, and I wonder about the correlation between that and this hunger or real desire to pursue their education despite their financial circumstances. What did you witness there in terms of motivation?

Dan Porterfield:

And this, of course, I was witnessing this long before I went to Franklin and Marshall College because I’ve worked with first gen college goers and immigrants and members of lower income communities my whole life, and what’s just so beautiful to witness if you’re working as an educator with people who are searching for opportunity and who have faced disadvantages, is this hunger to learn and grow and give back. I’ve worked with thousands of first gen college students, I have yet to meet a single first gen college student who didn’t want to give back. It’s amazing, not one. And that’s the beauty of education that when you seek it, you love it, you want others to have it too. When I went to Franklin and Marshall College, a group of us on the board and the administration worked to develop what we call the next generation talent strategy through which we reorganized the financial priorities of the institution in order to triple our investment in need-based financial aid.

And we made a promise to every student admitted that we would meet their full demonstrated financial need with a package that was mostly a grant and did involve some work study and also $5,000 a year of loan. We did feel that having some loan was actually a help because we could have more low income students if students were having a small loan as a part of their college experience. And so when we tripled our aid budget, we began to think, well, where are we going to recruit our students? And we reached out, first of all, to the Lancaster Public Schools in Pennsylvania where F&M is and then to a set of access programs around the country that we’re working with motivated lower income students. Some of them you’re probably familiar with, the Posse program, one called SEO in New York, one that was called College Match in California, college Track in California and in New Orleans.

Then we began to reach out also to different public charter schools, the KIPP Educational Network Achievement First Uncommon Schools, Green Dot Noble were some of the ones we worked with, Breakthrough Collaborative, another access program. We also worked with some private schools that had scholarship programs. We had all this financial aid money and we wanted to recruit students who would really benefit from F&M. So we felt partnerships was essential, and through all those different partnerships, we identified students who had what we called the ingredients of talent that we were looking for as a talent strategy. It was not framed as exactly a diversity strategy, as important as diversity is what qualities of talent would predict success for first gen students at a very rigorous liberal arts school. And so our qualities we looked for were curiosity because if you go to a liberal arts college, you’re going to take classes that you’ve never studied before, maybe geology or maybe dance or maybe philosophy classes that weren’t in your high school as a part of the curriculum.

Without curiosity, you might wonder what am I even doing studying this stuff? A second thing we looked for was saying yes to opportunity. Even if you didn’t have a lot of opportunity, what opportunity could you say yes to? Was it babysitting after school? Was it tutoring other students in your school? Was it holding a job over the summer to help your family out? We saw that saying yes to opportunity as predictive of success in a college context where students need to take initiative and seek out opportunity. The third thing was resilience because F&M’s, a very hard school, rigorous school in terms of academic expectations, so everybody struggles through the learning process. If they’re being challenged, who having faced challenges in their life were able to meet those challenges, not because they overcame them all, but because if they got knocked down, they could get back up.

If they had a setback, they had some perspective to help them go forward or they could lean on the resources of their culture or their religion or their family as an inspiration in dealing with difficult times. The talent to have a vision for education, somebody say, is that talent? Yes. If you’re going to commit yourself to four years of doing something meaningful and hard, you’re going to borrow money. You’re going to say, leave home, you’re going to start off in this whole new world. Do you go because somebody told you to or because you have a vision for why it matters. So those qualities of talent, again, saying yes to opportunity, resilience, curiosity, and having a vision of education. Were so highly predictive of success that our first gen students at Franklin and Marshall College right off the bat, even their first year, achieved the same grades pretty much as the student body as a whole.

