Category: Teaching & Learning

A conversation with Holly White, doctoral candidate at the University of Maine, and lead author of the recent PNAS Nexus article, Cultivating long-term well-being through transformative undergraduate education. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Eric Mazur gives lots of talks on how to teach. 

Often, he starts with a quiz, which goes something like this:

Think about a skill you’re really good at. Something you’re proud of — that other people respect you for.

OK, now try to remember how you got good at that skill.

Was it trial and error?

Practice?

Hearing lectures?

Getting an apprenticeship?

“Nobody chooses lectures,” says Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard. “Nobody, nobody, nobody chooses lectures. Then I show a picture of me lecturing — an old one, because I don’t lecture anymore — and I say: ‘Don’t we have a problem here?’”

It’s a problem Mazur has been trying to tackle for more than thirty years, ever since he realized that lectures — which are the classic way that physics is taught —aren’t actually that effective at teaching physics.

That realization came in the early 90s, after Mazur read an article in The American Journal of Physics about professors who gave thousands of students an unusual test. The test lacked textbook jargon and fancy equations. Instead, it used simple language to ask about basic physics principles, like the magnitude of the force that’s exerted when a light car collides with a heavy truck. 

When the students took the test, they did poorly — even students with award-winning teachers. Mazur was shocked. Could his students at Harvard do better? He hoped they would.

But they didn’t. Which is when he started to question the whole idea of lecturing. He realized that students who simply hear information from a talking head might not effectively learn that information. 

Of course, as a student, Mazur had been lectured to, as have generations of students, stretching back centuries. But suddenly, that started to seem like a terrible mistake.

At the time, Mazur was coming up for tenure at Harvard — normally, not a moment when one might adopt a side project. But he thought he might return to Europe (he’s Dutch), so tenure took on less importance than it might have otherwise. So he dug in and started to rethink teaching. He wanted to create a classroom where students were more engaged, and really, deeply absorbed the material.

As Mazur knew from his own life, engagement is key to having a meaningful experience in higher education. When he was a teenager, Mazur dreamed of being an astronomer. “And then at age 17, I enrolled at the University of Leiden, which was the mecca for astronomy. And within six weeks, my whole childhood dream unraveled. The courses were so badly taught.”

At the University, astronomy had little to do with the majesty of the universe. “It was just a jumble of formulas,” Mazur recalls. “And the whole big picture disappeared. It disintegrated. So I dropped out and became a physicist, because I knew I was reasonably good at physics in high school.”

But within a few weeks, Mazur realized that the quality of physics instruction wasn’t a whole lot better. “Which is why it’s so ironic that when I started teaching, I fell into the trap of doing what my instructors had done.”

Why perpetuate the cycle? Part of the reason, Mazur says, is that we don’t focus nearly enough on optimizing the classroom experience for students. We need to ask whether students feel challenged and supported. How much are they really learning? How deeply are they connected to their professors? For Mazur, having a doctoral advisor who cared about him made a huge difference in his life. 

Indeed, those sorts of connections make a big difference for lots of people. As the 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index revealed, the happiness of college graduates was not particularly correlated with whether they attended a public or private school, a small or large school, or a selective or not-too-selective school. Instead, researchers found, “if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did their odds of thriving in their well-being.”

You could argue, too, that deeply understanding physics or history or geometry greatly benefits a student’s future career. When you have to design a bridge, does it matter whether you got an A in your engineering class? Or how well you truly grasp a set of core principles?

CHANGE COMES, BUT SLOWLY

In the early 1990s, Mazur started “flipping the classroom.” No longer did he dispense knowledge to a hushed room of notetakers. Instead, students read through the content (what might once have been called “lecture notes”) before class. When everyone came together, students worked in groups to figure out problems and clarify concepts. 

Mazur quickly discovered that students were often better at explaining a concept to each other than he was at explaining it to them. After all, he had learned physics long ago, and it could be hard for him to understand what might be so perplexing about, for example, Newton’s Third Law. But students who had just spent a week striving to understand it could easily relate to — and help — peers who were struggling.

Mazur’s conversion energized him — and a lot of other people. He started giving a talk called “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer,” chronicling how and why he had changed his own classroom. In 2009, after -— by his count — giving the talk about 600 times, the University of Maryland Baltimore County taped Mazur and put the talk on YouTube. He was sure that no one would ever invite him to speak on this topic again, since his views were now so easily accessible. 

Mazur quickly discovered that students were often better at explaining a concept to each other than he was at explaining it to them.

You can guess what happened next. Mazur’s speech went on to attract more than 200,000 views, and he was invited to give talks around the world on why he had stopped lecturing. Academic studies began to focus on the benefits of active learning. And Mazur penned a book, Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual.

In 2019, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “students in the active classroom learn more.” But, it soberly noted, “[d]espite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods.” 

In a recent book, Brian Rosenberg — the longtime former president of Macalester College — writes that the “evidence that lectures are an ineffective way of teaching is both voluminous and incontrovertible.” So, he asks, “given its centrality to higher education and the evidence that it does not work very well as a teaching method, shouldn’t this be something about which faculty are thinking and debating pretty regularly? Isn’t the topic worth at least a faculty meeting or two?”

Still, change doesn’t come easily to higher education, and Mazur knows it. Asked if he thought he has moved the needle through his outreach, Mazur replied, “A tiny bit… which is probably a lot compared to what has happened over the past thousand years. I think people are more and more realizing that things are broken.” He does think the needle has moved more in K-8 education, where there has been significant interest in new pedagogical approaches.

The brokenness that Mazur sees is not just a function of too much lecturing. He believes our assessment system also makes little sense. High-stakes tests should not be the main way that students are evaluated, he says. Tests encourage cramming, which has proven to be a terrible way to build long-term knowledge. 

