Will the Teens Be OK?

Conversation in higher ed that doesn't seem like it's going to go away anytime soon is the long term impact on the mental health and engagement of students from the pandemic.

You know Michael, and as we know, this is a generational conversation given the students who were in elementary and secondary schools will be in college pipeline for the next decade. And today we're going to talk to a clinical psychologist and author who specializes in the development of teenagers about how to think about everything from admissions to student success to career launches on this episode of FutureU.

This episode of Future youe is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org this episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information policy and institutional transformation. Earn Continuing Education units this spring with Teaching Practice, an online faculty development program from Course Hero. Over a series of asynchronous courses, you'll uncover new ways to leverage tech in the classroom and build inclusive curriculum, all while supporting your own well being. Plus, you'll get weekly office hours support from leading instructors. Enroll for free today@education.coursehero.com subscribe to Future youe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.

Foreign I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. Michael, it's good to see you again as we head into this home stretch of this season of Future.

You. And you as well, Jeff. It's been a good year already and I'm looking forward as we round the corner so far to home plate, if you will.

Yeah, and it's, you know, it's that time of year speaking of home plate and and baseball, when school breaks really give us a lot of time to spend with our kids and you know, so we haven't had much snow here in the mid Atlantic. Well, really none. So I had the chance to take my youngest daughter on a ski trip recently that repeated one that I took my older daughter on right before the pandemic. Somebody once told me to carve out more one on one time with each of the kids and it was a pretty fun trip as a result. It gave us a chance to really catch up on life and school and to understand what's going well, what's not going so well her friends, what subject she likes. They sometimes are really different kids when they are alone.

And Jeff, it's actually a good reminder to me to get back to the one on one dates that my wife and I used to do pretty regularly with our twins just to give them some time apart to be their own people and to be with each one of us just, you know, without the other adult there. But that check in, just to be able to create the time to listen and not have their own thoughts and feelings interrupted, I think is so vital right now. And before listeners think that we're turning this into an episode on our own lives with our kids, I think the reality is both of us just, you know, we naturally think through our work in education, like many people do, through the eyes of our own children for at least part of that work and what we know from surveys and research from the CDC that this generation of children was already different from their predecessors in some important ways. And then we had this huge shock to the system in the form of the pandemic.

Yeah. So, Michael, I think we want to do a check in on the state of kids and today, particularly looking at teenagers, given our listening audience. You know, these are future college students in the coming years, and there's so much discussion and studies about their mental health right now, but also their level of engagement in the classroom and their transition to and from college.

So to help us untangle it all, we invited Lisa d' Amore to be with us today. Lisa is the author of three New York Times bestselling books. Her latest came out in February called the Emotional Lives of Teenagers. She also co hosts a podcast called Ask Lisa and is a regular contributor to CBS News. She also maintains a clinical practice. And in her spare time, I suppose, Jeff speaks regularly to schools, professional organizations and corporate groups around the world on the important topics of child and adolescent development, family, mental health and adult well being.

You know, Michael, Lisa has become a friend over recent years, and I'm just excited to have her share some of her wisdom today. Lisa Damore, welcome to Future youe.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be with you.

Well, we're delighted to have you. And obviously you've written two New York Times bestsellers before this new book, and they were focused on girls in particular. So I suspect many people, but especially Jeff and I, as fathers of daughters, are curious. Why did you decide to write this book on, on teenagers in general?

So I've been practicing for almost 30 years and have cared for kids of all genders in My clinical work since the beginning and the pieces I write for the New York Times and my podcast Ask Lisa covers kids of all genders. But my book length work had been on girls. And then came the pandemic, and it landed on teenagers everywhere in a very particular way. And what I felt needed to be said was really more about how we think about mental health and teenagers as a group and really to move beyond just thinking about a single gender.

But so let me focus on girls for a minute because as Michael said, he and I both have girls. And we were drawn to a recent story based on data released by the CDC that you obviously saw, because I saw you quoted in some of those pieces that found nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide. You know, should those findings alarm us, particularly those of us who are parents of girls?