And later we started to see first gen students overperforming in terms of representation at summa and magna com laude, or secure winning prestigious scholarship competitions. The graduation rates were always at or above domestic students as a whole at F&M. And so what I’m trying to say here is that we need to look at all students as a collection of assets and capabilities and potential. There’s talent in every zip code and there’s hunger in every zip code, and there’s a special kind of combination of talent and hunger that we find in lower income communities. Amazing point. It’s a collective effort. The faculty are critical to this because the faculty bought into this idea that Franklin and Marshall could triple at basically our enrollment of Pell Grant students, which meant triple our Latino students, triple our African-American students, triple our rural students. Everything tripled and the school got even stronger because there were that many more highly engaged students. But there are individual faculty members that I can name a lot, but someone like Ken Hess in chemistry who committed himself to working with all these first gen pre-med students and really was this amazing facilitator for students right off the bat feeling and knowing that they belonged. Ken was just one of many that I admire so much because of the way that they created a climate that allowed incoming students from underrepresented backgrounds to think of themselves as the talent in our talent strategy, not the diversity in somebody else’s student body.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I love that distinction and I am glad you made it because a lot of schools who have done similar efforts, very well intentioned, have sort of forgotten that piece. If you focus on the numbers and not the belonging, it’s not going to work.

Dan Porterfield:

And that doesn’t mean there’s not going to then be challenges. I write about Charisma Lambert, a student from Newark who overcame the feeling of imposter syndrome during her first year at F&M, and for her, a critical breakthrough enabled by faculty was that she could use F&M to learn about dynamics of her life story and Newark’s life story, that the college was equipping her to have even more understanding of the causes and consequences of inequity. And so she more than belonged F&M was her power pack for the life she wanted to live, or a different student, Nadia Johnson, who came into F&M believing that as a first gen college kid, she should be pre-med because if she was a doctor, she could help people in our community, and the only thing was that wasn’t where her interests lie.

She was doing it because she was living the identity of a high powered, high achieving student, but her fulfillment, she realized wasn’t found through that avenue with faculty guiding her and supporting her, she took the risk of changing majors, went into sociology, nailed it, and now for the last six years has been a incredible educator in Baltimore city and public education working with students like her and so fulfilled by doing it for her imposter syndrome was living into an identity of the high achiever at first that didn’t actually fit with what she values most. These journeys of learning and discovery, of course, like all growth, there’s pain in the process. I try to write with permission from my mentees about the pain points because it is in pain often that we experience growth and awareness and ultimately a sense of purpose in our lives

Marjorie Malpiede:

And for their educational journeys and certainly what they’re going to be facing. I want to ask one last question, and again, it’s two or three parts, so forgive me, but it’s a little more philosophical. I loved your point in the book about the necessity for a growth mindset given the world we’re living in towards a universal good versus something that’s just an individual benefit. You argue that growth mindset setters can navigate rapid change towards good outcomes like improving the planet or expanding economic opportunity, but how do we get students to think in terms of these universal goods when so much in their world and in society encourages them to think inwardly?

Dan Porterfield:

I think that the one way to do that is by having as the overall educational environment, it’s very vibrant where students are able to be exposed in and out of class to the experiences of others, the needs of communities, the needs of the world where college is in part about a widening of perspective and a coming to see the relationship of self and other through all kinds of relationships with people in your neighborhood, with people in your country, with people on the other side of the planet. We’re all living in a network of mutuality and dependency as Dr. King said. And so I think that a rich educational environment constantly exposing students to new and encouraging them to take the risk of learning the new is the best way to invite students to choose the course for them that will allow them to give back, but give back in a way that’s resonant with their sense of identity.

That’s why I think that for some it’s about discovery, and so they need faculty present to help them see themselves as able to discover. For others it’s about making their own mark as a creator. For others, it’s about teamwork. There shouldn’t be one way to make a difference, but the environment should always be about growth and expanding our range of exposures, if you will. I end the book by writing about three students who all ended up at Franklin and Marshall College because it was pretty much the only option for them of a school like this. They all came from schools where almost nobody went to college. One is a Muslim immigrant whose name is Akbar Hussein, who came from Bangladesh, lived in a workers’ factory as a child in Saudi Arabia before coming to America. The second is a student named Marra Jones, who came from a highly segregated community in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where there was tremendous racial discrimination and educational inequality in the schools and public health systems and housing that she grew up with.