And teachers — who generally devise the tests — are essentially evaluating their own work. As a teacher, Mazur says, “you know what you’ve presented in the class. Therefore, you know what students can answer, so they can pass the test. And most of them pass it by just rote memorization, or rote procedural problem solving… The type of skills that are tested under those circumstances have absolutely nothing to do with the skills that you need as a journalist, as a physicist, as a doctor, as a politician. It has no connection at all. It’s just like a hazing ritual almost.”

For a while, Mazur hoped the pandemic might upend education, but those hopes proved to be fleeting. “What I had underestimated,” he says, “is how badly people wanted to get back into the classroom to do what they did before.”

Still, Mazur believes that change is imminent. The rise of generative AI means that students now have extraordinarily powerful ways to do their homework instantly, to answer super tough physics questions — for example — without really understanding them.

This new technology may necessitate a radical thinking of what teaching is. It can’t simply be a search for right answers, because those are so easily accessible. Instead, homework and classwork will have to center on process, understanding, and analysis.

Artificial intelligence, Mazur argues, “is going to affect the jobs of our graduates in a way that is enormous.” He sees “anything that has to do with large-scale pattern recognition” being affected, from radiology to finance. “And therefore if we don’t adapt, we may become less relevant.”

He hopes the advent of AI will “force people to rethink the goal of higher education. And rethink not just content, which is the only thing that we’ve worried about so far, but also pedagogy and approach and assessment. How do we prepare people for an unknown future?”

Jason Weber was particularly attuned to the quiet student who sat in the very back row of the class he was leading. The student didn’t speak out, and rarely engaged. He was, as Weber recalls, very, very, shy. But this classroom wasn’t meant to be a spectator-sport environment. It was Texas Tech’s inaugural cohort of its new leader development program, designed to help students build confidence and purpose through active participation. Weber didn’t stop trying to draw him out, and slowly a relationship formed. 

About three-quarters through the semester, the student, Octavio Garza IV, approached him with surprising news.

“He said, ‘I just want to let you know that when I started this program, I didn’t really want to be here. But I just thought, maybe this would be good for me,’” recalls Weber, who in addition to being facilitator of the leader development program, is Associate Vice Chancellor-Leader and Culture Development of the Texas Tech University System. Octavio told him that his experience in this program made him decide to stick his neck out and apply for a student ambassador position, and that he had been selected.  

The following year, Weber would see Octavio in public roles around campus, staffing tables and handing out root-beer floats to new students. “This is someone who engaged with students doing things I never thought he would do,” Weber says. “Once I saw him in the hall, and I pulled him into my classroom to speak to a group about his experience with the program. He ended up standing in front of a whole room of people talking for five minutes on his experience and how beneficial it was. He had just completely come out of his shell.”              

Octavio has since graduated, and instead of following a career in law enforcement as planned, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in education while working in the admissions office for Angelo State University, part of the Texas Tech University system. “The school and that program had a huge impact on me,” he says, “and now I’d like to work in a career where I can help students make choices that will change their education, and their life.”

Texas Tech’s program for juniors, Lead Like A Ram, is now in its third year, and has become so popular that the two cohorts fill quickly. Participants meet twice a month for a two-hour learning session, with both groups overlapping over a shared dinner. The program is being piloted in different forms at other locations within the Texas Tech University System, and Weber hopes 2026 will see the launch of a version for graduate students in medicine.

Texas Tech is one of many institutions taking seriously the question, What kind of leaders does the world of tomorrow need, and how do we cultivate them? A 2021 study published by the Harvard Business School identified the top 10 leadership skills in demand for the future of work, including inclusive leadership, engaging and inspiring leadership, and leadership without formal authority. Meanwhile, a 2023 study by the National Society of Leadership and Success concluded that students today aren’t developing three essential skills most needed for the modern workplace: communication, decision-making, and leadership.

Academics and administrators interested in developing leaders through higher education have a new ally in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Known for a broad range of transformative advancements in education, the foundation expanded its classifications of institutions in higher education to include programs focusing on Leadership for Public Purpose. The foundation defines its interest in university leadership development in this way: “Effective leadership for public purpose transcends functional or instrumental leadership (i.e., personal career or political gain; or narrow business or organization outcomes), in pursuit of collective public good, including justice, equity, diversity, and liberty.”

This year marks the first cycle of the evaluations for the Carnegie Elective Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose, with 25 U.S. institutions of higher education held up as pioneers on the national landscape of leadership development, including Rice University.

In 2015, renown venture capitalists and tech executives John and Ann Doerr—both Rice alums with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering—decided to make a major investment in leadership at their alma mater. Earlier contributions established their investment in engineering leadership, and they wanted to make it available to students throughout the university.

The Doerr Institute for New Leaders is the result of their $50 million gift designed to empower students with the skills, training, and confidence to make a true difference in the world, through a combination of hands-on, real-world experience, and guidance from personal coaches. The institute has a wide range of programming for Rice students at no added charge: Using a combination of classroom-based learning, excursions to watch leaders in action, one-on-one leadership coaching, and group coaching, the university practices its belief that leaders aren’t born or made, they are grown.

The focus on the word leader over leadership at Rice and many other schools is a conscious one, says Ryan Brown, Managing Director for Measurement at the institute.

“Leader development is about developing the person as a leader and their capacity as a leader, their identity as a leader. When you say leadership development, you could mean the dynamic between a leader and a follower. You could mean that broader social system in place within which leadership is happening and potential leaders are being identified. But you’re getting into more organizational or system dynamics, and that’s not what we do,” he said. “Because we don’t operate within an organization where that leadership is happening in a corporate structure, for example, elevating a person. What we’re focusing on is developing each student as a leader, then we actually want our leaders to leave, want them to graduate and go out into the world and then lead there.”

