For centuries, colleges and universities have existed to educate — or promote “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” But for most young people today, institutions of higher learning are principally a means to acquire the relevant skills and requisite credentials to get a good job.
But as four-year colleges and universities have become de facto gatekeepers for access to social and material advancement, their principal clientele — 18- to 24-year-olds — have undergone an unprecedented collapse in overall well-being.
Harkening back to the past
Much has been written about the crisis of mental illness among young people, but these acute forms of distress are only the most severe manifestations of their wider existential and spiritual struggles.
This is evident in the American data from the Global Flourishing Study, co-led by our team at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. In the study’s American sample, many aspects of self-reported flourishing are worst among the youngest surveyed: Life satisfaction increases from 6.13 (on a 0–10 scale) among 18- to 24-year-olds to 7.03 among 50- to 59-year-olds, to 7.73 among 70- to 79-year-olds. Having meaning in life rises from 6.49 (18–24) to 7.53 (50–59) to 8.04 (70–79), while social connectedness rises from 6.38 to 7.32 to 7.99. The same is true across many of the indicators of flourishing in the study.
This trend almost certainly owes much to the ways in which young people have been harmed by smartphones, social media and other digital technologies, which have increasingly replaced face-to-face friendships and other enriching activities outdoors and in the company of others. At the same time, college students and graduates in particular are burdened by a set of cultural scripts that privilege professional and especially financial success over deep connections to family, friends or faith communities.
It is little surprise that students struggling to cope with these competing interests and pressures are drawn to offerings which point them to something bigger: Introductory courses on happiness or well-being are among the most popular ever offered at hypercompetitive schools like Yale, Stanford and UC Berkeley.
One student in Laurie Santos’ “Psychology and the Good Life” course at Yale commented, “What’s most pressing on our minds is grades, it’s the next job, it’s a potential salary after graduation,” but this class had helped her “focus on the present moment and the people around me.”
Though such courses are now novel and marginal adornments of institutions structured around skills training and credentialing, they in fact hearken back to an older model of the university’s mission as one of moral and even spiritual formation.
This deeper aim still retains an important toehold even at the most selective institutions, in the form of mission statements, which frequently highlight the promotion of students’ and society’s flourishing as a key institutional aim. The mission of Harvard College, for instance, “is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society,” while Stanford’s includes “preparing students for leadership and engaged citizenship in the world.”
This aim of educating for flourishing is foregrounded even more strongly in universities with a strong religious identity. One of the University of Notre Dame’s aims, for instance, is “to create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice.” And Brigham Young University “seeks to develop students of faith, intellect, and character who have the skills and the desire to continue learning and to serve others throughout their lives.”
College students are burdened by a set of cultural scripts that privilege professional and financial success over deep connections to family, friends or faith communities.
One important and neglected means both of orienting students toward flourishing and of better understanding whether universities are succeeding in this effort is a richer approach to assessment on campuses that are increasingly dominated by attention to academic achievement, professional success, mental health and student satisfaction.
This kind of measurement serves as an intervention in the life of the institution, shaping both what leaders discuss and strive to improve, and what students and faculty see as the salient aims of their education, while informing how the wider public interprets the life and role of these institutions.
At Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, our Academic Flourishing Initiative aims to help colleges and universities assess the extent to which their students and their communities as a whole are flourishing and to think creatively about how they might best promote “academic flourishing,” understood as a “state in which all aspects of an academic community’s life are good.”
The distinction of religious schools
Our research on academic flourishing includes assessments of individual flourishing, covering happiness and life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, relationships, and financial and material stability; community well-being, including the university’s relationships, leadership, structures, sense of belonging and welcome, and mission; and students’ perceptions of the university’s contributions to their formation for flourishing in their cognitive and intellectual capacities, their formation of moral virtues, their capacities for flourishing more broadly, and their ability to contribute to the world.
We have curated two complementary sources of data on these neglected aspects of academic life. The first is from The Wall Street Journal’s 2025 survey of students at more than 400 American colleges and universities about their growth in wisdom and justice, and their formation for contributing meaningfully to society and changing the world for the better.