Well, there's certainly alarming findings. But Jeff, you note, these were collected in 2021. They were actually collected in the fall of 2021. And so when the data came out, I thought, okay, what was I taking care of clinically? What was going on for teenagers were collected, and what was happening is they were entering their third school year that was disrupted by the pandemic. If they were going back, which not every kid was going back, they were going back in masks, which from a medical perspective, fantastic, but very frustrating for kids. And the other thing, I actually had to go back and look at some old notes to sort of put myself back in that moment. The other thing is that even as things were improving, kids didn't trust it. They were waiting to sort of get excited about their activities and their sports and then to have it ripped away from them again. So it was a really fraught time. These are alarming data, even knowing, though, that it's a fraught time. But I think the question that parents have now is what do those data mean for my kid today? Right. That's really what we want to focus on, because that's where we are now. Right. And we want to think about what does this mean now? And so what I would say to parents is, you know, kids being upset, teenagers having moods. That has always and everywhere been what it's meant to be a teenager. And our goal as adults who surround kids right now is to do a good job of making a distinction between typical and expectable adolescent ups and downs and a mental health concern. So right now, what I want parents to be on the lookout for in their daughters and their Sons, kids of all genders, and is not moodiness. We've always seen that in teenagers. We don't want to see a mood that goes to a concerning place and stays there. Teenagers should have ups and downs, but if they get to a place where their mood is getting in the way of their life, that is grounds for concern. The other thing we don't want to see is what I call costly coping. When kids are managing feelings in ways that give them a relief but come with a price tag. So kids are using substances, kids tearing at the fabric of relationships, or kids being harmful to themselves. So it's bringing relief, but it's doing harm. So those are the things that I would say to you as dads right now, and I would just say to parents everywhere, the data are concerning. We don't know what the snapshot would look like if we took it right this minute. But we do know what we should be on the lookout for.

So let's turn then to the mental health of teenagers in general. Because a survey from ACE during the pandemic surprised both of us that in college and university presidents, who typically have quite a bit on their plate, they said that their number one concern right now was the mental health of their students, even above the financial sustainability of their institutions. Yet at the same time, college leaders consistently are telling us that they just can't keep up with the demand. Right. They can't hire enough counselors, they can't provide enough services. You get the idea. And so I'm curious how you would approach it from the standpoint of a college leader. How should they address the mental health concerns that according to Jonathan Haidt and others, have been growing for some time? Because if you think about the CDC report is not just a short term issue, it seems like it requires a real change in mindset on campuses and a shift in services. Perhaps.

Perhaps so there's so many different forces that are coming together in this moment. So one is we have seen teenagers reporting increasing levels of distress pre pandemic, and then the pandemic did not make it better. Right. So we are definitely seeing kids who really are suffering from diagnosable disorders at rates that are different from what they were in the past. I think it really does raise a question about what do schools need to be providing by way of supports for those students if they come to college so that they can do college? I think that's a key question. Another trend that is underneath this, and it's part of why I wrote this book, is is that the definition of mental Health that circulates in the culture doesn't match very well with the definition that we use as psychologists. And on this one, I'll say I think we're right. Like, this is. This is our department, and we. And we have a pretty strong sense of it. And what I mean by that is that I feel like I'll just go ahead and blame the wellness industry, but probably it's not the only force. I feel like, let's say the wellness industry has really given people the impression that. That mental health is equated with happiness or a sense of feeling calm or at ease. And so I am now taking care of a generation of families where there's a lot of anxiety around being uncomfortable or unhappy. And I don't want people to be uncomfortable, and I don't want to be people to be unhappy. But for psychologists, we don't equate that with a mental health concern. So the definition that I work to bring across in the book, which I think in the end is actually very reassuring, is that mental health is not about feeling good or happy or calm or relaxed. It's about two things. One, having feelings that fit the moment that makes sense in the context. So if we think about college students, the transition to college is wildly stressful. That is entirely appropriate. And then two, handling those feelings effectively, handling those ways, those feelings in a way that brings relief and does no harm. So what do we want a college student to do when they're very, very stressed about the transition to college? We want to be talking to supportive people. We want them to be getting enough exercise. We want them to be protecting their sleep. We want them to find ways to take their minds off of it. Sometimes. There's a huge repertoire of very, very adaptive strategies that we want to see kids using. What do we not want to see? Getting blackout drunk, getting themselves in trouble, feeling overwhelmed, and getting in their bed and not getting out. That's when we become concerned. But what I want to do, and I hope this book helps us do, is to shift the spotlight away from the presence or absence of distress. Psychologists are pretty agnostic about distress. We expect it. We're not particularly worried about it. It's often, and this can feel like a stretch, evidence of mental health. Right. If somebody is mean to you and you feel hurt, that's evidence that you work perfectly. And I'd rather us really transition the spotlight over to the question of coping and whether it is healthy or unhealthy. So back to colleges. To the degree that colleges can help frame the definition that Being in college is hard. It's always been hard, which doesn't mean there aren't kids having extraordinary experiences. But every kid on campus is going to feel significant ups and downs in the course of being a college student. We don't want students to feel frightened that that means there's something wrong with them or that they are having a problem that is somehow surprising to those of us who've cared for college kids for a long, long time. What we want to do is to recognize that distress comes with being a person and certainly being a growing and developing person. And what really, really matters is how it gets handled, whether it's handled in adaptive ways or ways that turn out to not be so adaptive.

