Teaching in an Age of ‘Militant Apathy’

By  Beth McMurtrie
FEBRUARY 15, 2023
It is a strange time to be an undergraduate. Life may feel apocalyptic, buffeted
by climate crisis, social tumult, and war, but you wouldn’t know it on most college
campuses. If the societal upheavals of late 1960s and early 1970s were marked by
campus protests and fiery speeches, today’s students move from class to class with
heads bowed and hands clutched around phones. Instead of anger and outrage,
there’s alienation and anxiety.
Professors and administrators have been talking openly about this challenge for
the past year or so, since they saw students struggle mightily as they returned to
campus following the worst of the pandemic. Some dove enthusiastically back into
campus life, but many others had trouble engaging with their classmates or their
academics. This has accelerated discussions about the rise of student mental-health
challenges, the strains of economic uncertainty as college costs continue to grow,
and the heightened academic needs of students. Colleges have increased the use of
early interventions and strategies like mentoring and success coaching to assure
students that they belong on campus, and are embedding more career skills into
coursework to ensure they can succeed after they leave.
The efforts are critical for colleges’ survival, both politically and financially.
Skepticism about the return on investment in a four-year degree continues to grow,
while colleges have also been criticized for graduating lower-income students at
lower rates. And enrollments on many campuses, which dropped during the peak
of Covid, have yet to recover.
But as many students continue to exhibit debilitating levels of anxiety,
hopelessness, and disconnection — what one professor termed “militant apathy”
— colleges are struggling to come up with a response beyond short-term solutions.
The standard curricula in higher ed — and the way it’s discussed as primarily a
path to economic success — can exacerbate those feelings. Students are told the
main point of college is to move up the economic ladder, so no wonder it feels
transactional. And the threat of failure must seem paralyzing given the high cost of
a degree.
But what if students believed that college was more than that? That it was a
place to discuss the big questions bouncing around in their heads, learn a
vocabulary to describe what’s happening around them, engage with the messiness
of the world, and navigate their place in it. That it was meaningful.
This is hardly a new idea, of course. Service learning, common-reading
programs, internships, study-abroad opportunities, and experiential education —
known collectively as immersive education or high-impact practices — are all
meant to serve this purpose, and have shown to have a positive and often profound
impact on students’ lives. They can be more absorbing, creative, and self-directed
than traditional courses. But some students earn a degree without having even one

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of these experiences, and only about 60 percent of seniors have had two or more.
More fundamentally, the challenge has always been how to make these approaches
central to learning when higher-education structures — including cost — get in the
way.
Now, though, immersive education is getting a closer look. At a national level,
some educators are calling for a reinvestment in engaged teaching and a movement
away from the credentialism that for decades has dominated the narrative about the
purpose of college.
“There’s been a discourse in society that higher-education leaders have
embraced, which goes something like this: Higher education is essential for future
career attainment, positive economic outcomes and social mobility,” says Richard
Arum, a professor of sociology and education at the University of California at
Irvine, whose 2011 book with Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited
Learning on College Campuses, set off a national conversation about what students
get out of undergraduate education.
Colleges have championed that narrative, of course, in response to pressure
from policy makers, politicians, and families to prove that the cost of a degree pays
off in the long run. But in doing so, Arum says, they have shifted the conversation
away from the very attributes that make education feel meaningful.
“Students come to college and say, OK, this is largely about economic mobility.
It’s largely about credentials, about occupations,” say Arum. ”So I’m just going to
focus on courses that are about specialization for my major. And if the college
makes me do a general-education course, I’m not going to work very hard on that
because what the heck does that have to do with my career?”
Colleges try to counter that by telling students that critical-thinking and
communication skills are important as well. “But that’s a pretty vague argument
that isn’t obvious for students to internalize and motivate their behavior. So what
you see then is widespread disengagement from the curriculum,” says Arum. “For
educators like me, what’s missing is what education is about. It’s about
psychological well-being and flourishing and growth and human development and
encouraging a set of dispositions, attitudes and behaviors that lead to fulfilling
lives.”
While the transition to a more instrumentalist view of education was decades in
the making, Arum is surprised that in recent years the public narrative hasn’t
changed, given everything the country has been through: Black Lives Matter,
January 6 and the elections, mass shootings, wildfires, and floods. “Looking back,
historians will be puzzled at how the rhetoric didn’t shift from this more economic
discourse,” he says. No wonder students don’t seem to want to be in college.
“What we’re offering them isn’t aligned with their lived experiences and the
moment we’re in.”
Colleges that want to deepen students’ connection to their learning have
options. Some are investing in interdisciplinary programs that take students off
campus for weeks or months at a time. Others are revamping general-education
coursework so that entering students can immediately dive into age-old questions