The second is from the inaugural cohort of the Academic Flourishing Initiative, which launched in the 2025–2026 academic year with an initial set of 18 colleges and universities from around the world, many of them Christian institutions in the United States, including all of the Brigham Young University institutions (BYU, BYU-Idaho, BYU-Hawaii and BYU-Pathway Worldwide).
The Journal’s data are relatively thin for each institution but provide comparisons of hundreds of schools, and the resulting rank-orderings for a given item are strikingly different from conventional college rankings.
Among secular schools, for instance, the six highest scores (between 8.8 and 9.0 out of 10) for an item about the university’s contribution to student growth in wisdom are reported at places such as Washington and Lee University, Babson College and Claremont McKenna College, although highly selective schools such as Princeton University, Amherst College and the University of Chicago also do quite well, with scores between 8.4 and 8.6 (and rankings of 11–14).
By contrast, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania fare significantly worse than their near peers, with average scores between 7.5 and 7.7, placing them toward the bottom of the distribution for secular schools.
Across the publication’s data, however, the scores for this item are on average higher at religious institutions, with places such as Samford University, Brigham Young University or the University of Notre Dame reporting average scores between 8.9 and 9.2, and more than 20 institutions reporting scores above 8.5. This makes intuitive sense: Religious universities are distinctive in their ability to offer an integrated program of intellectual, moral and spiritual formation, which would be difficult — and indeed, improper — in the more pluralistic setting of a secular university.
Nonetheless, it is striking that these schools, most of which do not top the charts of conventional rankings, are reporting such success in this key area of contributing to students’ growth in wisdom — at least in the students’ own estimation.
Of course, these data are not self-interpreting. A cynic might suspect that Harvard students are simply more realistic than those at Princeton about the relatively transactional nature of their degree.
Yet, students entering Harvard Yard through the University’s Dexter Gate are still greeted with the words, “Enter to grow in wisdom,” while those leaving through the same gate read, “Depart to better serve thy country and thy kind.” These aspirations — growth in wisdom and contribution to society — are fundamental to the self-understanding of Harvard and many other universities, so it seems relevant to ask students how they think their schools are doing in this venture.
The data from the Academic Flourishing Initiative, by contrast, offer a richer portrait of fewer schools. Aggregating across the 12 four-year U.S. colleges or universities in the consortium, we find, for instance, that students in the sample generally report higher levels of flourishing than other Gen Z Americans.
Students at these schools report scores for “life satisfaction” of 7.13 out of 10, for meaning in life 7.72, and for financial and material security 7.72, compared with 6.13, 6.49 and 5.35, respectively, among American 18- to 24-year-olds. This is likely in part a function of their relative privilege: In 2022, only about 31 percent of American 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in a four-year college or university, and these were disproportionately drawn from wealthier communities.
It is little surprise that students struggling to cope with these competing interests and pressures are drawn to offerings which point them to something bigger.
Initiative students also differ from the population at large in other ways, however, which are likely also relevant for their higher levels of flourishing. Notably, about 85 percent of the sample at the 12 institutions under consideration here report attending religious services at least weekly, compared to only 14 percent of 18- to 24-year-old Americans as a whole.
This is significant, because a robust academic literature, much of it produced by Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, has established with a high degree of probability that regular participation in religious communities on average promotes many aspects of (temporal) flourishing.
The community well-being scores from the Academic Flourishing Initiative are somewhat less encouraging. While, in aggregate, the averages for each dimension of community well-being are relatively high, they also reflect a steady decline from freshman to senior year.
For instance, scores for the item “everyone is treated with respect at the university” are almost a full point lower for fourth-year students than for first years, while the item “leadership can be relied on to do what is right” declined by 0.79 across the four years.
With just one year of data, we cannot tell for certain whether this decline is a temporal effect, in which students are becoming more cynical about the university during their time on campus, or a cohort effect, in which each successive cohort of students is less cynical than the previous one.