“If we only helped students to see themselves as leaders, but we had actually turned them into narcissists, then that would not be a good outcome.” 

The common set of measures Doerr Institute uses in its coaching program includes leader identity—the extent to which you see yourself as a leader, feel capable of leading, competent to lead, and willing to lead. “We also include sense of purpose, self-awareness, a couple of measures of psychological wellbeing, and an intellectual humility measure, which I really like,” Brown said. Contrary to what some might think, leadership is not about decisiveness and persuasion. “If we only helped students to see themselves as leaders, but we had actually turned them into narcissists, then that would not be a good outcome.”

Intellectual humility is a concept and measurement coined by Mark Leary at Duke University, and references the degree to which people are willing to admit that they’re wrong when they’re presented with good evidence, being open to new ideas, and finding out things that they don’t already believe are, in fact, true.

“That has a lot of application just in life and leaders that seems so important today. It’s intricately combined with active listening skills and empathy and all these kinds of things, so it makes for a healthy combination of outcomes,” he says. “We measure those things before and after students go through that coaching program, and we see consistently significant increases in leader identity and self-awareness, sense of purpose, intellectual humility and reductions in psychological distress. So we have this boost in wellbeing that is kind of a good secondary effect.”

Gavin Daves is a junior at Rice, and when he joined his first program at the Doerr Institute, he was fairly certain about what he was looking for. As someone who studies operations research and statistics, he functions in the world of applied mathematics. And he is aware of the social shortcomings within STEM.

“I’d say there is a little bit more of a vacuum or like a hole in leadership within STEM. They certainly have the leadership titles available, but not as much like the soft skills, emotional intelligence skills,” he said. “Some things that we don’t get taught in our classes are areas like how to work with the group, or how to deal with conflicts, you know, issues that are dealing with people. But I think those things are also really important when we talk about STEM jobs and careers.”

In high school, Gavin actively considered what he needed to improve on as he transitioned into college. He held some leadership positions in the band and as head of the music honor society, and belonged to a small team of students engaged in an AI competition for MIT. But he suspected that he needed to better develop elements of his personality to shine in order to have impact in his roles.

“I struggled with seeming maybe a little bit robotic to some people, unrelatable, because I came across as someone who was only focusing on the job they had to do. I wanted to work on finding ways to show a little bit more personality and even more passion for the stuff I’m doing, and about to showcase a different side of me and ultimately make me a better leader,” he said.

Gavin was trying to find ways not just to tell people what to do, but also help them grow, and if they couldn’t relate to him and trust him, it was turning into a roadblock. Through the Doerr programs, particularly the one-on-one coaching, he found himself able to immediately apply work on his skills to his part-time job as a data scientist at a tax analytics company.

“I’d say I’m a natural introvert, but I find I’m able to come out of my shell when I’m talking about something I’m excited about, or encouraging people to partake in something I’ve found really beneficial. These qualities transcend leadership, listening well and dealing with conflict, and make you a more complete and better person, overall.”

Like Rice, Washington University in St. Louis has a new initiative dedicated to developing leaders, and like Rice, it came through the generosity of a visionary alum. The $20 million George and Carol Bauer Leaders Academy places values-based leadership development at the center of the university for all students, building on the philanthropy of previous gifts supporting pockets of leadership—for Danforth Scholars, and the business school.

The Academy, still in its first year, will support research and oversee student leadership programs across schools and all ages of students in co-curricular programs, imbuing them with the best practices in leadership development and personal character formation. It also benefits the campus community with workshops, faculty grants, professional coaching, and a campus-wide Leadership Week.

“We look at leadership through what we call the 70-20-10 model, with 70% of your leadership development coming through experiences, 20% through mentoring and coaches, and 10% through academic coursework,” said Julia Macias, director of student leader development for the Academy. “This might be a little shocking, coming out of an academic institution, but we really think there are a lot of different ways to exercise what you’re learning and try things out and innovate what’s ultimately going to solidify their leadership development. Everyone, regardless of formal status, has the potential to influence and energize others to achieve a common goal. And so we really think about ourselves as developing people to become purpose-driven leaders of character and capability.”

Those character skills, and their wide-ranging benefits in both work and life, are a critical part of what so many students find binds disparate parts of their lives into a cohesive, values-based whole.

“Before, I didn’t think about how much being a good leader has to do with being a good person. Like, you have to work on yourself, first. And when I did my first program, they told me I should really work on my optimism and my empathy. And I was like, What does that even have to do with being a leader?” says Thara Venkateswaran, a Rice senior in ROTC headed to commission as a Naval officer in May. “But I realized that it really does, and emotional intelligence plays a huge role.”

As an executive officer, the second in command of the entire unit, she is responsible for managing 45 people, including all the freshmen. “Honestly, it’s a constant process of reflection and working on yourself. Because there is a lot of overlap between personal struggles and leadership struggles, professional and personal life. Really, everything is applicable to everything.”

This election season, there has been a lot of talk about defending Democracy. What that means to young people, and how they will act upon it in their lifetimes, is the question and the focus of College Presidents for Civic Preparedness. Growing out of The Institute for Citizens and Scholars in 2023, the coalition of diverse leaders coalesced around a concern that the lack of civil discourse—indeed, the dismissal of civics as an integral part of higher education—may be contributing to the polarization of America and the inability of young people to engage in meaningful debate. As the protests over the war in Gaza roiled campuses last spring, they frequently gave way to vitriol, misinformation, and obstinate behavior. And these leaders find themselves fighting what has been a simmering fire on campuses across the country: the urgent need to educate students in the practice of becoming productive, well-informed citizens.