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that help them find their place in the world. Or they are creating immersive-
learning courses and building them into majors, so that time-pressed students — or
those hesitant to take on a less-structured or more time-consuming class — know
that it will count toward graduation.
At Lehigh University, a number of first-year students have the chance to embed
themselves in different environments and cultures during a semester away from
campus. This year’s projects focused on Ecuador and on the American West.
In Ecuador, the group lived in local homes, explored the ravages of pollution on
the Amazon, and considered solutions to climate degradation. “Students are
desperately seeking experiences that are ways to connect and find ways to make
meaning of themselves in the world. What’s their place, what’s their sense of
agency? What’s their way to affect these massive issues around them that they see
defining their world?” says Cheryl Matherly, the university’s vice president and
vice provost for international affairs, who helps lead the program, Lehigh Launch.
“These are experiences that talk about engaging with the world in ways that make
the learning real.”
TRACIE VAN AUKEN FOR THE CHRONICLE
Yandel Santos, a first-year student at Lehigh University, traveled to Ecuador as part of the
Lehigh Launch program.
For Yandel Santos, who participated in the Ecuador program last fall, the
experience was the perfect entry point to college. “I wanted to immediately be put
in an environment that would force me to adapt,” he says of why he applied.
Like a lot of students of his generation, Santos considers himself curious and an
independent learner. He uses social media to explore the world virtually, watching
a YouTube lecture by a Yale professor on power and politics, or scrolling TikTok
to get people’s takes on events half a world away. Such access, he says, allows him
to expand his social networks beyond friends and family, and the lessons and
attitudes they offer. “What distinguishes my generation is that for the most part we
don’t accept the status quo,” he says, echoing a common feeling. “We’re going to
challenge it and question it and pick it apart.”
A native of Philadelphia, Santos had not traveled outside of the East Coast. In
Ecuador, he lived with a host family, and took Spanish, biology, anthropology, and
an integrative seminar with the other Lehigh students. The concepts he learned in
one course would often connect to, and build on, those he learned in others, and the
emphasis was on learning collaboratively. He also took on a research project on
sustainability, interviewing residents.
The experience taught him how Indigenous cultures adapt to the climate crisis.
The group, for example, visited both pristine parts of the Amazon rainforest, and
communities with high rates of cancer and oil bubbling up from the soil, a legacy
of corporate drilling.
Santos, who plans to study astrophysics, sees a connection between his
exploration in Ecuador and his major, in that astrophysics seeks to understand the
universe and humans’ place in it. And Lehigh Launch taught him a couple of
things that he will take with him: Always leave class with more questions than you

