Researchers looking at students’ ‘character, meaning, and relationships’ to understand how they thrive
A project focused on students’ character will soon hit several colleges as Harvard University scholars plan to digitally survey and monitor well-being and success beyond traditional metrics.
The research is part of a larger Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, which encourages character building and virtues in academia. This year, the institution awarded $15.6 million in grants for 24 projects at 29 schools, including the one at Harvard, The College Fix reported.
Harvard scholars Tyler VanderWeele (pictured right) and Brendan Case (pictured left) will use their grant, awarded in early August, for a “Virtues of Academic Flourishing Initiative” aimed at better understanding students’ well-being and the values they take from their college experience.
“The core aim of the program is to get a better sense of the distribution across American colleges of a complex trait that we’re calling academic flourishing, which is essentially the extent to which the lives of students are going well,” Case said in a recent phone interview with The College Fix.
VanderWeele is Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program director, and Case is the associate director of research. VanderWeele also serves as a professor and co-director of the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion.
“Academic flourishing as we hope to assess it involves aspects of student life from individual flourishing like mental and physical health, character, meaning and relationships, but also communal well-being for the university as a whole,” Case told The Fix.
“How well does the school function? Does it have effective practices and effective leadership? Is it a place that’s moving all together towards a common goal, or is it highly divisive?” he said.
In an email, Case said the researchers plan to conduct surveys at several schools as part of their research, although Harvard is not one of them. The first survey at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is expected to begin this month and will run for three years, ending in August 2027, he said.
“We do think that the more universities engage in this kind of assessment, the more valuable, frankly, they’ll see it,” he said.
Their research addresses a major deficit at institutions today that often prioritize health, inclusion, and job outcomes metrics over character traits essential for academic and career success, Case said.
Neglecting to develop qualities like honesty, confidence, and love of learning has hindered institutions from fully realizing the promises of their core missions, he said.
“Universities measure a lot of important aspects of student life,” Case told The Fix. “They’re not, as far as we can tell, doing as much to assess the extent to which a student’s time at a college or university is forming them into the people universities say they want to produce.”
MORE: Wake Forest program helps students build ‘moral, civic’ character
In the face of many trends threatening higher education, Case noted how institutions must continue to make students’ investments to attend college remain worth the cost.
“This is something that would be an important addition to the roster of assessments that a university is currently engaged in,” he said.
These new character metrics “would give them a better sense of how well they’re doing at achieving what they say are their core aims are: forming students who can, in the first instance, preserve, cultivate, and transmit knowledge across the generations, and then secondarily, those who can serve as as leaders,” he said.
Still early in the project, Case said collecting data is the current focus. Eventually, to build off their results, he said he hopes to gain resources that will even more directly promote character education.
“I expect that the work we do over these initial years will breed lots of other work …” he told The Fix. “We expect that it will be an increasing research priority as this project does straddle the border between research and direct promotion of flourishing that in our view really is the first, very important step towards changing [higher education].”
Their project is part of a larger Educating Character Initiative, led by Wake Forest University in North Carolina and funded by the Lilly Endowment. Its goal is to provide public and private, secular and religious higher education institutions with the resources “to integrate character education” into their classes and campus cultures.
Another project through the initiative is taking place at Hope College, a private Christian institution in Michigan. Through the grant, college leaders are working to integrate the virtues of gratitude and generosity in its courses and research projects, The Fix reported.
MORE: Act of forgiveness decreases anxiety and depression in all humans: scholars
IMAGE: Harvard University Human Flourishing Program
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