She found her way to F&M because of a single college advisor who encouraged her to push herself to a school like this. The third Sheldon, Ruby comes from central Pennsylvania from a small rural community, all white fundamentalist Christian where he had never encountered anybody who was black, who was gay, who was Muslim, who was Jewish. His exposure, he was the only one in school just about that went to college. Any exposure he had, his first two years of college was new. And those three, Akbar, Marra and Sheldon, each one of them is exemplary, but they’re also representative of the talent in their communities. Today, Akbar at age 30 or something is the chief policy advisor to the governor of Pennsylvania. Marra is a freshly minted clinical psychologist having earned her PhD at University of Illinois. After serving and Teach for America, Sheldon spent his junior year studying abroad, including in Bangladesh living with a Muslim family.

He then won a wrangle fellowship which paid for his graduate education at Georgetown. Now he’s a diplomat in the US State Department, and these three students were just about the only ones in their schools who went to college. F and m was the only place that offered them admission. They were offered full scholarships because of our full need approaches, and they took their opportunity to work with incredible faculty to become for our country a policy leader, a clinical psychologist, and a diplomat, and one is black and one is Muslim American and one is white rural background. And that is the vision that I have for education for all young people: that before college and in college, we ignite what is great in young people by giving them the belief that they can drive their own learning and we support them every step of the way. And then we have the benefit as a society, I believe, of seeing people grow into roles of leadership and public service that will make our country stronger. Cynicism has never solved a single problem in our country. There’s plenty of people cynical about the world, and when they start solving problems, we should start adopting cynicism, but otherwise, we need to invest in people that are optimistic, can do mindset, that want to learn and give, and from that they will create the kind of world we want to live in.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I have a personal reflection here, Dan. We’ve had many conversations and I’ve always found you to be so optimistic, and I’m reading through the lines here in the book, and it’s also based on my own experience because every time I actually get out on campus and talk to students, I feel hopeful and I can see now why you are actually so optimistic.

Dan Porterfield:

All you’ve got to do in my opinion, is walk around and get to know young people, and I don’t only mean on college campuses, we just get to know young people. Real young people just listen, just engage. Just allow them to express the things that interest them, that make them laugh or that give them a feeling of optimism and then double down on that. Education is something where if you get it, I benefit. That’s what’s so distinctive about it compared to all the other social goods. If everybody gets it, my children are better off. And so I hope as a society we will come together around this notion that young people are rising. Generations are a place where we can land in all our disagreement, we can land around the idea that let’s invest in the greatness of our young people, let’s give them educational and work opportunities that give them the chance to be the leaders of their own lives. Let’s take pride in what it means to be a country that pays it forward.

Marjorie Malpiede:

Well, I am going to have that be the last word. Thank you so much, Dan. This has been an absolute joy to talk to you, and again, it has really been inspirational and it gives us all more reason to get up and do the work we do in higher ed.

Dan Porterfield:

There’s hundreds of thousands of people across all of our campuses of all types, with students of all backgrounds who are doing what I celebrate in the book every single day. That’s not the dominantly told story, but that is the dominant reality.

Marjorie Malpiede:

The book is called Mindset Matters, the Power of College to Activate Lifelong Growth, and it is available starting June 25th on Amazon, correct, Dan?

Dan Porterfield:

That’s right. Johns Hopkins University is the press, and I hope that readers who, if they do read it, take the time to linger over those stories because there is an eminence in the life experiences of students in our midst and ask ourselves, are these 35 or 40 students at Porterfield profiles from F&M? Are they all that different from the students on my campus in my neighborhood? The answer to that question actually is no. They’re exemplary, as I said before, but they’re also representative.

Marjorie Malpiede:

Thank you so much, my friend. I’m sincerely grateful for you joining us on Learning Well Radio today.

Ian Elsner:

This has been Learning WellRadio, a production of LearningWell, for more information about our work, go to learningwellmag.org. And if you like what we’re doing, leave us a rating or review. Thanks so much for listening.

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

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

Paul Tough: Thank you. Great to be here.

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

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

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

PT: It is true.

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

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

MM: Go with the one.

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

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

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

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

MM: Public investment,

PT: Yeah, I think-

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

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

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

PT: It’s really complicated.

MM: That may be a complicated question.

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

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

PT: Yep, yep, yep.

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

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

MM: Feel like I belong here.

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

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

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

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

PT: Great.

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

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

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

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

PT: Please.