“In my conversations with college presidents, they emphasized the need for higher education to rebalance its responsibilities between private and public good. They see an opportunity to strengthen our democracy through promoting healthy civil discourse,”  says Rajiv Vinnakota, President of The Institute for Citizens and Scholars, a nonprofit organization focused on cultivating talent, ideas, and networks to develop young people as empowered, lifelong citizens.

Cultivating good citizenship may once have been an expected goal of higher education. But some presidents express frustration with the difficulty of getting institutions to embrace this as a priority, says Vinnakota. Pushback from a broad range of stakeholders—including students, faculty, trustees, alumni, and policymakers—reflects a decades-long trend in public opinion, where college is viewed more as a personal gain than a public good. This can lead institutions to burrow down on career development, while ignoring civic engagement.

There may be more at stake here than a healthy Democracy. Gallup surveys in 130 countries show people with higher personal well-being are more likely to say they give something— time, money, or help to a stranger— back to their communities. Civic Engagement Index scores, which measure people’s likelihood to do all three, are twice as high among those who are “thriving” compared with those who are “suffering.”

The Institute for Citizens and Scholars took the lead in connecting these administrators to create what Vinnakota envisioned as “a coalition of the willing where the collective power of presidents working together might move this common cause forward.” The Institute began by initiating a series of virtual conversations among presidents in early 2023, and officially launched the coalition with 15 leaders in August of last year. The group has since grown to 92 presidents and counting—particularly critical in a year where questions and confusion over fundamental principles such as free speech, and the right to protest vs. the protection of individual rights, dominated the public zeitgeist.  

The roster is a diverse and impressive array of schools. Participants range from elite institutions like Dartmouth, Vassar and Amherst to large public universities like Cal State San Marcos and Indiana University, including minority-serving institutions like Claflin College and Howard University. Vinnakota says presidents join for different reasons, but are united by the shared understanding that civic preparedness must be at the heart of the academic experience and campus life. 

“Some college presidents are already making this a central focus within their institutions. These are the true believers. Others are earlier in their journey and are eager to learn from leaders and utilize the tools we provide,” he says “Many have faced significant challenges since October 7th [the start of the Israeli-Hamas war] and are relying on our support to help guide their institutions through this period as effectively as possible.”

Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway was an early member of the group, and says connecting with other leaders who shared his concerns and experiences was one of the first benefits of coming together.

“It was obvious in meeting Raj that I wasn’t alone in being concerned about the quality of the discourse in civic spaces or on civic topics. I wasn’t alone at being dismayed at the poor level of awareness in a college-going population about the basic building blocks of our democracy,” he says “Joining a group of leaders who shared this feeling of deep concern about the quality of civil discourse became a means for me to put into action a lot of what we’ve been thinking about here.”

Holloway, who defended his institution before Congress in the antisemitism hearings in May, believes the dismissal of civics education only serves to further erode a discipline that has been in decline. According to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the US invests just 5 cents in civic education for every 50 dollars allocated to STEM subjects.

Joining a group of leaders who shared this feeling of deep concern about the quality of civil discourse became a means for me to put into action a lot of what we’ve been thinking about here.

“The defunding of civics education is a major part of the problems we are seeing today,” he says. Holloway lays the blame, in part, on the quality of the education itself. “One of the reasons for the pushback [on civics] is that, frankly, it was being done poorly. It was antiquated and writing people out of history,” he says. “Civics should be about speaking to the complexity of our nation and all the different strengths that come with it, but we didn’t evolve our government civics courses to meet that need in K-12.”

Holloway teaches a first-year semester course at Rutgers on civil discourse and is a staunch defender of free speech, in all its discomfort. He believes the decline in civic preparedness education came at a time when the country may have needed it the most. “The ways education has been totally unprepared for the addictive power and influence of social media has added to the problem,” he says. “The complete freedom for people to say whatever they want may look like free speech but there is no accountability and no civility and that’s a really toxic combination.”

Building a Good Citizen

College Presidents for Civic Preparedness is taking all of this on with three Civic Commitments that each member institution adopts: “Educating for democracy is central to our mission. We will prepare our students for a vibrant, diverse, and contentious society. We will protect and defend free inquiry.”

In interpreting this, Vinnakota believes we need to ensure that young people are civically well-informed. “This means understanding how their government functions, the historical context of our current situation, and having the ability to distinguish fact from opinion,” he says. “Secondly, they should be productively engaged for the common good, which includes voting and having respectful conversations about public issues—even when there are disagreements. Finally, a commitment to democracy involves building trust in institutions, government, and fellow citizens.”

According to their materials, the presidents develop programming on their campuses to advance these civic commitments in keeping with their unique institutional missions. These include: hosting speaker series that promote diverse viewpoints; expanding course offerings centered on civic preparedness; utilizing orientations for student debates and free expression skills; designing student programming around constructive dialogue and civic engagement and learning; promoting voter engagement initiatives; and highlighting the themes of democracy and civic life through speeches and seminars.

In its recent report, “From Polarization to Progress,” the coalition describes the ways in which the schools are working toward these goals, both collectively and individually. The group continues its confidential presidential forums, and held its annual meeting at Howard University in January. Its blueprint, built off of the three major goals, includes launching initiatives and learning opportunities in several domains, reflecting a theory of change that spans policy and practice. They are:

• Administrative, led by presidents and provosts and involving campus-wide initiatives like Campus Call for Free Expression, a series of activities designed to spotlight the principles of critical inquiry and civil discourse;
• Classroom, involving curricula, first-year learning and certification programs, as well as faculty development through the Faculty Institute, which held its first convening in June at Rutgers;
• Centers and Institutes, such as Wellesley College’s Hilary Rodham Clinton Center for Citizenship, Leadership and Democracy;
• Auditorium, encompassing speakers, public events and lectures. 

