Preparing Students for Life Beyond College

A Meaning-Centered Vision for Holistic Teaching and Learning

Robert J. Nash, Jennifer J.J. Jang 張文馨

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317600114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

At a time when STEM research and new technologies are dominating the curricula of colleges and universities, this important book refocuses the conversation on holistic education for all students. Organized around the most important and difficult questions that students face, Preparing Students for Life Beyond College explores a vision of education that will enable students to talk about universal issues openly and honestly, preparing them for life beyond their formal education. Featuring a variety of traditional and innovative pedagogies, strategies, recommendations, and case studies, this practical resource provides student affairs practitioners and higher education faculty in a variety of disciplines with concrete approaches for developing campuses and classes that encourage critical thinking and reflection. This exciting book prepares colleges and universities to help students create meaning in their lives—no matter the discipline, campus location or delivery system.

Part I

The Vision

The hyphenated term “meaning-centered” in our book title (and in Chapter 1’s title) describes what we believe ought to be the goal of a college education for all students, no matter their major or minor courses of study. The term is inspired by Viktor Frankl’s comment that human beings need more than the “means to live”: they also need a “meaning to live for” (Frankl, 2006). In Part I, we describe our vision of a “meaning-focused” education. In these first two chapters, we preview for our readers the rationale, strategies, applications, and goals of a meaning-making education that will evolve throughout our book. Part I explains the overall template—the “vision”—for everything that will follow in the book.

Chapter 1

A Meaning-Centered Vision for Holistic Teaching and Learning

Ever more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.

Viktor Frankl (1959)

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Viktor Frankl is the well-known survivor of the Second World War Holocaust death camps. He is also the creator of “logotherapy,” which describes his psychotherapeutic methodology geared to helping people make meaning. Frankl, after spending three torturous years in concentration camps, and losing most of his family to the gas chambers, went on to write several books on the importance of meaning-making for all lives. His work has influenced us greatly as two educators who work in the academy. Frankl wrote many times in his books that the main lesson he learned during his agonizing experiences in the Nazi death camps was that his “meaning in life was to help others make meaning in theirs.” We believe that this is what higher education should be all about. Frankl’s lifelong mission has been to help people to create a “why” (a meaning to live for) beyond the frenetic pursuit of the “means” (the job credentials necessary to accrue “stuff”) encouraged by so many career-driven curricula in the academy. This is our mission as well in each of the chapters that follow throughout our book.

THE WHYS TO LIVE

Sadly, at a time when Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) Research, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and professional-credentialing education are dominating the curricula of colleges and universities, we seem to be straying further and futher from the vision of a holistic education for all students. For us, a “holistic education” is one that prepares students for life beyond college in every one of its complex, interrelated dimensions: the personal, professional, moral, recreational, relational, social, political, religio-spiritual, healthful, and vocational, and others as well. The major theme that underlies every sentence in our book is this one: A holistic college education goes way beyond the usual question “How exactly will a degree prepare our students to earn a living?” What we will be examining in this book is an equally significant, but too frequently overlooked, question: “How will a college education prepare our students to grow as whole human beings throughout their lives?”

The first question is a more immediate pragmatic, career-centered inquiry, and, of course, the concern is an important one. The second question, however, describes the inescapable, lifelong Quest for meaning-making and personal flourishing facing our students, and this, too, is a crucial educational undertaking. We are reminded here of Nietzsche’s insight about the centrality of meaning-making in creating a holistic life: “He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how’.” Our book unpacks the implications of a college education that concentrates as much on the “why” to live as well as on the “how” to make a living.

Nietzsche, perhaps one of the most misunderstood, personally troubled philosophers of the nineteenth century, knew first-hand how necessary a “why” to live can be in sustaining a life amidst the most challenging “hows.” He spent his own relatively short lifetime trying to establish a “why” to live. He was plagued for most of his adult years by a deep, suicidal depression. In his own words, “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace; by means of it one gets through many a bad night.” Following a major psychotic breakdown, and after spending over a decade in mental asylums, Nietzsche died in 1900 of frontotemporal dementia (not neurosyphilis as is commonly believed). There are some biographers who claim that Nietzsche actually took his own life (although there is considerable controversy regarding this belief), because he had spent his lifetime agonizing over whether or not life was ultimately meaningless.