You're reducing my anxiety as we're talking right now, which I appreciate and I want to. I want to turn to the other side of the coin, which is engagement in school, because you write in your new book, and you just referenced it as well, about the emotional upheaval that's common in, in adolescence. And one of those features has to do with teenagers disliking school. Now, the teachers and professors we're both talking to are reporting record levels of disengagement right now with their students. But you write, quote, it is not at all unusual for a student to plod through a conventional education, yet be poised to thrive in a career that is not rooted in traditional schooling. So I want to know what can, or maybe even should parents and teachers do to address this disengagement or this dislike of school itself.

So the quote you read I would have written before the pandemic, and I wrote it now because I think there's something that we don't talk nearly enough about, which is school isn't a great fit for every kid who's in school. And so I think we need to deal with that head on, both in terms of supporting, supporting them, helping them find motivation if they do want to stay in school, finding ways to make school as engaging as possible, but also not becoming too disheartened if school isn't where they thrive, because so many kids thrive beyond school. So that's one set of issues. There is also a very real post pandemic landscape of kids having a hard time engaging in school. And my husband's a high school teacher and he's a, he's a gifted teacher, and we talk about this all of the time. And what he describes to me is kids who were, you know, removed from traditional school as a function of the pandemic lost a lot of information about their role in the learning process. And that's what he often talks with me about, is, like, they don't seem to entirely understand where they fit into all of this. And the example he gave one night that just really stayed with me is that he was meeting with a student who was having a very hard time on tests. And the student was saying to my husband, but I'm really studying. I'm studying a lot. And my husband said to him, after a period of studying, how well do you feel, you know, the material? And the kid looked at him and had no idea what he was talking about. And I think that's where my husband put his finger right on the issue that. That sense of how do I fit into this process? Where do I belong in the ownership of my own learning? Right. So we need that in high school and then in college. Like, that's sort of assumed that you are taking responsibility for the ownership of your learning. And what I would say is, we can't be that surprised that if you disrupt school for one to two years at the level it was disrupted, that kids are going to show up in college looking less prepared than they were. And I was thinking about it the other day, I was like, well, what if you flipped it around? What if there was no impact? We'd be like, okay, well, what if high school has been doing all this time requiring kids to come to school? So we're seeing the impact. We're seeing the impact of kids who really, you know, I aren't entirely ready for college because they missed a lot of steps along the way. Yeah.

So, Lisa, we talked earlier about girls, but the question that many college and university presidents and enrollment deans and admissions deans I talk with is kind of, what's wrong with boys? Because if you look at enrollment in higher ed, it is largely outpaced female enrollment is largely outpaced male enrollment for quite some time in higher ed. And then during the pandemic, that gap even widened more. Many colleges I talk with are really struggling to attract male applicants, struggling to get them to enroll and then get them to engage them when they're on their campus. I remember the president at Fordham University said, what can we do to get them out of their dorm rooms where they're mostly playing video games? So what's happening on this front, and what could colleges, or should colleges do, if anything?

So I feel for the boys in this very much, because one of the things that we know from the research and that I unpack in my book, really around middle school, is that Girls suddenly, when puberty hits, get a two year developmental leap on boys that, you know, if you look at a sixth grade or seventh grade, if you look at just the mode, you know, the modal onset of puberty, the girls are going to be largely moving well into puberty. And the boy's not there yet. Boys right, about two years behind. There's all sorts of physiological implications of this, but there's also all sorts of neurological implications that girls brains just become vastly more mature and sophisticated as a function of puberty two years ahead of when boys brains do that. And so there's lots of boys who cover the gap, right. Or also lots of boys who are on the early side of puberty and don't have that neurological disadvantage. But what we do see that comes through high school and high schoolers will. High school educators will tell you this. The girls are just more mature, they're more serious about school. They're able to focus in a different kind of way as a group. Right. This doesn't apply to every kid everywhere, but that's what we see. So there's a couple ways to think about this. One is, I think we want to uncouple college admission from college readiness. Those are two very different things. Lots of kids can get themselves into college who are not really ready for college. So then we want to evaluate college readiness as a separate phenomenon. What is college readiness? You are mature enough to take really good care of your own health and safety. You know why you're there and have something that you're really aiming to get out of it. You can make tough decisions like going to class when all of your friends are right there and are ready to play video games. Right. That those are the kinds of things that I would put on a college readiness measure. And then the question becomes, who's evaluating the readiness of any young person to go to college beyond the kid being admitted? What I think we might ask families is to work more closely with their kids to uncouple admission from going to college. I think it's wonderful when a family's kid gets in and they're like, you know what, we're going to let you get in, but we're going to ask you to take a gap year. Like, we just know you need a little more time to grow, to really make the most of college. I also think, especially as we're seeing this heightened unreadiness as a result of the pandemic, colleges probably have to up their programming to help kids understand what college is about and how to Engage colleges appropriately. And here's the thing that's really interesting to me. There are a lot of colleges that have been doing this for years, and they tend to be colleges that are bringing in non traditional students, or colleges that are commuter colleges where they know that part of really breeding the success of the students they have coming in is they're going to need to offer more structure and more orientation to what the expectations and demands are of college. And I think that what we're probably hearing more gaps from are the colleges that have never had to do that before, that they were positioned so that they were taking in students who largely understood the brief and knew how to fulfill it.