Many of the myriad initiatives were already well-established, but bringing them together under one umbrella is part of the learning. The report notes strong activity in the past year: 88% of members offered courses or seminars that centered on civil discourse; 98% generated new civic research, fellowships, or initiatives; 98% hosted speaker series, dialogue dinners, or debates; and 94% held community, civic, or political engagement events. In 2025, 20% of current consortium members will offer programs that reach every student.

Bennington College President Laura Walker would be considered a “true believer.” The former president of New York Public Radio was drawn to the small liberal arts college in Vermont largely because of its mission “to work towards a world more beautiful, sustainable, democratic and just.” She has launched programs that support this mission including the Free Expression Task Force, which brings together a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, and Board of Trustees members to craft long-term policies that ensure these fundamental rights are preserved and nurtured within the institution. This fall, Bennington’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action is launching a seven-week course called “Saving Democracy Together,” open to Bennington students, alumni and the public.   

Like Holloway, she believes we dismiss civics preparedness in higher education at our peril. “I believe we are witnessing the effects of this lack of prioritization, compounded by the fractured media landscape and other factors, in today’s political climate,” she says. But Walker, like the other leaders in the group, is in it to change it. “Despite the sometimes grim appearance of our political landscape, it is not too late to effect change. I remain hopeful that we can make a concerted effort to reconnect education and democracy in ways that secure our future.” 

Vinnakota says the organization’s blueprint will lead to a number of changes on today’s college campuses: a decrease in polarization; comfort speaking up, especially if you feel you have a minority viewpoint; and a willingness to engage with people whose views are different than yours. In prioritizing constructive conversations, it is clear that this group of leaders, many battle-worn from drowned-out assemblies and political intervention on free speech, have civil discourse as top of mind going into this school year ahead of a contentious election.

“The presidents know that the protests are not going away. The students have been very clear about that,” says Vinnakota. “The question is how can administrators address this in a productive manner?  How can we engage students in an effective way where they feel as though they are making an impact on the direction of this country?”

Holloway sees this as the opportunity. “College is a great moment of re-articulation where a young person comes in and can have a set of experiences that either affirm their views or radically change them,” he says. “To me, this is the perfect breeding ground for wrestling with ideas.”

The college years are a crucial time for young adults to cultivate the skills of leadership and character, which significantly influence not just students’ personal and professional development, but shape the values of the next generation of leaders. Mastering values-based leadership helps students effectively guide and inspire teams, fostering collaboration and problem-solving abilities that are vital in today’s dynamic work environments. Moreover, developing strong character traits such as integrity, empathy, and resilience lays the foundation for ethical decision-making and builds trust with peers and colleagues. Together, these skills not only enhance academic and career success but also contribute to creating purposeful change within oneself, one’s community, and beyond. The educators entrusted and charged with imparting these skills must translate abstract ideas into practical frameworks. What does it mean to teach character? To nurture leaders of integrity and purpose? Steve Sosland, vice chancellor for Leader & Culture Development for the Texas Tech University System, has spent his career finding answers to these questions across different organizations and sectors.

Higher education is Sosland’s fifth industry. After graduating from West Point, he began his career in the U.S. military, where he spent 11 years as an infantry soldier. He later worked in corporate America, first in the restaurant industry and later helping other junior military officers find jobs in the business world with companies that sought to hire veterans for their leadership and character skills. In 2010, Sosland became the chief operating officer of Hill Country Memorial hospital in Fredericksburg, Texas, where he and a team of leaders transformed the then-failing hospital into a pillar of excellent healthcare and leader development, for which President Obama awarded the hospital the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2014. 

Sosland’s first role in higher education was as the executive vice president and chief people and performance officer at the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center at Fort Worth. Today, in his role at Texas Tech, Sosland reflects on this unlikely trajectory and highlights the thread that connects each disparate sector and organization: in every dimension, his career has been dedicated to “working with organizations to incorporate a values-based approach to leadership,” which, he says, “advances personal development, quality of life, and wellbeing by helping individuals live in alignment with their own core values.” 

Sosland’s own life is an example of this dynamic process. Today, he says his purpose is “to influence those who will transform the lives of others,” but that mission wasn’t apparent to him at the outset. “When I was in my twenties, looking ahead at my career, I could not have predicted the path,” he explains. “When I was in my fifties, looking back at it, I wanted to find the common thread, and what I found was that I had worked in environments with a strong sense of core values and a culture built around those values. That culture was either there when I arrived, or I used leadership development as an opportunity to create it.”

Leader & Culture Development at Texas Tech takes a comprehensive, bird’s-eye view approach to bringing values-based leadership and purposeful work to the university system’s five campuses. “If we are going to help students, it is fundamentally important for us to first focus on faculty, staff, and administration,” Sosland says. “If we work with the students by directing them to leader development programs and helping them become leaders of character, but they don’t see role models around them, then it brings into question all of our work.” 

The Path to Purpose

To ensure that students have those role models, Sosland works directly with university leadership, shaping the tone and character of the institution. Part of that work involves  exploring purpose, both personally and institutionally. “The way that I work with senior leaders — college and university presidents, deans, department chairs — is by helping them to identify their purpose, both personally and for their entity,” he says. “We then identify their challenges — be them challenges of morale, wellbeing, efficiency, inter- and intrapersonal issues — and we address those challenges within the cultural environment, taking a people-first approach. I call this concept generational leadership. I might very rarely interact with students, but I interact with deans to help them lead their department chairs, who then help the faculty members, who help the students.”