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

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

MM: Yeah, I know what you’re saying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following is a transcript of this LearningWell Radio episode. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts.

Marjorie Malpiede: This is LearningWell Radio, the podcast of LearningWell Magazine, covering the intersection of higher education and lifelong wellbeing. I’m Marjorie Malpiede, the Editor of LearningWell and your host today. Our first guest for our first episode of LearningWell Radio is Dr. Corey Keyes, the renowned sociologist and psychologist who has introduced groundbreaking work in the areas of flourishing and languishing. Welcome, Corey.

Corey Keyes: Hello and good morning.

MM: As a faculty member at Emory University, Dr. Keyes taught The Science of Happiness. He has a new book coming out called Languishing, and it’s actually available this week. Corey, let me say, I knew that you were a brilliant sociologist and psychologist, but I did not know that you were such a talented writer. Your book is really terrific.

CK: Thank you. I appreciate that. I take great pride in trying to write in a way that communicates the nuances and stories behind the numbers of our science.

MM: Well, I have to say that is exactly what my reaction was. I loved your opening, where you take us back to your teenage years and you’re listening to Jackson Brown’s “Running On Empty.” Loved that song. And of course, the reference to the King Biscuit Flower Hour. That was awesome. What a throwback. But the whole book is like that. It’s really very enjoyable to read. So anyway, big thumbs up for me as one reader, one reviewer, but let’s get into the book a bit and give a little bit of a preview for our audiences. First thing I’d like to ask you is, what motivated you to write this, Corey? You’ve been publishing for a long time, but this is really something special.

CK: Well, for a long time I’ve had a passion for advocating for better treatment and approaches to helping people with mental illness, and especially trying to get people invested in preventing it in the first place. Because I know we’re all on the same page when we hear again and again in the news that there’s a crisis in mental illness and that it’s growing. And the fact that I continue to hear about this crisis and that it’s growing, has led me to feel I’ve heard this enough, because the problem is nothing is changing. And I’ve waited and done the science for 25 years on promoting positive mental health in order to prevent, and I’ve felt that the science was solid enough, that there was enough there to write a book. And my dream is that this begins to encourage public health systems and systems like higher education, not the least of which I would also hope in public K-12 education, to begin thinking about prevention by promoting flourishing. So, my book is about trying to change the discourse and introduce another way to deal with the crisis of mental illness by promoting good mental health.

MM: Yeah, and it really does come across very loud and clear in the book. Reading it, it’s clear that it’s about the reader, so it will be about the person who could be benefiting from this information, but it’s also about all the sort of systems and institutions that influence what you describe as flourishing and languishing. I think my next question, for people who think they know the term but really don’t, I think commonly don’t, is how would you describe languishing? Because it’s not always what people think it is.

CK: No. And in fact, I think sometimes the simple descriptors don’t do it justice, because people will use the words either, “Meh,” which Adam Grant did in his New York Times op-ed, or “Blah.” And I don’t think those two terms do it justice, because I want to get back to the way I measure it, which is 14 questions that constitute measurement of the presence of good mental health, which I refer to flourishing, and languishing is the absence of some of these very important things. So to languish is not only to have lost a sense of interest in life or you’re not feeling happy or satisfied, but along with that, at least six or more things are missing in your life, like a sense of purpose, a sense that you’re growing as a person, a sense of self-acceptance that you like most parts of your personality. There’s some social components, like a sense that you are making contributions or you will make a contribution to the world or your community, a sense of belonging to a community, a sense of coherence, which is that you can make sense of what’s going on in the world around you. So, languishing is a constellation of things, but it’s the absence of functioning well, combined with the absence of feeling anything good or not feeling much of anything about your life. So in that sense, languishing is a lot more than just, “Blah.” It’s the absence of what makes life meaningful and gives you a sense that you matter and so forth.

MM: So, something you say in the book is interesting to me and it gets to that same sense of, do we really understand the language around this? So you say, “Don’t be fooled by feelings.” Explain that a little bit and how people may not understand if they’re languishing or flourishing.