So when I talk to professors, they blame so much of what they're seeing in the classroom now on the pandemic, the students who missed academic classes, social time with friends, extracurricular activities. As a result, the professors I talk to say students are falling behind academically and they lack many executive functions in classrooms. I can't tell you about the number of professors saying they don't know how to work in groups, they don't know how to ask for help, they don't show up for office hours, just like we're not going back to 2019 and so many other things. We're not going back to 2019 in terms of what we expect from teenagers either. Or were those expectations always off about what we expected from teenagers back in, you know, 2018, 2019? Was. Were our expectations just too much for where they are in their developmental phase?

No and yes. So what I will say is, you know, these are professors who've been at these campuses for a long, long time, and they've seen tons of cohorts of kids come through who could do what was being asked, who understood their role in the learning process and could fulfill their role in the learning process. And then, unsurprisingly, we get this cohort that arrives that did high school in their dining room, as one of my kids did, and unsurprisingly, they're not as prepared as the kids who were going to school, as we have traditionally done. So I don't think that the expectations were too high before, but I do think we have to deal with the fact that we have a cohort of kids in college who really missed some important steps in terms of understanding school and how it works. So I think there's that factor. The yes, though, is, and I know this is something you've thought about and worked on prior to the pandemic. We were just watching this ratcheting ratcheting, ratcheting, ratcheting up of what we were asking kids in general, or asking the most ambitious kids, really, where. So I just had a daughter go to college this past fall, and I got, you know, we did the application process, saw her through her senior year. And I remember applying to college, and I'm looking at this kid's application, and I am like, oh, my gosh. Like, this is bananas. What we are asking of the most ambitious kids who are trying to go to the most selective schools. This is completely over the top. And so part of me is like, okay, well, if the pandemic brings about a reset on how we evaluate some of those things, or tests becoming optional takes the temperature down on the frog in the water. You know, that long metaphor. I'm good with all of that. I am good with all of that. Or just everybody eases up a little bit about this having to go in a very particular way.

Yeah. So you talk a little bit in the book about helping teens adopt a new vantage point, which I like, because I think teens are so caught up in their own lives right now that they often forget what an outsider might see. Especially, for example, around this admissions process right there. I'm talking to so many who are frenzied right now because they're kind of waiting on decisions, or so many were deferred this year and they didn't expect that. And I always tell them, just pause for a second and kind of look at it from a different perspective. Look at it from the perspective, for example, of the admissions officer who has to review all those applications. Right. So given that teenagers think their lives are spiraling out of control sometimes, especially, for example, again, around this admissions piece right now, how do you get them to consider that new vantage point?

Well, I'll tell you how I often do it when I'm talking to high school seniors is I say to them, here's something you should know that we forget to tell you. After about age 25, no one knows where you went to college. They really don't. Unless you're somehow bringing it up, it really becomes quite invisible. And I will tell them, you know, I remember realizing this when I was in grad school. I was on a master swim team, and one of my dearest friends was this woman, Catherine, in the English department. And we were hanging out constantly. And about six months in, I thought, I have no idea where Catherine went to college. Right. And I'm thinking, why did nobody tell me this? That this sort of, like, disappears? And so what I will tell you is that teens are surprised to learn this. And of course they're surprised because from where they sit, it's like college, college, college, college. And we very much give them the impression that wherever you go is somehow kind of tattooed on you and everyone's going to be able to see it and it's going to determine everything that happens next. So even that little shift can be useful. And I will say to them, so if you get what you want or you don't get what you want, it's actually going to be a chapter that closes pretty fast and then there's going to be a whole lot more chapters. So that's one thing I have found that can help. The other thing I say to high school seniors is, look, control the controllables, right? This is such a wild process. There are so many things that are outside of your hands. I want you to feel as good as you can about whatever outcome you get. And part of how you're going to get there is that you're going to feel like the things that you could do something about, you did do something about. And that can, I think, sometimes feel like a bit of a relief.

