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Rarely does an internal university report on higher education attract sustained attention beyond the campus that produced it. Rarer still is when such a report becomes reading not only for faculty and administrators across the country, but for students themselves.
During the month of April, as the past academic year was winding down and as we worked with students across classrooms, student government, clubs and community initiatives at Columbia University, the Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education repeatedly surfaced in conversation. Students invoked the report not simply to reflect on higher education in the abstract, but to articulate deeper anxieties about whether undergraduate education still offers a meaningful framework for building a life. The Yale report is ambitious, far-ranging and consistently self-critical, and it is only to higher education’s benefit that it has quickly become a touchstone in national conversations about its future.
But it is students’ responses that have truly surprised us, and the report’s unusually wide reception among students may also point toward one of its central limitations: For all its concern with restoring public trust in higher education, it leaves largely unexamined much of what students themselves now seek from undergraduate education once they arrive on campus.
What, then, are students searching for when they arrive on campus? To be sure, students (and their parents) worry about cost of attendance, grades and campus climate, among other concerns identified in the Yale report. Yet despite breathless public debate about ideological conflict on campus or the debilitating effect of AI on the job market, what we increasingly hear from students—achingly at times—is a desire for an undergraduate education that offers something more than either professional credentialing or political affirmation.
Students also repeatedly express a concern with understanding the institutional terms that make their education possible. Amid these anxieties lies a deeper uncertainty about whether college can still help students imagine lives in which work, relationships and civic responsibility form a coherent whole. At a moment when trust in civic institutions and public life more broadly has become increasingly fragile, students are searching for a credible way to connect their education to the larger question of how to build a life under conditions they experience as politically fragmented, economically precarious and morally disorienting.
What these conversations reveal, beneath the contemporary crisis of trust in higher education, is a deeper crisis of formation. Formation may sound like an old-fashioned or overly moralized term, and higher education’s discomfort with the language of formation points to something important: a growing uncertainty about if, whether or how undergraduate education prepares students not simply for careers, but for the larger task of building lives. By formation, we mean the process through which students learn to connect what they experience in the classroom to questions of purpose, work, relationship and civic membership.
The more difficult question, and the one the Yale report largely leaves aside, is whether the inherited model of liberal arts education remains adequate to these pressures and expectations, or whether liberal arts institutions must recover (or perhaps renew?) a more explicit understanding that the formation of persons lies at the heart of undergraduate education itself.
The formation of persons has long been central to liberal arts education, even if many modern research universities and colleges have rarely felt the need to articulate this explicitly, or cultivate it intentionally. For much of the 20th century, the dominant liberal arts model of undergraduate education operated through what might be called an indirect—or at least unacknowledged—theory of formation. Colleges understood themselves as shaping students into more than simply knowing subjects, but they largely assumed this formation would emerge naturally through rigorous academic study, immersion in a serious intellectual community, and proximity to faculty expertise. Students would mature personally and intellectually, acquiring habits of judgment and civic responsibility along the way—often practicing these virtues through leadership opportunities in student councils, clubs and fraternities and residential life. And they would graduate prepared for professional life, in part because their degrees carried ample social capital and implied participation in a recognizable set of shared values.
But if the intellectual mission of the liberal arts depended upon these broader forms of trust and association, colleges can no longer take them for granted. If liberal arts institutions are to restore students’ trust in their education, they must take more intentional responsibility for ways of formation that they once presumed academic excellence alone would provide.
This will require colleges to become more explicit about questions they have long treated indirectly: the relationship between education and vocation, the cultivation of civic and moral responsibility, and the formation of persons capable of recognizing others as worth listening to and learning from. To be clear, we are not suggesting that liberal arts colleges abandon liberal education for narrow vocationalism or some shallow triumph of the therapeutic or personal actualization. Nor are we suggesting that students be formed in ways that align with a particular intellectual or political orthodoxy. Instead, we think today’s liberal education needs to respond directly to what students are asking: that their institutions speak more honestly and explicitly about the harder work—and more fractured world—they know awaits them, and about how a liberal arts education prepares them to find work and build lives of meaning under these bewildering conditions.
Such a recovery of formation would also require colleges to recognize more fully that the intellectual mission of the liberal arts rests upon relationships of trust, care and mutual accountability—that is, social relations within the context of college and university life. The work of cultivating what John Dewey called “critical intelligence” depends not only on curriculum or intellectual rigor, but on the social and intellectual practices through which students learn to listen, respond and think alongside others under conditions of difference and uncertainty in specific institutional contexts.
These forms of association can no longer be treated as incidental to undergraduate education itself. In an environment where many students no longer experience institutions or public life as coherent or dependable, colleges must become more intentional about cultivating the relationships and practices through which a common intellectual and civic life become imaginable. Formation, in this sense, is not opposed to the intellectual aims of liberal education, or academia more generally. Rather, it names the relational and moral work through which a rich intellectual life becomes possible in contexts defined by cultural and political heterogeneity. This is to recognize that education, at its best, happens in the context of community: learning with, from and through community.
Michael Roth’s widely read critique of the Yale report in The New York Times gestures toward this understanding of liberal education. Roth rightly resists the Yale report’s overly narrow conception of the university’s mission, insisting that colleges have long aimed at more than the transmission of knowledge alone. Though he does not use the language of formation, he recognizes that liberal arts institutions have historically understood themselves as concerned with the cultivation of persons capable of civic and moral judgment. Yet even here, Roth leaves the question of student formation underdeveloped. Roth says little about how the lived realities of contemporary college life require liberal arts institutions to rethink practices of formation that earlier generations could afford to leave largely implicit.
Indeed, even the Yale report—despite its tendency to narrow the university’s mission—cannot fully avoid gesturing toward these broader formative concerns. We see this in its call for universities to cultivate “common knowledge” and “a shared intellectual experience,” just as we see it in Roth’s praise for expanded civics instruction. And one might quibble with what David Brooks means by “good” when he writes that the purpose of humanistic education “is not to produce learned people but good people.” Yet he is right to insist that education done well is a project of formation.
Seen in this light, the recent proliferation of centers and initiatives devoted to civic discourse, democratic engagement and public purpose can be understood as efforts to give institutional expression to that formative work. It is possible, of course, to be cynical about these developments. It is also possible to see some of them as attempts, however tentative or imperfect, to recognize that a liberal education depends not only on curriculum, but on the relationships and forms of association through which students learn to think, speak and live with one another. Unless institutions come to understand this work more fully for what it is—the formative work of connecting intellectual inquiry to vocation, citizenship and the difficult practice of living with others under conditions of pluralism and uncertainty—such initiatives risk remaining partial and inadequate to the task.
For liberal arts institutions to own a more explicit understanding that the formation of persons lies at the heart of undergraduate education will require a certain amount of bravery. This type of education names a form of social relationship, one that requires not only the willingness to speak, but the capacity to listen deeply, to respond honestly and to remain open to the possibility of being changed. It will require colleges to understand teaching and learning not simply as the transmission of knowledge, but as relational practices through which students discover that questions about how to live are rarely answered well in isolation. Such an education depends upon faculty capable of cultivating habits of deep listening, epistemological humility and mutual openness, and institutions will need to devote far greater attention and resources to supporting this work. It will also mean recognizing that beneath many students’ anxieties about vocation, success and adult life lies a deeper fear that they will ultimately be left to navigate these conditions alone.
Students will come to trust their undergraduate education when it helps them experience the acquisition of knowledge and credentials as part of the larger project of learning how to build a life with and alongside others, rather than as something they are expected to do on their own.