CK: I think there is this obsession, and I think we in this country are particular leaders in the obsession with happiness, or what I would call the emotional part of flourishing, what I call the emotional wellbeing. This gets a lot of attention, and indeed, every year there’s what we call the World Happiness Report, which measures things like life satisfaction, “Do you feel satisfied or do you feel happy about your life?” And we rank countries based on the happiest and think they’re doing really well, and those countries that aren’t very happy. But flourishing is so much more feeling good. And I argue that if you focus only on and prioritize only feeling good, it will not be your North Star. ‘Cause I think of flourishing as my North Star because it’s what kept me in recovery from my own mental disorders of depression and PTSD, and it’s where I feel most at home. If you only prioritize feeling good without functioning well, you will not be doing well. And not the least of which is there are college students, a lot of them, about 20%, that would meet the criteria for flourishing in terms of happiness or feeling good, but they’re languishing when it comes to the criteria of functioning well. That means they have low levels of either psychological or social wellbeing, or both. And they have five times the rate of mental illness as those students who are flourishing. And by flourishing, I mean they’re functioning well. They have six or more of the criteria of functioning well every day or almost every day, combined with feeling good. So that in and of itself suggests that feeling good is not enough of a criteria or it cannot be considered a gold standard alone for doing well in life or even be considered mentally healthy. It’s not the feeling good, the feeling happy that’s really driving the benefits of flourishing, it’s the functioning well. Purpose in life, belonging, contribution, mastery, growth, and acceptance, all those good things that represent that we’re doing well in life. And so I always argue, put functioning well first and you will feel good about a life that’s meaningful and has substance.

MM: I think that’s so interesting because so many of us just think about the standards around feelings, happiness, or sadness, or excitement, or motivation, and we are not really thinking about the processes behind that. So that’s a really interesting way of looking at it. And is this really what you’d call your dual continuum model, that you can be mentally ill and mentally healthy at the same time?

CK: I review, in one of the chapters, an array of evidence that supports what I call the dual-continuum model, not the least of which is the research on the neuroscience of emotions. Now, I didn’t do this research, but I’ve reviewed it, and a lot of it is focused on negative and positive emotions, sadness in particular, and happiness. What they found in the brain is that sadness and happiness share some things in common when it comes to being activated in our brain, but they have a lot of distinctive things that go on. So when we’re feeling sad, the fact that they don’t overlap completely, meaning that when we’re sad, happiness isn’t completely downregulated in our brain, that’s not the case. We can feel both sad and happy at the same time, because they don’t share everything in common when it comes to activation in our brain. And I was writing about this very thing in my book when I realized that Susan Cain was about to publish a book as I was writing my book, and she wrote a book called Bittersweet. And I was writing about the fact that you can have bittersweet moments and feelings precisely because the brain is wired in the two continuum when it comes to just emotions. You can feel a little happy and a little sad at the same time. And on college campuses, I used to love teaching this particular part of my Happiness class during the spring semester when I had almost all graduating seniors. And as we got closer and closer to graduation, it became clear and clear that they understood this because they were feeling poignancy and bittersweet about their time at college and the fact that they now were about to leave it. They felt happy because they had accomplished something worthy of their effort and they felt sad because they were leaving behind something meaningful. So it goes much deeper than that. And mental health and mental illness belong to separate continuums. They’re correlated. But not correlated so strongly that the absence of mental illness means that you’re automatically flourishing. So, there is very strong evidence in a lot of that research I’ve done and done with colleagues, even at the genetic level, showing that we inherit two sets of genes. One set is what I would call risks, genetic risks for mental illness, and then there’s flourishing or positive mental health, which is also equally heritable as things like depression. But there’s only a modest overlap of the genetic variance or the genes for mental illness and mental health. So that means you can inherit a low genetic risk for something like depression, but the absence of genetic risk for depression doesn’t mean that you’ve also inherited a high genetic potential to flourish. But it also goes the opposite way, Marjorie, you could inherit a high genetic potential for depression, but you could have also inherited a high genetic potential for flourishing. And we now know that genes alone do not determine our outcomes. It requires environmental activation of a lot of our genes. So as I like to say, when you’re in that situation where you’ve inherited high genetic risks along with high genetic potential, you ask yourself the version of the negative wolf and the bad wolf, which one wins? The one we feed. Right? So there’s very strong evidence of the dual-continuum model, and that makes the case very strongly that even if we could find a cure, and we’re not anywhere close, even if we could cure all mental illnesses tomorrow, it wouldn’t necessarily mean everyone’s mentally healthy, and we could have just left them in another equally bad condition, languishing.