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went in with, and you can’t live in one place your whole life and say that you
understand humanity.
His professor and the program’s director, David Casagrande, a professor of
anthropology, called the experience “the most successful thing I have ever done.”
“I just saw a complete transformation of students who now completely
understand the relevance of anything they’ll study, and have skills to deal with the
disappointments and challenges they’re going to encounter for the next three-and-
a-half years or the rest of their lives.”
To understand why programs like this work well, it helps to understand what’s
happening with students.
We all know that remote learning was damaging for many teenagers, but Mary
Helen Immordino-Yang can tell you how. A professor of education, psychology,
and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, Immordino-Yang
studies how adolescents learn and develop, in part by using brain scans. In
examining neural images, she found that learning is not just an intellectual process
but a social and emotional one. Parts of the brain associated with those processes
fire up as students engage with new and complex ideas, particularly those that
encourage self-reflection and meaning making. Those actions also develop
students’ brains in crucial ways. In fact, she found that how students engage in this
activity holds better predictive power of their longer-term development than
metrics like IQ or socioeconomic status.
“It goes beyond being connected,” she says of these different regions of the
brain. “They are all part of the same process.”
Strip one or more parts of that process away, as happened when students were
isolated during the pandemic, and learning becomes “narrowed and impoverished,”
she says. “If you had a hard time managing the complexity of the real-world social
space, [solitude] could be an advantage,” she acknowledges. “But for most
teenagers and young adults, you’ve now taken away much of the rich complexity.”
Students were lacking, among other things, stable, caring relationships with
teachers and other adults they would encounter at school. “What we really have
done during the pandemic is left kids on their own to build that kind of feeling.”
Since we rely on these different facets of our brain to process and make
meaning of what we learn, students had to fill in the gaps, whether or not they were
well-equipped to do so. In many cases, their brains would over-activate or under-
activate. They would ruminate, become anxious, get depressed, or withdraw.
Of course, the adolescent mental-health crisis is not new. According to
the Healthy Minds Study, which surveys thousands of students each semester
about their mental well-being, the percentage of students reporting depression,
anxiety, and academic stress has been increasing steadily for years.
Immordino-Yang is one of many experts who attribute some of these longer-
term trends to the pervasive use of social media, which deprives teens of genuine
social interaction, and turns us into passive observers of others’ experiences. One
trend that she finds particularly disturbing is the use of dating apps in college,
noting that she often hears students say they don’t know how to date or have

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romantic relationships. “They don’t have that disposition, that drive, to be in a
close conversation with someone else.”
Add to that the structures of modern education, which have increasingly
emphasized structured learning and test preparation, and it’s no wonder that
students are struggling, she says.
“In every context, the student needs to feel like they are driving, they are the
ones managing their own learning,” says Immordino-Yang. Instead, students have
come to expect “‘you tell me what to do and I’ll do it,’” she says. “We need to take
that away. That is a crutch. That is not real learning. That is compliance.”
Many educators have noted that even as students struggle, they find it
challenging to advocate for themselves. That may be because in certain college
settings, it’s easier to retreat than engage.
William B. Davis, interim vice provost for academic engagement and student
achievement at Washington State University, recalls getting phone calls from
concerned parents well into the fall semester of 2022. Oftentimes, he says, ”what’s
being reported is a sense of disconnection, even though [students] have been on
campus 13-14 weeks.” And traditional structures aren’t working. “We’ve had
mentoring programs, living-learning communities, but for whatever reason those
aren’t sufficient.” At the same time, he adds, students are having trouble
articulating their needs “in ways that would help us help them.”
The cost of college, too, weighs heavily on most students. And whether or not
they’re worried about paying their tuition bill, students are keenly aware that the
stakes are high.
“There is a certain kind of economic anxiety in this group and that translates
into a broader uncertainty about their situation in society and at the college,” says
Frank Anechiarico, a professor of government and law at Hamilton College, who
has been teaching since 1978. “It’s impressed upon them that they are going into a
tough world. ‘You better be ready, you have to be very, very good in order to make
it.’ All of those things make it difficult for them to develop their own skills in a
creative way that’s not so worried about failure, or [being] less than perfect.”
One of his students, Elian Sorensen, sees it in some classmates. At a place like
Hamilton, a small, selective liberal-arts college, students are primed to achieve a
lot. “There seems to be this overwhelming fear of failure that is so paralyzing,”
says Sorensen, “that instead of turning in subpar work, or work they don’t feel
good about, they just don’t turn anything in.”
Detachment, stress, hopelessness, and passivity are all things that advocates of
immersive education hope to counteract. Typically, these courses and programs are
collegial, requiring students to work together on a problem and counteracting the
isolating effects of remote learning. They are often interdisciplinary, tapping the
skills and talents of a range of students and professors to spark creativity — not
groupthink. They may be experiential, pulling students out of the classroom and
away from screens. They take an open-ended approach to complicated problems,
instead of a box-checking one. And they attempt to connect the subject to students’