“Our work reminds them of what was already inside of them.”

Purposeful work is often described as “aligning who you are with what you do.” Sosland describes this alignment as “a sense of oneness in a person’s values at home and at work, which is one way to define integrity: from the root integris, meaning oneness or unity.” Though research suggests that purposeful work can promote wellbeing and fulfillment throughout life, a 2022 Harvard University study found that 58 percent of teens and young adults reported having little to no sense of purpose in life. It is a remarkable figure, but not an entirely surprising one. In a 2021 study of more than 10,000 young people across 10 countries, 56 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds surveyed said they believed humanity was doomed due to the climate crisis. The study, published in Lancet Planetary Health, also found that 60 percent of respondents blamed their national governments for this bleak state of affairs. 

Amid a youth mental health national emergency, growing sentiments of dread and nihilism plaguing young people, and Gen Z taking to the internet to voice their existentialist views in the form of political memes and parody videos, the idea of finding purpose could seem almost quaint. But initiatives focused on character and values-based leadership have material impact and the potential to change lives—particularly the lives of college students, who are on the lookout for purpose and in the process of creating and sustaining their core values.

To make the case for purpose, leaders in higher education must not overlook the fact that high tuition costs and poor financial wellbeing lead students to increasingly seeking pay over purpose. In addressing this concern, Sosland cites James Truslow Adams, who coined the phrase “the American Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of America. “Adams said that our college education largely focuses on how to make a living, but perhaps it should be how to make a life,” he explains. “How to make a living is important, but I think that as universities, we’ve lost our way. We are so hyper-focused on teaching how to make a living that we lose sight of teaching how to make a life. What we are doing at the Texas Tech University System is raising these as equally important matters. We are focused just as much on building the character of the students as we are on helping them get a job, because it is their character that will help them survive in challenging times. We are preparing them to find work that aligns with their core values.”

Grit is one value that comes up in Sosland’s conversations with higher education leadership, faculty, and students. “When it comes to purpose, we are asking, Why do I exist? We ask it on a personal level, and we ask it on an organizational level. Why does this organization exist? How do we create an environment that is rich and allows people to grow and develop to their full potential? And how do we do it so that, along the way, they gain the skills of resilience and grit that will get them through life’s challenging times and help them when they face failure?” Dr. Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and renowned scholar of grit and self-control, defines grit as the combination of passion and perseverance toward a long-term goal. Sosland cites Duckworth’s philosophy of grit as influential to his work in character and leadership development. “Our universities are in West Texas,” he explains. “Most of the population of Texas is in the eastern third of the state, but West Texas is largely rural. Our universities primarily serve rural areas with harsh weather conditions — sand storms, harsh winds, harsh temperatures. In these conditions where a lot of our students grow up, they have to be resilient. They have to navigate tough environmental conditions just to survive. Their grandparents and great-grandparents lived through the Dust Bowl. In their backgrounds, grit and resilience are imprinted deep within them. But, as with anyone, this gets lost. They get caught up in the what-ifs of life, and they sometimes forget what was imprinted from parents and teachers and coaches early on. Our work reminds them of what was already inside of them. That is what identifying and living in alignment with core values does for both individuals and organizations.”

Students at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering enter their studies with a sense of hope and purpose. They are often young people with an interest in public welfare and socially conscious work, setting out to design auspicious futures for an ever-changing, ever-complicated world. But what happens when four years of stress, hustle culture, and careerism obscure the sense of purpose that brought them to engineering in the first place? When students lose sight of their purpose, the effect is not only demoralizing in the short term — it can have lifelong implications for wellbeing, work engagement, and fulfillment.

Dr. Harly Ramsey observed firsthand how an engineering education culture can obscure purpose and impair wellbeing in students as a professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC. She has been dedicated to offsetting this trend for several years, teaching in the Viterbi School’s Engineering in Society program (formerly the Engineering Writing Program), a unique program designed to integrate humanities topics such as ethics and communication into the engineering curriculum. It is from this intersection of thought that Ramsey, a professor of technical communication practice whose PhD is in English, approaches her role as an engineering educator. In 2021, The Coalition for Transformational Education gave USC a grant to launch the Vision Venture video series, an interview project that connects engineering students to recent alumni as a way of helping students reconnect to their sense of purpose, agency, and direction. 

When, in response to the Vision Venture project, Ramsey’s students participated in a series of anonymous surveys related to wellbeing, she was surprised by the troubling results. “These students sit in front of me twice a week. I feel like I know them.” Yet, she recalls, “I had no idea how stressed and isolated many of them felt.” She was also struck by her students’ warped perception of time, noting that many had lost sight of the future — and forgotten the reasons they wanted to be engineers in the first place. 

That lost sense of purpose is now central to Ramsey’s research, as well as to her approach to teaching. “The process of education that we put engineering students through in the course of four years has been found to decrease their interest in public welfare,” Ramsey says. Indeed, a 2014 article by sociologist Erin A. Cech, which Ramsey cites as influential to her work, reveals that despite widespread discourse on “the importance of training ethical, socially conscious engineers,” longitudinal data suggest that “students’ interest in public welfare concerns may actually decline over the course of their engineering education.”

“As a moral agent and a person who cares about my students,” Ramsey says she feels obligated to use the classroom to promote purpose and agency, laying the foundation for wellbeing after graduation. “Enough of them need help; let’s bring it to them,” she said.

It was with this mission in mind that Ramsey joined forces with Dr. Julie Loppacher, the director of USC’s Kortschak Center for Learning and Creativity, to bring 5-minute self-regulation exercises into the classroom. Loppacher and Ramsey designed the accessible, co-curricular model for improving student wellbeing, learning, and sense of purpose based on self-determination theory and presented the results at the 2023 Frontiers in Education Conference.