Know your sphere of influence. So your book is. Is focused on teenagers and adolescents, of course, but given many of our listeners are on college campuses, they're wondering when the emotion spin that you write about, you know, does it evolve through college, does it keep going? Does it ever end? And in particular, there's another transition we're interested in, which is one that's coming up, which is college graduation. It's a time of big emotions for students, particularly given the economy right now, the hybrid job market, which I think looks different to today's students than their predecessors. Any advice you have for parents or for college leaders in dealing with the big emotions of the class of 2023?

Lower expectations. But I would have said that at any point in time, not just around the aftermath of the pandemic. I think one of the things that is so hard about being a college student is you really are given the impression like you're being set up for success and if you do well, you'll do well. Really is very much the messaging. And I remember I have very vivid memories of sitting at my own college graduation. I was graduating with honors from Yale, right. Like there was no reason I should have felt bad about how this had gone down. So what was my post college job? I was walking my plants from my dorm to my crummy one room apartment so that I could continue to do research in the exact same lab I've been working in since I was a sophomore. And I'm sitting at graduation thinking, this is it. And then I start my first job and all I'm doing is entering data in a windowless room for eight hours a day. Now, I have become increasingly convinced that mid career thriving is almost always on the back of 10 to 20 years of early career grunt work. And I wish somebody told me that because I think there is this grand celebratory moment at graduation and some kids are going off to, you know, Stanford Medical School and Harvard Law School and they can feel great about that moment because their path is really clear. Most kids are like, this is it, right? Most kids are me. And so I really wish we spent a lot more time talking with college seniors of like, okay, now it's going to get a lot more pedestrian and probably a lot more boring and you're going to be doing a lot of grunt work for a while. And that is okay because that's how you get where you want to go. But it can feel deflating. And I certainly, I personally had an experience of feeling very, very deflated.

And now to your earlier point, Lisa, now our listeners know where you went under undergraduate college. Of course. My co host here, Michael Horn, also went to Yale. We've had, I think we've had more yalies as guests on the show than probably any other college or university in this country. So I think, Michael, this might be it. We might have to, you know, say no to you.

We're, we're gonna have to put a quota on Yale.

Okay, we are going to.

Okay.

And, and it actually leads into my, my last question because we've had another guest on the show, another Yale graduate in Anya Covenants last season. And you know, we were talking about the impact of, of the pandemic on K through 12 schools and, and higher ed. And, and we just had a simple question for her that I think a lot of parents and people who work with young people today are just thinking about, you know, are the kids going to be okay?

All right, so let me start with the hard part and then we get to the better part. The hard part is there were kids who were fragile before the pandemic for whom the pandemic made things like truly horrendous and fragile in any variety of ways. There were kids who were not fragile before the pandemic or were doing okay before the pandemic. And the conditions of the pandemic brought about difficulties that lasting very hard to shake. So I'm going to be honest, if I could go back and just erase the pandemic, oh, would I? Right. In terms of what its impact has been on kids. That said, our kids are going to be okay, but a huge part of how we get them there is how we talk about them and how we react to their distress. I think we want to be really careful about suggesting that teenagers are broken. I think we want to be really careful about suggesting that distress is in and of itself on its own grounds for concern. I think we want to go back to what we know about what really, really helps young people thrive. And here's what it is. Good working relationships with adults, ways to make meaningful contributions. And then I know this sounds so small and basic. Getting good sleep, adequate physical activity, solid nutrition. Those things go so far. And part of how we make those things happen is that the adults who surround young people keep their eye on those balls and then also make sure that when teenagers come our way with distress, we greet them as a steady presence. We don't overreact, we don't jump into action, which usually for them affirms that it is even worse than they thought it was. That as much as that we can be forward looking and hopeful for adolescents, that sends a very strong message to teenagers about our belief in their ability to get through hard things, to grow and learn in the context of difficulty. Now, this isn't going to be every kid, and we're going to see kids who absolutely deserve specialized care and additional care. But we want to be really mindful that how kids come out of this will in part hinge on how we get them through it. And the thing I'll say more than anything else, we do have an adolescent mental health crisis. We are not going to solve it by having more therapy for more kids. It's not a practical reality and we know that. Here's how we solve it. By strengthening the relationships between teenagers and the adults in their immediate environment. That's how we're going to do it.