MM: So, Corey, let me just say, what I love about your work is that it gives people hope, and it looks at these issues in a way that not just destigmatizes them, which you’ve done, but also allows people to give themselves a bit of a break around this. But let’s talk about Languishing and why you wrote this, because so many people are languishing. And you talk about the pandemic and how that obviously accelerated these issues, but also, they weren’t the cause of them. In fact, I think one of the things you say is, because we were sort of sliding into languishing, it was harder for us to be resilient to what happened in the global pandemic, if I got that right? But let me ask a few questions again about the mental state and how people can get out of it. So you talk about why languishing is really a risk to your mental and physical health. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

CK: Sure. In fact, I list at the very beginning a lot of evidence that supports, I call it the 13 reasons why you want to take languishing very seriously, and why we want better mental health and flourishing. Not the least of which I haven’t focused as much on physical health, there’s a little evidence I review when it comes to aging, but the one in particular that really stood out for me is this very strong body of evidence that has to do with what’s called the conserved transcriptional response to adversity. Not my words. That’s the words that some biologists and geneticists gave to this genetic propensity we all have. And the CTRA is activated when we experience adversity, and it’s not healthy for us, because when that CTRA, forgive the abbreviation ’cause it’s a lot to say, is activated, it downregulates antibody production, which is not good. We want antibodies for our immunity, immune responses. So when the CTR is activated, antibody production is suppressed and inflammation is accentuated or activated. Again, inflammation in and of itself is not good for us. And so researchers have been looking for things that actually buffer, mitigate the CTRA when we are experiencing adversity. And here is the amazing thing about the distinction between feeling and functioning when it comes to flourishing. Feeling happy and satisfied has no relationship to modulating the CTRA, but when you have higher levels on functioning well, that is, that goes into my measurement of flourishing, higher levels of particularly psychological wellbeing, people then have a much more modulated or controlled CTRA response. It means that if you are functioning well and you are experiencing stress and demands and adversity, you are protected against the CTRA. And if you aren’t functioning well, higher psychological wellbeing, the CTRA is activated very strongly when you experience adversity. So that’s just one very strong physical underlying genetic /physical response. It’s deeply connected to the functioning well part of flourishing, not the feeling good.

MM: So, if I’m understanding this correctly, it’s almost like you can strengthen your flourishing muscle, so to speak. Right? To have some of what is happening in terms of the languishing and the conditions and elements around that, you can influence or even prevent it. Correct?

CK: Yes. In fact, there’s two studies I reviewed that I just love, one of which is in the work. And you can think of college, a university setting in the same way you can think of a workplace. And this particular study was done in Australia, and they asked workers, “Yes or no, are you currently working in a high stress or hostile, if you will, work environment?” That was the beginning of the study. And then they measured psychological distress over time, and they measured at time one their level of positive mental health. What was remarkable, is over time, if you were flourishing, working in a high stress or high conflict work environment did not result in any more distress than compared as those who are working in a low stress, low conf environment. But if you were languishing and working in a high stress and high conflict work environment, you had a markedly higher increase in distress over time than if you were flourishing. So flourishing in the work settings protected you from having stress and conflict undermine your mental, emotional life. And then there was this second study that I reviewed that followed people over a three-week period and every day asked them whether they had experienced any of several sources of stress, things like the typical sources of stressors, like there’s conflict at work, you had an argument with your boss or your spouse or your friend and so forth. What was amazing about this study, was if you were flourishing, you experienced the same amount of sources of stress as those who are languishing. And in fact, in a three-week period, 84% of the days of those three weeks were filled with sources of stress. So most days. You only had three days out of the three-week period where you didn’t have any source of stress. So everyone was experiencing stress, but then they measured negative mood that day. And here’s the remarkable thing, if you were flourishing and you experienced source of stress, you’re much less likely to have negative mood as a result of it compared to those who are languishing. If you’re languishing, those sources of stress resulted in a much more negative and foul mood at the end of the day than if you are flourishing. So it’s not like if you’re flourishing, you don’t have bad days, you have as many bad days, if you will, or sources of stress at least as those who are languishing. But again, there’s something about flourishing that protects you from having bad things really result in bad feelings. Again, we don’t know why, but then again, I go back to the following thing. Did we not need to know how smoking caused cancer in order to prevent cancers from smoking? No, we just needed to know that smoking caused cancer. And here, I’m not so interested in how flourishing protects us, just that it does, and we need more of it in our students and we need more of it in our lives, in the workplace.