The World Psychiatric Association (2014), in its latest study of youth suicide, found that 10 percent of all quarterlife deaths during the last three decades were due to suicide. One in five teens seriously consider suicide annually. Over 1700 die by suicide each year. The number of unsuccessful suicide attempts for quarterlifers, as well as persistent suicidal ideations, among this age group was even greater, even though difficult to pin down with any certainty (Crouse, 2014). If nothing else, these statistics confirm for us the singular importance of helping students to create, and sustain, deep, non-ephemeral “whys” to live beyond the short-term “hows” of making and spending money.

THE QUEST FOR MEANING BEYOND TRAINING

Increasingly, higher education has become a mono-disciplinary undertaking with faculty living in specialized silos of teaching, scholarship, and professional training. We are proposing that the best way to get faculty, student affairs and academic administrators, and students on the same educational page is for all of us to help students create meaning in their lives—no matter the discipline, campus location, or delivery system. For us, focusing a college campus around the universal student pursuit of meaning is far more preferable than what now exists throughout the United States in colleges and universities. Almost everywhere in the American university today, there is an escalation, and increasing separation, of bureaucratic structures: student services, customer-oriented offices, research- and grant-driven science departments, MOOC units, and upper-level administrative wings. Andrew Delbanco (2012) asks the most relevant educational question of all: “Where, in this house of many specialized mansions, is the college? Does it still exist as a place of guided self-discovery for young people in search of themselves?” For Delbanco, the primary purpose of higher education should be to “aid the learner to acquire a new soul … and, hence, to be reborn.” Along with Viktor Frankl, we say “amen” to this vision.

Unfortunately, there are few opportunities on most college campuses—either inside or outside the conventional classroom, and either online or offline—as curricula become more vocational and scientifically driven for students to develop those strong background beliefs and ideals that will guide their lives when they graduate. Today’s college students are asking their own existential questions of meaning. Their questions are timeless and yet reflect the age in which they live. These questions are a fascinating admixture of the abstract and the practical, the universal and the particular. They represent well the tensions that exist for so many college students who seek to find the delicate balance that exists in the difficult space between idealism and realism; between macro- and micro-meaning. Our “meaning-centered” curriculum is based on these “timeless, existential questions.” It is no coincidence, in our opinion, that the word “quest” is at the root of the word “question.”

As university educators, we witness first-hand every single day the need for our students of all ages, who represent a multiplicity of identities, to have something coherent to believe in, some centering values and goals to strive for. They are on a quest to discover a meaning to live for. They, like us, need strong background beliefs and ideals to shore them up during these times when religious and political wars plague entire societies; when the natural environment continues to deteriorate; and when the fluctuations of the global economy result in recession, deflation, and in the inequitable distribution of scarce resources. The quest for meaning has the potential to unite, rather than divide, an entire college community, no matter how different its individual constituents might be.

Here are some very compelling statistics to confirm our point directly above: the American College Health Association (2012) reports that, in a sample of 76,000 students from a variety of diverse backgrounds and identities, 86 percent felt overwhelmed, 82 percent felt emotionally exhausted, 62 percent felt very sad, 58 percent felt very lonely, 52 percent felt enormous stress, 51 percent felt overwhelming anxiety, 47 percent felt hopeless and purposeless, and the rest felt dysfunctionally depressed. So, too, a 2013 survey of 30,000 college graduates, undertaken by Gallup and Purdue University, found that while an undergraduate education might have prepared many of them for “great jobs,” it did little or nothing to prepare them for “great lives.” Only three percent of these graduates felt that their education helped them to achieve “well-being.” Well-being, according to Gallup, includes five areas of human flourishing: a deep sense of meaning and purpose, a rich personal and relational life, financial stability, social and community belongingness, and healthy physical activity. These areas of human flourishing are what we mean when we talk about the quest for meaning beyond training. Career credentials are in and of themselves no guarantee that our students will go on in their lives to experience “well-being.”