And that's something, by the way, that given the focus of this podcast, that I think colleges and universities can do a lot more of in terms of helping students find those relationships, whether they are professors, coaches, mentors, and other adults on college campuses. Lisa, this has just been absolutely, absolutely terrific and a great way to end on a positive note and really keep us hopeful for what's next. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

And we'll be right back on futuree. This episode of Future youe is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendian believes that system level change and a student centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners and rural community members. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org

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welcome back to Future youe. Following that really insightful conversation with Lisa that I think gets really personal for us, Michael Given, as we said, I have one teenager and between us we have three more entering those years pretty soon. So this is a discussion that I think is both personal and professional for us. But let's focus for a moment here on the professional because I I think Lisa had a lot of nuggets that could prove useful to parents of college students and college leaders, especially given, as we mentioned, presidents say mental health is the number one issue they're confronting. So let's start here. Lisa said that as things started to go back to normal during COVID she said kids didn't trust it. I thought that was a really interesting quote and I don't think parents did either. There's all this data and research now on the number of kids who have left the public school system and on growing parent frustration with that system. So I just kind of curious, given your expertise in kind of the K12 world, what's the state of trust in K12 schooling now among students and their parents? I've always seen trust in our system, in the US System as our point of distinction. Is that changing?

It's an interesting observation, Jeff, and for you to pick up on it because it's well known that I think it's well known anyway that historically Americans will rate the public schools writ large in the country is not doing all that well. But then when you ask them, well, how is your local public school? They rate them really highly. But interestingly enough, that latter mark since reaching a high point in 2019 according to the Education Next survey of Public opinion, that number's Actually been falling year over year, and especially among Republicans. And then if you look at the percentage of black families who would give their local school an A or B, it's even lower than the Republicans number. So I think you couple that with the fact that enrollment in public school districts is down by more than a million since the pandemic, with large numbers of families moving to independent schools, charter schools, homeschooling. According to some estimates, Jeff, you have 2.2 million kids in micro schools, and then there's like tons of folks who are just missing from the data, and we have no idea what they're doing. And I think coupled together, that's a pretty strong picture that people have just lost a lot of faith and trust, just as you said. And obviously that's not just in public schools. I think it's in institutions more generally. But. But it's certainly public school districts as well. And I think parents saw how they failed them, whether they stayed closed too long, whether they taught poorly, whether they taught things, you know, that they find objectionable, whether they ignore the science of reading and just didn't teach large numbers of kids how to read. So, yeah, I think there's a real decline in the trust in public schools right now. Now, Jeff, I imagine, like me, you've been tracking the CDC stats around mental health and depression among teens, particularly teenage girls, and it appears again, particularly teenage girls, who are actually liberals, by the way, and that Jonathan Haight, you know, has been doing some really interesting research around all these questions, and he's been centering on the impact of social media on them. And it's John and then along with Gene Twenge, who are saying, yeah, Covid accelerated some of these trends. But actually the trends have been there since teens started going on social media. Now, against that backdrop, Jeff, Lisa mentioned that the transition to college is tough and that the wellness industry, as she said, is, quote, unquote, really given people the impression that mental health is equated with happiness. I found that quote so interesting, Jeff, because I think it sort of calls into question a bunch of assumptions around a lot of these self reports anyway, around mental health challenges. But I guess here's the other question. A lot of that is tied into people's conceptions of what success looks like. And so is it the case that maybe we've created some of these challenges by having, you know, overly high expectations of colleges around this idea of student success?

It's interesting, Michael, because we've seemed to have moved from the kind of paper chase mentality of college which of course was about law school, but it had that famous line that people repeat all the time. You know, you, you know, telling the professor, telling the students, look to your left, look to your right, you know, one of you won't be here next year. And that was, of course, a very institutionally focused idea of higher education in terms of kind of weeding students out. And then we move to the student success movement of the last two decades. And what's not clear to me is what success really is for institutions. It's obviously around retention, but I always wonder how much is good enough. So the pendulum has really swung. And that's not to say that a student centered model is bad, but I think we really need to have a better sense of KPIs as an industry. You know, lots of schools will say they want to be, you know, at the average of their peer set in terms of retention and graduation rates, for example. But the better question to be asking, I think, is given the makeup of your student body, the student body at a particular institution, is that where they should be or should they be somewhere else, whatever that might be? Right. What does success look like for them? And the reason that I think this matters is that what I'm hearing is a lot of skepticism about the value, value of the degree from employers. You know, we know that colleges and universities are focused on the value of the degree from the family perspective, from the prospective student perspective, you know, the ROI to families. But there's also pressure now on the other side, which is the completion into the workforce side, especially given some states like Utah, Maryland and Pennsylvania, they're all moving to make a lot of their state jobs now degree optional. And I think what we really want to show as a higher ed industry is that, yes, we've done away with weed out courses, we're focused on student success and being student centered institutions. But at the same time, we still have these important quality milestones that students need to reach. And I think employers might be missing a little bit of that, you know, and getting that balance right, Michael, is key. And I'm wondering how colleges, as Lisa says, can frame the definition that being in college is hard without making students, as she adds, you know, feel frightened about it.