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values, beliefs, and goals, investing them in the outcome and developing their
sense of agency.
Anechiarico has been working on an antidote, of sorts, to this anxious malaise
through a program called the Justice Lab.
In it, students collaborate over the course of a semester, taking four courses
together that explore a significant challenge facing Utica, N.Y., their local city. In
the fall, Sorensen and 13 other students examined homelessness. Several days a
week they would head into the city and meet at the library for a course on the city’s
history taught by a history professor, or a class on urban homelessness and
addiction taught by a sociology professor at a local church. They also learned
about health care systems from a biology professor and social policy from a
government professor, heard from guest lecturers, got to know members of the
community, and interned at various nonprofits. Sorensen, for example, spent time
at an opioid-treatment program inside a health clinic.
MATT BURKHARTT FOR THE CHRONICLE
Elian Sorensen, a senior at Hamilton College, examined homelessness in Utica, N.Y., as
part of the Justice Lab program.
The pastor of the church, which had come under fire from locals for offering
shelter and food without requiring that clients be sober or off drugs, often sat in on
their classes, offering his perspective and earning the admiration of students for his
dedication. Some students even spent their free time volunteering there. It was
remarkable to meet someone who had worked so hard trying to improve the lives
of people experiencing homelessness in Utica “and he’s facing such backlash and
vitriol,” Sorensen says. “It was really eye-opening.”
Sorensen, who is majoring in public policy, plans to work in disability rights
after graduation. The semester spent studying homelessness was profoundly
different from taking traditional college classes. For one, it pulled students off
campus, highlighting how separate Hamilton is from the community around it.
That made Sorensen wonder why Hamilton hadn’t gotten involved in Utica’s
struggles with homelessness.
Second, there was an immediacy to the learning. “Most of my courses have felt
distant from the subject matter they were focused on and this didn’t,” Sorensen
says. “It felt like a first-person perspective.”
It’s not as if other coursework hasn’t touched on real problems. A public-policy
course examined the decision-making process around setting speed limits. A
statistics class in economics focused on red-lining and inequality. Those were
worthy topics of discussion, but still felt abstract, Sorensen says.
The experience also had an emotional component. “There was definitely a
feeling of being almost weighed down by the terribleness of what we were exposed
to,” says Sorensen, specifically “learning that so much of our inability to solve it is
because of a lack of political will.”
It never felt despairing, however. While homelessness is not a narrow problem,
says Sorensen, it’s also not overwhelming. “We learned about the specific political
environment of Utica and its history and how the opioid epidemic contributed to

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the problem.” The students also learned how housing costs are a key driver of
homelessness. “It made us feel like this was a solvable problem,” says Sorensen.
“We were learning the skills to articulate compelling solutions.” The students’
research on housing, homelessness and addiction, in fact, was presented to some
community leaders and helped move homelessness to the top of the mayor’s
agenda, Anechiarico says.
Finally, Sorensen noted, the collaborative nature of the project helped mitigate
the tendency toward perfectionism, where people are hesitant to say anything in
class for fear of being wrong. “This program creates the opportunity to raise your
hand and be like, I have a thought and it’s not a full thought, but I’m going to see if
I can put it out there and maybe somebody can build off of it. And that’s not that
scary.”
Anechiarico noticed the same thing. Being together five days a week created a
level of social cohesion that is hard to replicate in a single course. “They really
ended up liking each other. They trusted each other and worked on things
together,” he says. “I didn’t ask them to do it. They just did it.”
Does immersive learning demand a full course load, dedicated professors, and
time away from campus? After all, such programs are by definition small, as well
as costly and time-consuming to organize. Or can the same benefits be found in a
single course, or a series of courses spaced out over time? Advocates say they can.
One of the more successful examples is Purdue University’s 15-credit-hour
certificate program, Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts, designed to get students
on the STEM-oriented campus interested in studying the humanities and liberal
arts. Its two-semester first-year sequence, called Transformative Texts, Critical
Thinking and Communication I, fulfills general-education requirements and now
draws 37 percent of incoming students.
Undergraduates in small groups might discuss and debate Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, Dante’s Inferno or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. They are
encouraged to find their own way to express what they have learned, too: by
creating a video game, perhaps, or a podcast series on Great Books.
In a way, Transformative Texts represents a return to the roots of liberal-arts
education, when all students were expected to engage with great works of writing
and timeless ideas. That was perhaps the original form of immersive learning. But
as the number of students who major in the humanities has cratered and those who
pursue STEM degrees — which are loaded with disciplinary requirements — has
grown, many students have little time to engage in this kind of coursework.
Cornerstone, which began in 2018, was a response to that trend. In 2016 only
10 percent of graduating Purdue students had taken a class in literature, and just 7
percent had taken American history.
The program’s advocates say that it also illustrates how just one or two
immersive courses can have a profound effect. There’s something about reading
classic works that ask the big questions in life, taught by seasoned professors in
small groups, that helps students orient themselves in college.