Giving Students Permission to Pause

In our own teaching experience, we have found that students of all socio-economic, national and international, racial and ethnic backgrounds—whether working fulltime as somewhat older, blue-collar, first-generation college students or attending college as traditional, middle-class, second-, third-, or even fourth-generation college students—come to our courses on meaning-making with the need to make sense of the unknown, sometimes terrifying, future that awaits them. What these quarterlifers have in common is dealing with questions like the following: After they graduate (if they do at all), how will they pay off the tens of thousands of dollars in loans they have had to borrow to finance their education? How do they hold up under the emotional stress when their friendships, and, in some cases, their family relationships, go awry? What do they do when their work becomes unsatisfying, and they don’t want to get up in the morning to put in one more monotonously empty day on the job?

How do they deal with such issues as the widespread sense of disillusionment and panic caused by a results-driven, lockstep education; or those dreaded occasions when they hear that someone they love suffers from the ravages of a metastatic malignancy; or when they face life-altering decisions triggered by failing grades or complete loss of interest in their major (and minor) fields of study; or when they learn that the person who means the most to them in the whole world no longer loves them; or, worst of all, when they no longer love themselves?

Education for making meaning holds the promise of giving a plugged-in undergraduate, and graduate, population permission to stop and pause in the middle of going through the motions. Education for making meaning enables students to talk about the deeper existential questions and universal life issues openly and honestly, and face-to-face, with significant others on campus. Meaning-making conversation forces students to take a giant step away from the number-one addiction in the United States—internet addiction (Young, 2010). This includes electronic gaming, smartphones, instant messaging, texting, e-mail, and all the other terminally numbing social media that control students’ lives. Most of all, though, an education for meaning-making helps students to understand the folly of living their lives totally obsessed with a goal-driven, get-rich-and-successful, as-quick-as-possible, plan for the future.

We are a pair of college educators (Robert is a professor, and Jennifer is a student-affairs diversity administrator and scholar) who co-teach two elective courses each year on the philosophy of meaning-making for quarterlife students. Robert has written a bestselling book (2010), with Michele Murray, on the topic of meaning-making, and he and Jennifer have presented on the topic of meaning-making in a number of venues to both faculty and student services professionals throughout the United States. Most telling, though, is that back on our respective campuses, record numbers of undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of majors throughout our university voluntarily enroll in these elective courses. Why, you might ask, would students choose to take a course that, at best, is an outlier (and, often considered “soft”) in the modern university? The answer is both simple and complex. We hope that the story of “Lorna” in the next section sheds more light on this question.

THE STORY OF “LORNA”

We begin this section with a description of a quarterlife student who studied with Robert several years ago. Even though she is a unique human being, so many of her issues are generalizable among those students who are asking the universal meaning questions that we will be introducing in Chapter 2.

When Lorna was in her late teens and early twenties, she was deeply troubled. She was a first-generation, blue-collar college student, who made the decision to attend college against the wishes of her divorced, high-school dropout mother who needed her to enter the workforce immediately after high school to help her pay the bills for a large family. Lorna was brilliant, creative, and beautiful, with an IQ that put her in the genius category; but, even though she had always been grateful for her “privileges,” she was also miserable and unhappy. A survivor of a broken family, adolescent cancer, fraternity-house rape, and a restless soul who experimented wildly with drugs and sex, and someone who to this day battles with a serious eating disorder, Lorna, for years, had led a life bereft of any deep meaning and purpose that can sustain her at all times.

Her search for some kind of sustainable meaning to life led her to many deadends. She asked people around her too many questions about the meaning of her life, and she got too few answers to satisfy her. She was always the doubter, the outsider looking in, during these dialogues with her friends, mother, and seven siblings, as well as with people she respected as successful professionals. Lorna eventually went on to earn three degrees, including a doctorate, at an excellent university. Today she is a professional educator of the highest integrity and influence in an elite, post-secondary institution. She fills a room with her charisma and power, even though her physical stature is slight.

But, despite her enormous professional successes, even today, at times, she can also be melancholic and despairing, just as she was when she was an undergraduate. She sometimes succumbs to an anxiety so profound, and to migraine headaches so pounding, and to a personal confusion that is so impenetrable, that all anyone who loves her ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I The Vision
• Part II The Meaning-Quests
• Part III The Next Steps
• Bibliography
• Index