Jeff, I think you're pointing to the wisdom of mastery based learning, right? That we're going to hold these high standards and that you got to get to them. And I think what it points to is if you take that seriously, that struggle is important. And we have to give the signal to students that struggles aren't just important, they're actually natural. And there's some research, as you know, from psychologists David Yeager at UT Austin and Greg Walton at Stanford, among many others, showing that if you actually normalize the struggles in college, then you can help people realize that struggles or challenges are actually normal. And then that causes those people to persist far more. And so one way that they do it is they've shown stories of older students and shown their struggles and then how they ultimately overcame them and, and were successful. And when you did this early on in a student's college experience, particularly those from first gen families, you know, who don't have a lot of experience with college, it closed the differences in full time enrollment and grades between students from backgrounds that are disadvantaged at the college and other students at the same schools by, get this 31 to 40%. That's a huge shift by just normalizing struggle. And so I think we have to do a better job of saying this is normal and working through it won't hurt you, it won't weaken you. And I'm going to take another thing from Jonathan hates research around how young people try to avoid challenging words and ideas. And you got to shift it to say, actually grappling with this will actually strengthen you. It will make you better. It'll show you that you can work through it. It'll give you the sense of agency that you are in control. And it's, you know, back to the mastery based learning idea. I think we need to be introducing this in K12, but certainly higher ed where we say like struggle and failure is a normal part of the process and it's on the road to mastery. And yes, there's hard points, but you can overcome them and get the results. And by doing so, we build in things like resilience and agency and the creation of self efficacy or esteem into the academics themselves rather than just creating, you know, more things schools should do. Because I think a lot of people are probably listening to us and being like, oh my gosh, are faculty going to have to wade into mental health challenges? We're just not equipped. You're right, but like you can actually handle it through the teaching of academics now. Jeff, I, I will say though, speaking of hard, it raised another idea in my head which is, you know, I was struck by Lisa talking about the stuff, superhuman applications that students feel like they must have to apply to college. Is this, do you think, where some of this feeling of, you know, it's, it's too hard or, or success is the opposite of hard sort of starts or, or at least accelerates. In other words, are we asking too much of students in admissions right now?

Well, I think the simple answer is yes, or at the very least, I don't think we're asking for the right things. You know, especially as applications have increased 30% in the last three years. And I was just looking at these numbers from the common app. Right, so that's the common app number. 30% last three years. Raw applications up 1.55 million more applications. So 1.5 million more apps this year compared to the class of 2020. So just in three years it's climbed that much. And you know, those high school classes are about the same in terms of their size. You know, in many of these selective colleges still promise holistic review, but given all that they ask for on the application, that's becoming a lot more difficult to do to look at all the stuff that students send without adding more staff, which they're really not able to do, or really speed reading through it. So the question is, what should they be asking for? What do they really want to know? And I think in many ways they're less interested in what the student has done than what they possibly can do when they get to campus. So often in the admissions offices, when I was in there, I also often heard, heard them say about an applicant, you know, what will they do when they're here? What courses will they take? What clubs will they join? They really want to make sure that there's that growth mindset that these students, that these applicants haven't peaked in high school. But the mentality around applications is putting it into overdrive in high school and burning out in many cases just to get into that right college. So students end up peaking in high school, which is exactly what college admissions offices don't want. So what might this look like? What might something different look like? I think a combination of what we have now, so we're still going to need grades, for example, but maybe less focus on collecting, you know, 6, 10, 15 AP courses. You know, let's, let's look at kids who take interesting and hard classes. But what I'm most interested in, Michael, is what you were just talking about, right, this idea of skills and what do students really know? I think it really goes along with this idea of mastery based learning, of figuring out, is there another way on the transcripts to show what the students know rather than just what they did. I just think there's a lot of pressure on the system right now on the admissions system, and I really do think it's going to break in many ways. And Michael, I think we're also setting up kids for this unrealistic expectation at the other end of college. I was interested in what Lisa said about careers that mid career thriving, which maybe I hope that we're both doing now in the middle of our own careers, is about all that grunt work you do early in your career. It's interesting. Scott Galloway talks often about this on his podcast about how today's college students are just not patient enough about their careers. So how might colleges encourage that while at the same time they're putting so many more resources in career services, as we know, you know, which everyone wants. You know, how can they kind of balance that with helping kids say, you know, you have to be also a little patient about what comes next.