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 “I can tell you some really emotional stories about kids who were lost when
they came here,” says Melinda Zook, a history professor and Cornerstone’s
founding director. “It’s a huge school and they had all these other courses as
STEM students, huge classes where they felt completely anonymous, didn’t know
anyone, were often taught by an adjunct or a graduate student. And then they get
into Transformative Texts and it’s sort of like homeroom. And it’s a professor, and
they are known and they are seen and they can take ownership over their
education.”
Maddie Milharcic is a second-year student majoring in environmental and
natural-resource engineering. She enrolled in Transformative Texts her freshman
year and found the class discussions to be invigorating and introspective in a way
that her other courses could not be.
She recalls one debate that stemmed from reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, an
ancient poem, about whether man can exert godlike control over the world. That
was a fascinating topic, she says, in the context of engineering, which essentially
aims to take dominion over the natural world. She found herself reflecting on
questions such as, how much of the world can we actually control, and how much
of that should we control? She had a similarly lively debate about the American
Dream when discussing The Great Gatsby with classmates from Brazil and China.
“A lot of times with STEM-based courses there’s a right answer — a correct
path and a correct arrival point. But not so much with these two courses,” says
Milharcic, who hopes to do nonprofit or humanitarian work in developing nations.
“It was nice to take a breather and use different parts of my brain and have those
exercised.”
Milharcic notes that many people her age feel as if “the world is on fire” and
want to do something about it. “I think that’s the reason a lot of students are in
engineering: Maybe we can help someone somewhere. But you come in and you
don’t really know anything about engineering — or anything at all at this point —
and sit in a lecture hall with 300 students. And it can be hard, especially coming
off the application process where you describe your career goals and you talk about
what you want to do with these big dreams.”
Zook points to another benefit of these immersive classes, besides the in-depth
discussions and tight friendships that often form. They allow students to take a step
back from the urgency of the world’s problems, to concentrate instead on “joy and
beauty” through a poem or a piece of art.
She has noticed a shift in generational attitudes toward work for which this kind
of reflective learning is beneficial. “I don’t think credentialism is exactly dead.
And certainly that desire for a job at the end of these four years, that’s not dead
either. But it may not be the same as millennials,” she says. “They were going to
do whatever it takes, jump through whatever hoop we put in front of them to get
there.
“This is a more contemplative, maybe a little more sullen group. But you can
bring them out of their shell. And they’re delightful if you’re able to do that.”