MM: So Corey, I’m completely convinced that flourishing is the goal, and I think to learn how to get into that state of flourishing is part of what you do in the book, and I want to get to that. Am I correct in saying that there are kind of two elements here to unpack? One is, and I love that you do this, you talk about in your book the propensity for society to consider whether you’re languishing or flourishing to be a matter of personal responsibility. It’s either you do it or you don’t, and it’s all about you. But you do point out that many times our systems are failing us. Can you talk about that in the context of higher education?

CK: I couldn’t help but be the sociologist because I’ve been living a lot of my life in both in psychology and sociology, and I’m amazed the amount of work that’s been published in positive psychology, and psychology in general, that simply ignores the power of context and institutions and culture and values and so forth. And so it was clear to me. I talk about my own personal experience. Before I was adopted at the age 12, things were horrible for me. And I was going in one direction and it was in the wrong direction. I was in detention more than I was anywhere else after school, and I was not doing well and so forth. And when I got adopted into my grandparents’ home, it was a 180 degree change, and it was remarkable to see and I still marvel at it. I went from being in detention to honor roll student, every semester, to quarterback of the football team, playing basketball, in the choir. Something in me changed, but it was because I was transplanted in a place where I could flourish. And so I knew that was the first time I experienced flourishing. And in my dedication to my book, my whole book was dedicated to my nana and papa, who when I experienced that, they gave me the seeds of flourishing because I never forgot that. And so it’s clear to me that people are really struggling, even people in high-level professional jobs like medicine. And I write about one op-ed that just floored me, but this was not the only doctor who’s lamenting the fact that they’re having to work in a, they call, a corrupt, profit-driven institution that’s demoralizing them. Because they have to cut corners and they can’t do the things that they want to do and need to do as doctors to help their patients because hospitals are sitting on massive profits, but they’re cutting corners. And what’s happening to people is they can’t live their values. And when that happens, when they’re demoralized, you start to destroy the person that came to you with values and dreams of using their work to do good. And when you prevent people from doing and living their values to do good things through their work, you begin to destroy them. And that’s what languishing is often described as, “I’m dying inside,” or, “I feel dead inside.” Now, I won’t say that higher education is doing the same, but I do worry that, I think, there’s a lot of, well intentioned leaders, people who want students to find purpose and live their values, but I saw this firsthand, we’re grooming our youth to value one thing, money and power, by everything is boiled down to grades. And I know you’re going to say, “Well, what do we replace grades with?” But grades are all that matter because that’s all that matters to us. And at first, I was frustrated as a professor. I would’ve kids coming into my office crying because they had an A minus or a B plus. Something is wrong with what we value in higher education.

MM: LearningWell Magazine examines the intersection between higher education and lifelong wellbeing. So not just how we experience college and what happens to our mental health at college, but how college influences our wellbeing over time and over your lifetime. So obviously, it is a great conversation for anyone who cares about any of those issues. Not to put you on the spot in terms of specifics, but if flourishing is the end goal for our students, and we’re faced with the mental health crisis that we all know and are working hard to address, shouldn’t we, and what could we be doing to really try to promote flourishing on college campuses?