Well, Jeff, I think it's maybe almost a cliche at this point about how millennials just want, like everything right away and they don't want to pay their dues. You know, they think they should graduate and not have to do the hard work and get paid. I hesitate personally to opine about a generation. I think it's easy to do and, you know, certainly feel like there's some truths there. But. But you know, what, what do I know? Right? I think every generation looks at the next one and says, oh, those kids don't do X. Right. But I do think the basic formula that you do some grunt work early on to learn the foundations of, you know, the business, whatever you're working on, build judgment, understand the fundamentals of how things work and why, and then you take that knowledge to move up and do better and add more value. That's something we ought to be working on in embedding. And I know I'm a broken record in this stuff, but. But again, I think it comes back to what we were just talking about. It starts with showing that hard work and effort are what it takes and we have to get out of this. I'm playing the school game just to get the grade or whatever else that causes people to skirt doing the hard work. And instead they want to invest the time and effort because they see it as about improving themselves rather than just getting by. And then hopefully they can take that and translate that to their career as well. I think right now it's a little bit too easy just to look at, say, a YouTube or Instagram influencer on social media and say, why don't I have that many followers or whatever else and assume it ought to be that easy. And, and that's perhaps where social media is hurting our youth right now as well. But the formula, I think that you and I, we, we have both certainly followed in our own careers. I, I don't think that's gone away. It's still a tried and true one. And indeed, despite the popular perception that entrepreneurs are all like 20 something college dropouts, I'm pretty sure the average age of successful startup founders is like 45 in this country. So, you know, I think we also have to tell the narrative a little bit more accurately rather than just focus on the exceptions, if you will, that create great storylines. So Jeff, one last thing. Given that rankings are in the news a lot right now, Lisa talked about how much colleges need to provide the basics for student mental health, meaning better sleep, more adult relationships, better eating habits. Should we maybe rank college on how they do against those basics?

Oh, Michael, how I would love a ranking that doesn't talk about how good the food is in the dining hall or the best dorms like the Princeton Review does, but more on how much is this school going to take care of me. It's really interesting. A few years ago I worked on a paper with everfi and we'll put that in the show notes and there was one finding I won't forget because EverFi provides these courses to students such as alcohol prevention training, for example, so they have millions of students on their platform as a result. So they're able to survey them and ask them these questions. And they asked them what was most important when deciding which college to attend. And 82% said safety and well being were as important as academic rigor. 72% said colleges need to do more for the well being of their students. So could you imagine us talking about colleges that are both rigorous but also give their kids things like mental health days on occasion they really focus on good sleeping and eating habits. I mean, how often is that really talked about these days in colleges? And you know, we've talked about on this on the show before, Michael, about intercollegiate athletics, for example, example. And to move towards this idea of improving the habits of the mind and the body. So could you imagine just having, you know, movement and fitness classes for everybody and we start to rank colleges on that as well.

Oh, I like where you're going, but I think we're going to leave arrow pining on on on the future of movement and fitness for another day, Jeff. And instead we're going to go to one of our favorite segments in which we get questions from you, our audience and this segment this season, of course is supported by course hero. So, Jeff, the question this time comes from Bernadette Sweekinos from Ferris State University in Michigan. And Bernadette asks, how can I help my students heal emotionally from the pandemic and the political turmoil of the past years? How can I help my students regain or learn the skills that they lost or missed over the past two years?

So that's a great question from Bernad. I've been back on the road a lot, probably too much this academic year at both high schools talking about admissions and on college campuses talking about innovation in higher ed. And I always love the chance to really interact with students. And I think there are a few things that they seem to be looking for in my conversations with them. One is a role in education, right? They don't want to just be recipients of information. They want to be active participants in in their learning. They want that optionality. We've talked a lot about that on this podcast. They want more choice in how they learn. So role in their education optionality. Third approachability. They've really enjoyed getting access to their teachers and professors over zoom on their terms. So how might that continue? Especially since this generation is not one to take advantage of office hours or the horrors of talking to people in person. They want variety. You know, students want a variety of approaches to teaching and learning with an emphasis on interactive activities and hands on learning. And finally, they want to know why does it all matter? How can I connect it to me and what I want to do? You know, in other words, how can I translate and transfer the learning from the classroom to what I'm doing outside of it?

Jeff, that's a great place, I think, to leave it in sum up the show. So first a thank you to Bernadette for the question brought to you by course Hero. And then a big thank you to Lisa d', Amore, of course, for just a terrific and enlightening conversation that frankly has me feeling a lot better. Jeff, about the future on these fronts. And a thank you to all of you, our listeners on Future youe until next time,

Sa.