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 Martha Fay Burtis, associate director of the Open Learning and Teaching
Collaborative at Plymouth State University, has been thinking along similar lines.
A few years ago the university received a grant from the Davis Educational
Foundation to develop what it calls “cluster pedagogy,” and bring an
interdisciplinary approach to complex challenges like climate change. As part of
the curricular revamp, all first-year Plymouth students are required to take a
“wicked problems” course.
Access to clean water, for example, is a geographical problem, but also a
sociological and political one. That teaches students that the most difficult and
intransigent problems are not owned by a particular discipline, says Burtis, but
such an approach also provides them habits of mind, or ways of thinking about
these challenges that gives them a level of agency.
“You don’t want to be teaching a class as students are coming in that’s basically
like, ‘Yeah, everything’s screwed up. And this is hopeless,’” she says. “So it takes
a particular kind of pedagogical approach.”
Burtis feels like hope is what’s missing in today’s students, which is
understandable given the strains they are under.
“People used to seek out college degrees because they felt like it was a way to
launch their lives in meaningful ways. And partly that was about being able to get
jobs and support families, but it was also about being able to find purpose and find
meaning in life,” she says. “I think if you really talk to students, what you would
hear many of them say is that they don’t feel like they have that.”
Some of it is due to their age, for sure, but she adds, “I worry that for a lot of
young people today, their anxiety isn’t so much about, ‘I need to make the right
decisions so that I find meaning in my life and I end up on the right path.’ It’s
more, ‘What is even a right decision when it feels like I don’t know what the future
holds, and I don’t know that I have any power or control over where I will end
up?’”
Immersive learning is designed to give students more control, in that regard,
because it allows them some determination of what they want to explore and how.
James Madison University has been taking this approach through a program
called X-Labs, which offers open-ended, interdisciplinary courses on a wide range
of topics, such as foreign-policy challenges, medical innovations, or e-sports. Seán
McCarthy, an associate professor in the school of writing, rhetoric and technical
communication, who has taught several courses through the lab, is a huge
proponent of this form of learning. Last semester was a reminder of why:
Professors across campus, like many across the nation, had difficulty engaging
their students. A colleague of his termed this phenomenon “militant apathy,” in
that students seemed almost defiant in their indifference to school work.
McCarthy’s X-Labs students, by contrast, were “completely fired up.”
Immersive learning has plenty of champions, but it still remains on the
periphery of the college experience, for reasons large and small. A big one is cost,
of course, and institutions have yet to find ways to make immersive learning
widely accessible, particularly for lower-income students.

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 The most intensive experiences, those involving multiple courses and time
away from campus, are almost impossible to expand. Not only are they time
consuming to organize, they often require small classes to work well. The
Hamilton Justice Lab program, for example, was capped at 16 students. The
transportation and logistics of getting students back and forth to Utica, says
Anechiarico, would have made a large group impossible. Staff at Hamilton’s Levitt
Center for Public Affairs, of which he is director, provide significant support,
including budgeting, administration, and community outreach. Anechiarico himself
supervised the internships and met with students as they worked on their research
papers. “There’s a lot of bureaucracy involved in this,” he says.
Similarly, Casagrande, the Lehigh anthropology professor, says that the
Ecuador program required an enormous amount of logistics involving home stays
and travel, much of which was handled by a third-party provider.
Then there’s the issue of faculty time. Casagrande considers himself an
innovative professor, using historical reenactments in class to discuss climate-
change negotiations, for example, or taking students on field trips to buy trees for
an urban-permaculture class. But designing and running these activities takes time
away from things like research. Because he is tenured, he is less worried about
that. But that puts him in the minority.
“If you think there’s a crisis in student engagement,” he says, “that’s nothing
compared to the crisis in faculty time management.”
At Lehigh, the big challenge now is to figure out how to scale up Lehigh
Launch — which was designed not to cost students any more than a semester on
campus — and perhaps bring some of the lessons learned back to other classrooms,
says Matherly, the vice provost. “We can have a wonderfully curated experience,”
she says, “but if the only people who benefit are the 11 who do this, it really isn’t
adding much value.”
McCarthy, the James Madison professor, notes that bureaucratic impediments
in higher education — from funding structures to disciplinary silos to the ways in
which faculty are evaluated and promoted — have long blocked innovative
teaching from growing beyond an isolated program or a boutique enterprise. “A lot
of this culture already exists,” he says of the creativity he sees around him. “It just
needs to be properly supported and celebrated and enhanced in our curricular
design.”
Designing and running these courses may involve finding a community partner
to study or work with, creating a class structure that is adaptable as projects evolve,
handling logistics and project-related costs, and open-ended assignments that
require regular faculty guidance — particularly if students are struggling.
Phillip Motley, an associate professor of communication design at Elon
University, has taught a variety of immersive courses, including January-term
classes and a semester-long 12-credit program on social innovation that involved
working with a consortium of local nonprofit groups.