CK: Well, the second half of my book talks about what I’ve come to call the five vitamins for flourishing deficiency. And those five activities that flourishing people do more of than people who are languishing, which is they prioritize some form of helping others. They prioritize learning something new and growing personally, they prioritize spiritual or religious activity, they prioritize socializing or connecting warmly and belonging, and they prioritize play. Now, those five things I was just thinking about this morning before we got on, and it occurs to me that you would think that those five things are already happening on most college campuses, maybe not as much play, but wouldn’t you think every day a college student learns something new and sees him or herself growing? And I see it that college students connecting and socializing every day, not everyone perhaps engages in spiritual or religious activities, but many of them do and so forth. My question becomes, if many of the students are doing those five things already, but they’re not flourishing, what is it about colleges that may prevent those five activities from being as beneficial as they could? ‘Cause they are for adults who aren’t in college or who are after college. And I wonder sometimes if it’s just that students, like many of us as adults, would read a book like this and say, “Well, let me fit in some of these things in 5 or 10 minutes of my busy day or my busy week.” And I didn’t write it that way. In fact, I was sometimes encouraged by people around me saying, “Well, just tell people what they can do in the 10 minutes they have if it’s a typical day or a busy day.” And I was like, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not the way this works.” Because people who were really benefiting from those activities did more of it in that day. They helped more. They didn’t just help someone. They engaged in more helping behavior that day and they had a much better day and they stayed flourishing. And if they were languishing, or in the study, there were some people who were depressed who did more of each of those vitamins. And they didn’t have to do all five, by the way. They just picked one and they did more of that day. Even if they were languishing or depressed, they had a better day. And over time, they moved away from languishing or depression, and inch by inch closer and closer to flourishing over time. So those five activities aren’t things to just do as a sort of 5 minute or 10 minute exercise, like breathing or taking a couple deep breaths, or meditating for a minute and quieting your stress response. These are things that have to become important parts of each day. And that’s why I’m convinced, even if people on college campuses or administrators read the book and say, “Wow, I think most of my students are doing these five things, or at least three out of the five, but they’re not flourishing.” Well, it’s because their priorities are much more related to one thing, study, study, grades, grades, degrees, degrees, and the next step.

MM: So it’s almost like if institutions, colleges, and universities really made flourishing their North Star, that would really change the conditions by which students could be working to engender their own flourishing. Would you say that’s right, Corey?

CK: Yes. I could imagine a university prioritizing and measuring this and taking it just as important as GPAs and resumes, and that they prioritize those five vitamins to such a degree that they counted in the same way that taking a class is given credit and you get graded. ‘Cause that’s the one thing I learned, if students don’t get credit, they don’t think it’s important because they infer the institution doesn’t think it’s important. And so somehow, I think we need to teach these things and value them to the same degree, and measure them and monitor them in the same way that we monitor grades and provide that. And my dream, as I said in some of my writings, as when a student walks across that stage to get their diploma, we can tell them, to the same degree, that their flourishing has grown as a result of being here to the same degree that their knowledge and GPA reflects their learning. When that happens, I’m convinced students will get the message. They will learn about their own wellbeing, their own mental health, and what it means to them that the institution values it as much as they do, and that this is what you’re given as your journey through adulthood from this institution. Not just a degree, but a sense that your wellbeing is something you need for this journey.

MM: That’s awesome. So Corey, we have learned so much today, and obviously I would encourage our listeners to read the book and learn even more. When you think about all of the important messages here, who would you say you wrote the book for?

CK: Well, you will notice that this is part memoir because my research was, as I said, me-search for a better way. And I wrote this, forgive the phrase, but it’s part of my heart, for all of the lost souls. And there are many of us, and I think many of us are lost without knowing it. And there is this poem I want to read to you, this is why I wrote it. And it’s a poem written by Athey Thompson, and it’s taken from her book, A Little Book of Poetry. And I wish I’d seen this poem before I finished the book because it would’ve been the way I ended it, but here it goes. “I shall gather up all the lost souls that wander this earth, all the ones that are broken, all the ones that never really fitted in. I shall gather them all up and together we shall find our home.”

MM: Well, that needs to be the last words for the interview. That was amazing, Corey, and I thank you so much. So, we’re talking to Dr. Corey Keyes. His new book will be out at the end of February, it’s called Languishing, and it will be an important experience for anyone who reads it. Corey, we are so excited that you came and talked to us today and shared all of your wisdom. I am so grateful. Thank you so much.

CK: Thank you for having me.

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