The culture of “pride in the grind culture” among engineering students adds to the collective stigma around mental health.

Triage Time

Stress and its impact on mental health are pervasive issues among college students across all disciplines, but for engineering students, the problem may be especially pronounced. A demanding academic workload, pressure to perform well in exams, and “a culture of normalized stress” among engineering students all contribute to the phenomenon of lost time (and loss of purpose) that Ramsey identified among her students and for which she coined the term “triage time” in 2022. Hustle culture, grind culture, careerism — by any name, normalized stress can be detrimental to students’ sense of agency and meaning, as the pressure to succeed obscures the pursuit of passion and purpose. For some, a social environment that rewards stress and encourages burnout for bragging points compounds the pressure. As 2024 Viterbi School graduate Jesse Tennant put it, “There is an environment where many are struggling and few want to admit it. Students seem to ‘out-stress’ each other. Many students stack their schedules to the max and constantly talk about how busy they are.” This, Tennant adds, culminates in “a cycle of escalating stress, where interacting with classmates can make one feel inadequate for not being stressed enough.” 

The sentiment echoes the findings of a 2023 report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education that rates of anxiety and depression among 18- to 25-year-olds, which are twice as high as rates among teens, are exacerbated by a pre-professional hustle culture that favors employability and income over purpose. That careerist approach to education may pose financial and social barriers to leading a meaningful life, causing some students to neglect the pursuit of joy and purposeful work.

While the culture of stress is not unique to the field of engineering, Tennant says, “I believe that engineering students have a unique learning experience. Many engineering classes routinely have low exam and project scores. I took a class last semester where the average for every exam was below 50%. While the class was curved at the end of the semester, scoring in the traditional F range is demoralizing and can make you question your intelligence and whether you ‘belong’ in the program.” Moreover, research suggests that engineering students, many of whom operate in a climate of normalized — and, at times, celebrated — stress, may be especially reluctant to seek help. The culture of “pride in the grind culture” among engineering students adds to the collective stigma around mental health, Ramsey says, compounding the barriers to getting help. 

Taking five

Self-determination theory identifies three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Loppacher and Ramsey wanted to test whether dedicating 5 minutes of class time to self-regulation techniques, such as goal-setting, journaling, and cognitive reframing, could help students meet these needs. “Emotions have an impact on our cognitive state and ability to learn,” Loppacher explains. “They can be profoundly positive, and they can be profoundly limiting.” Self-regulation techniques are academic and emotional tools that improve a person’s cognitive state, preparing them to learn, feel, and be better. Each technique is grounded in data, which Loppacher shares with students to provide a basis for every prompt. Rather than simply telling students that goal-setting increases self-efficacy and achievement, for example, Loppacher presents research that students who set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals are more likely to attain them. Participation is optional, and exercises are capped at 5 minutes at the start of class. 

At a time when youth mental health is considered a national emergency and experts fret over a seemingly irremediable generational divide, fostering open, intergenerational dialogue can dispel panic and misunderstanding.

While some professors may be reluctant to yield valuable class time to student wellbeing, restricting the exercises to 5 minutes and conducting research on their efficacy ensure that the process is accessible and productive. Ramsey and Loppacher emphasize that professors are not expected to be mental health professionals, nor should they be obligated to go beyond their scope of expertise or deduct learning time from their classes. In fact, Ramsey says, “Whether or not professors care about student wellbeing, self-determination theory is a learning tool that helps students perform better in class.” By fostering holistic learners, this approach can also increase professors’ self-efficacy by improving classroom engagement and performance. 

The student response

Ramsey and Loppacher will expand the program beyond the Viterbi School of Engineering in the 2024-2025 academic year, as they recognize a ubiquitous need for co-curricular supports. Loppacher conducts optional interviews with students who have participated in courses that implemented self-regulation techniques and concludes that there are many benefits to the program, both obvious and subtle. Many have noted the importance of intergenerational understanding as it relates to stress, hustle culture, and wellbeing. At a time when youth mental health is considered a national emergency and experts fret over a seemingly irremediable generational divide, fostering open, intergenerational dialogue can dispel panic and misunderstanding. “Intergenerational relationships are extremely important in our lives, especially as learners,” Loppacher says. In one interview, a student stated, “The intergenerational recognition of my stress levels was incredibly powerful.” When asked about the role faculty and staff play in student mental health, Tennant echoed this idea of recognition and care. “While many professors and staff genuinely care about students, this should be the standard, rather than an exceptional attribute,” he says. “Students should feel confident each semester that their mental health will be prioritized by the entire institution, rather than hoping they have a caring professor.”

The idea of care — for others, for oneself, and for the future — reverberates throughout many students’ reflections on the 5-minute self-regulation exercises. “The demonstration of care from my professor was the most important thing,” one student reflected. “This isn’t just a writing class,” said another, “you actually care.” Research underscores the importance of care: in the 2018 Gallup Alumni Survey, alumni who reported having “someone who cared about me as a person” during their undergraduate years were more than twice as likely to report high levels of well-being and work engagement later in life — but fewer than 5 percent of alumni said they had. Some students have reported that a mere acknowledgement of their “human-ness” by a professor was novel: “We’re all people…engineering is a very work-heavy major…so it’s helpful to have a reminder that you are not a machine…you need to do these things [self-regulation strategies] for the human part of yourself.”