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 These sorts of courses require not only more time, but often a different sort of
structure, he says. You can’t drive into town to meet a community partner, for
example, when your class meets twice a week for 70 minutes.
In admissions work McCarthy does for JMU, he’s seen that families are
interested in things like experiential education and want colleges to teach their
children skills that will help them become active citizens. But universities too often
take those interests and turn them into buzzwords, and “Frankenstein” programs
together, he says. Instead, McCarthy argues, administrators must consider more
fluid structures that allow funds and resources to more easily cross departmental
boundaries. “It’s a grand challenge — a wicked problem in itself,” he says.
The grand challenge of creating more immersive-learning opportunities may be
one reason why many universities have preferred instead to tackle what
happens beyond the classroom. Early-warning systems that track students’ grades
and send alerts to advisers, chatbots that answer simple questions quickly and at
any hour, and an emphasis on creating a sense of belonging through peer
mentoring and success coaching have shown promising results.
It’s not as if traditional classroom structures have been left untouched. The
movement toward more inclusive and active learning strategies has grown
exponentially during the pandemic, as professors have learned the benefits,
particularly for first-generation students and those from underrepresented groups.
But as long as these efforts remain a patchwork, colleges will continue to struggle
with student disconnection.
Several national projects have emerged to try to reset the narrative around the
purpose of undergraduate education, advocating a more expansive, equitable, and
immersive ideal.
The Postsecondary Value Commission, led by the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and the Institute for Higher Education Policy, has attempted to define
and measure the value of education after high school, in part to address deep
concerns about the cost of college and the implications for lower-income
students, students of color, and others who face disproportionate hurdles. The
commission included well-being and civic engagement in their definition of value,
and incorporated research on student learning and growth by Arum, the UC-Irvine
scholar.
The Teagle Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities are
underwriting the expansion of Purdue’s Cornerstone project to more than 25
colleges. Teagle has long supported work in deepening liberal-arts education in a
way that makes strong programs available to all students, whether they study at a
community college or a highly selective one.
That’s because too many institutions are failing to challenge students to dig into
the big human questions they want to explore, says Andrew Delbanco, the
foundation’s president and a professor of American studies at Columbia
University.
Delbanco agrees that the ways in which political and academic leaders have
spoken about higher education for the past generation or so has had harmful side

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effects. From colleges, he says, the message has been: Gain a competitive
advantage, earn prestigious credentials. “That’s all tied up with the whole rankings
mania.”
As for politicians, it’s about return on investment. “If you look at the speeches
that President Obama gave about higher education and the speeches that President
George W. Bush gave about higher education, it would be challenging to
distinguish between the two. They’re both talking about the economic advantage of
the individual and the economic competitiveness of the nation and in the global
marketplace.”
But if you talk to students about “skills-based education,” they tune out,
Delbanco says. They want to get help from thoughtful teachers and peers and
imaginative works, so they can develop a voice in shaping the future. “They don’t
want to be shaped by these impersonal forces.”
The most ambitious project is also the newest. The Paradigm Project, a seven-
year, national effort led by David Scobey, director of Bringing Theory to Practice,
wants to transform undergraduate education into a meaning-making enterprise
where experiential learning is integrated throughout the system. Rather than a
study-abroad program here, a civic-engagement class there, the curriculum would
be organized around problems, project-based, and interdisciplinary. Equally
important, this reorienting should not be any more expensive than what has been
traditionally offered, which means that colleges would also have to think about
what they have to stop doing, says Scobey.
The project wants to accomplish this by creating a grass-roots movement of
evangelists to shift the public narrative away from “instrumental vocationalism”
toward a more holistic view of education that includes personal development and
community well-being. Doing nothing, Scobey argues, will simply cede ground to
those pushing an evermore transactional interpretation.
“The nightmare version of that,” he says, is “the unbundling of higher ed, where
you’re just getting a six-week certificate on top of a six-week certificate.”
What can make immersive learning more common? Students on the fast-track
through college — those loaded up with required courses or burdened by debt —
are unlikely to take a course that’s optional. It’s been shown, for example, that
first-generation students are less likely to participate in any sort of high-impact
practice, like study abroad or service learning.
Some say that immersive education will never really take off until the cost of
college becomes more manageable. It’s hard to engage when you have to race to
work after class just to pay your bills.
“We are seeing students transferring from four-year to two-year schools with
professional programs simply because speed is important,” says Eve Shapiro, chief
knowledge officer of Beyond 12, a nonprofit that provides coaching for almost
3,000 college students who are lower-income, first-generation, or from a
historically underrepresented group.
That means a lot of the community connections are getting stripped away. And
other, more engaging options, like internships — especially if they are unpaid —

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are simply off the table. “Our students are feeling anxious and disengaged not
because they’re not interested in school but because of these larger financial
barriers,” Shapiro says. “They’re spending a lot of time trying to fill financial
gaps.”
The only solution, advocates say, is to make the experience integral, as
Scobey’s project aims to do, to undergraduate education — without additional cost.
Some institutions have moved further along that path.
Plymouth State, for example, has shed academic departments to create cluster
pedagogy on topics such as health and human enrichment, or arts and technologies,
which will allow the university to design more project-based, interdisciplinary, and
exploratory courses. But it remains a work in progress, says Burtis, the associate
director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative. It’s easier to break
down disciplinary silos in first-year and general-education programming than in a
curriculum that takes students through to graduation.
Ball State has taken a different approach, offering a wide array of immersive-
education courses since 2000, and they have become part of the university’s
identity. An office of immersive learning provides grants, professional
development, and other support for faculty interested in creating and teaching one
of these classes.
While immersive learning took a hit from Covid, the numbers are climbing
back up, said Jackie Grutsch McKinney, an English professor and Ball State’s
director of immersive learning and high-impact practices. This semester about
1,200 students are enrolled in 85 sections — almost as many as would enroll each
semester before the pandemic hit. (Ball State enrolls roughly 14,000
undergraduates.)
Several departments have figured out how to work immersive learning into their
majors, which makes these courses particularly attractive to students, McKinney
says. Architecture students, for example, are competing in a solar decathlon to
build a house. A course taught by both art and biology professors produces a book
for children that focuses on endangered or invasive species. A math class for non-
math majors, which counts toward their core requirements, works with Habitat for
Humanity to help develop financial tools.
Integrating more of these immersive-learning courses and other high-impact
practices into majors, says McKinney, is key if Ball State wants to ensure they’re
widely accessible on its increasingly diverse campus. Students are extremely
pragmatic about their plans, she notes, particularly if they are pursuing majors with
many curricular demands. In that scenario, selling someone on an immersive-
learning course isn’t likely to happen if it doesn’t count toward graduation.
Another challenge is also emerging, one that suggests a real struggle to engage
the very students who could benefit the most from this style of teaching.
Blame it on exhaustion, the fear of failure, or the impact of remote learning, but
many academics have found students increasingly risk-avoidant. It’s a paradox:
Students say they want more control over their learning, but they are also uncertain

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what that entails, especially when, as with immersive learning, plans and goals
may change midstream.
“What happens in an immersive-learning situation is that expectations can be
very fluid as you make discoveries with community partners and as a group,” says
Jennifer Blackmer, director of the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry at
Ball State. “They are trying to figure it out and trying to do so within a much more
stressful environment.”
A few years ago, the center began developing team-taught, transdisciplinary
seminars that emphasize collaborative learning and problem solving. The first of
these seminars was offered in 2020, before the pandemic hit, and it had no problem
recruiting 80 students. But since then, says Blackmer, it’s been a struggle to attract
students, a problem she has discussed extensively with colleagues.
“Students are finding it more difficult to take risks on things they don’t fully
understand,” she says. “They want very specific clarity in terms of when things are
due, what they can expect. They are not as willing to live in ambiguity.”
Like McKinney, Blackmer is attempting to tackle this problem by promoting
the value of interdisciplinary courses to faculty and advisers, and integrating them
into majors. Students need to be persistent, too, she says, in pushing for what they
want. The more opportunities they have for immersive learning, the less
intimidating it will seem.
Higher education is at a decisive moment. Will it continue down the path of
credentialism and skill building, or will it embrace a more expansive view, one that
engages an increasingly diverse, skeptical, scared — but also hopeful —
generation?

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