For college students getting ready to embark on their post-graduate lives, a sense of purpose can be a North Star, illuminating the path toward personal development, fulfillment, and success. Having a clear sense of purpose provides students with direction and resilience, brings meaning to their endeavors, improves their mental health, and empowers them to make informed decisions about their futures. When students can identify and live according to their purpose, they can cultivate a deep sense of belonging within themselves and their communities. The pursuit of purpose shapes the college experience and lays the foundation for meaningful living beyond graduation — but how do students find something as elusive and individual as purpose? At Belmont University, they are finding it through alumni in the Purpose Mentorship Program.

“We are trying to help students know who they are, who they were made to be, what makes them unique — and how they can capitalize on that for the sake of communal flourishing,” said Joe Mankowski, the Transformational Project Strategist at Belmont University, where he heads the Purpose Mentorship Program. 

Belmont is a private Christian university in the heart of Nashville, Tennessee. It attracts students with dreams of making it on Music Row, young entrepreneurs, aspiring medical professionals, and — like most college students — young adults who are still trying to find their passion and understand how to pursue it. A 2019 study conducted by Gallup in partnership with Bates College explored that pursuit, defining and measuring purposeful work experiences among college graduates. The study found that 80 percent of college graduates say that it is extremely important (43 percent) or very important (37 percent) to find purpose in their work — yet, less than half of those graduates reported finding it. Graduates who report a strong sense of purpose in work are almost ten times more likely to meet the criteria of overall well-being, which encompasses mental, emotional, physical, and financial health. This research reiterated previous findings that deriving purpose from one’s work is correlated with “having someone who encourages students’ goals and dreams.” 

“We aren’t just training students for a job; we are forming whole people.”

In Belmont’s Purpose Mentorship Program, that “someone” is a university alum — a person who has been in the student’s position, often within the last several years, and made the transition from commencement day to purposeful work. Launched in the 2021-2022 academic year with funding from the Coalition for Transformational Education and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, the initiative is emblematic of a broader mission that President Greg Jones and Reverend Susan Pendleton Jones brought with them to Belmont. Making it a focal point of his administration, President Jones’s Discovering Purpose course asks students, “What’s your why?” This question, which is also the driving concept behind the Purpose Mentorship Program, prompts students to reflect on the process of meaning-making both as individuals and as members of a vibrant community. 

Originally piloted by the Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business and the Massey College of Business, the Purpose Mentorship Program fosters meaningful connection between alumni and students, helping students to envision their futures and articulate their goals. Alumni are recommended by faculty and staff based on character, humility, and leadership skills in addition to professional success. Each mentor circle is composed of one alumni mentor and a cohort of 2-5 students. Mentors are prepared with curriculum-based discussion points and encouraged to engage in their own self-reflection on purpose and identity. The groups meet monthly to walk through how one’s purpose develops over the course of the college years and manifests in life beyond graduation.

As a Belmont alumnus himself, Mankowski views the Purpose Mentorship Program as a reflection of Belmont’s mission to cultivate “whole-person development,” educating leaders of character and wisdom. “Being part of a community that has so consistently and fully invested in its students has motivated me to find ways to invest back into the community,” he says. 

Mankowski understands just how vital the relationships formed through the program are for students making decisions about their futures. Equally significant, he says, are the questions it asks. As he explains, “If you know why you’re here, it gives you so much latitude and freedom.” The program begins by asking students who they are in the context of their communities — college students, interns, roommates, daughters, sons, partners. While understanding those identities can begin to help students locate their goals, Mankowski says, it also is imperative that they “take a step back and ask, ‘Why do I think humans exist? Why do I think we work? Why do I think we love?’”

“In an achievement-based culture, it’s so easy for students to prioritize work at the expense of self-reflection, self-awareness and introspection. We are holding space for that exploration.”

In a climate of careerism, immense student debt, and hustle culture, students may fall into the trap of basing their identities entirely on work in an effort to secure high-income jobs. When students pursue these bestowed metrics of status and worth —  job titles, grade-point averages, salaries — at the expense of finding their purpose, their overall well-being can suffer. That’s why, according to Dr. Amy Crook, Vice President for Transformative Innovation, Character and Purpose, the search for purpose is more than work. It is a lifelong quest for identity and understanding — not just within oneself, but in service to others. “We want students to realize they are more than their job,” Crook said. “Their ultimate happiness, fulfillment, joy and ability to make the world a better place is much larger than their job titles. We aren’t just training students for a job; we are forming whole people, and we want them to feel confident in exploring these bigger questions. And we are doing so through supportive, caring contacts who can be honest about the obstacles they faced and the opportunities where they were able to make choices to have a more fulfilling life.”

Mankowski echoed this sentiment, noting that “in an achievement-based culture, it’s so easy for students to prioritize work at the expense of self-reflection, self-awareness and introspection. We are holding space for that exploration.” 

What better guides for their North Star journey than those who paved the way before them? Mankowski views alumni relationships as crucial to the purpose initiative. The program pairs students with alumni mentors based on 5 distinct areas of purpose designed to gauge motivations and values, rather than organizing them by career or major. These 5 personalities — the creative visionary, the compassionate guide, the sincere storyteller, the thoughtful investigator, and the organizational innovator — act as a litmus test for students and alumni to connect across professional disciplines, forming what Mankowski calls “unlikely partnerships” that reinforce the belief that purpose is not a professional identity, but an ideological one. The program also directs students to courses that may be best suited to their style of purpose — the sincere storyteller might enjoy a creative writing workshop, while the organizational innovator may gravitate toward the biology lab — bringing meaning and individuality into the classroom. This approach helps students connect their curriculum to real-world experiences, building the relationship between purpose and academic or professional life.

The transformative potential of the Purpose Mentorship Program lies in these relationships — between students and alumni mentors, and between academic life and self-reflection. Mankowski notes that the program gives students “a sense of unconditional mattering — that is how we connect with ourselves, with our life’s purpose, and with each other.”