Nonetheless, these patterns are concerning, and perhaps should prompt university leaders to examine what, if any, aspects of university life might be causing a deterioration of student confidence in their institution’s health.
Finally, the scores for the “university contribution to student formation” items are also instructive. The domain that was highest overall, and which showed the largest increase from freshmen (8.23 out of 10) to seniors (8.38), was for the university’s contribution to students’ cognitive and epistemic capacities — this makes sense, given universities’ fundamental role in stewarding and imparting knowledge.
In other areas (formation in moral virtues, flourishing more generally and societal contribution) scores were a bit lower (around 8 for most items) and relatively flat across the year cohorts.
In a few cases, however, scores did decline somewhat from freshman to senior year; this was particularly evident for one item, which assessed the university’s role in helping students “work with people with diverse political and religious beliefs,” which dropped by 0.27 points from first to fourth years.
Here again, the uncertainty about whether this is a temporal or a cohort effect is important to keep in mind, although in America’s current climate of ideological polarization, the idea that each successive cohort is less polarized seems unduly optimistic.
This trend raises the troubling prospect that the climate of animus and distrust which seems ever more prevalent in American life is increasingly affecting life on campus as well.
Résumé vs. eulogy virtues
A university that assesses academic flourishing and initiates a campus-wide conversation about the results would have a powerful tool for encouraging students both to consider the extent to which they and their community are flourishing, as well as to reflect on ways in which they might further intervene in the life of their campuses.
One response might be to implement courses like Yale’s “Psychology and the Good Life.” But caution is in order here, as this class focuses on strategies and practices that individuals can implement to improve their well-being — exercising, getting enough sleep, mindfulness practice, etc. — arguably reinscribing the culture’s fixation on individual self-fashioning and self-actualization.
This is a better route to cultivating what David Brooks has called the “résumé virtues,” central to individual and professional success, than the “eulogy virtues,” central to a good life.
Religious universities are distinctive in their ability to offer an integrated program of intellectual, moral and spiritual formation.
One notable difference between the mission statements of religious and secular universities, evident in the examples offered above, is that the former emphasize lives of “service” as key institutional aims, whereas the latter focus on “leadership” and “contribution.” This emphasis on service over leadership — on others over self — is already a great step toward pointing students to the deeper virtues of kindness, generosity and self-sacrifice that form the basis for enduring happiness.
For most of us, however, the eulogy virtues will not be acquired in a classroom but rather in those durable communities in which we practice laying down our lives for loved ones. Our species’ oldest and most important such communities are the family and religious groups, which still today offer profoundly beneficial effects, on average, for those who participate in them.
Unfortunately, young people today are perhaps the most detached from these institutions of any generation on record. As I noted above, only 14 percent of 18- to 24-year-old Americans attend religious services at least weekly, while Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies has estimated that as much as one-third of Gen Z will never marry.
Given that, one of the most powerful ways for a university to promote its students’ subsequent flourishing is to teach them about the significance of religious communities and marriage, and to create contexts in which prioritizing religion and family over professional success seems right and normal rather than a reactionary or subversive impulse.
Many religious universities are plainly already succeeding in these goals, as the extraordinarily high rate of religious service attendance among Academic Flourishing Initiative institutions indicates. So too, as Tim Carney notes in “Family Unfriendly,” the religion- and family-centered culture of Rexburg, Idaho, home to BYU-Idaho, goes a long way to explaining why it has among the highest Gen Z marriage and fertility rates of any city in the country.
The challenge and opportunity for universities today — and for religious institutions in particular — is to find creative ways to balance their core mission of education and (yes) professional development with due attention to the ordering of these goods to a life filled with love and purpose.
Young people today do not belong to a different species than previous generations. What they most fundamentally need to flourish is much the same as their grandparents and great-great-grandparents: loving relationships and loving communities that will help them do good work, insofar as they are able, with a sense of meaning, purpose and joy.
Whatever the financial returns it promises, a university diploma that distracts students from that goal is a bad bargain.
Brendan W. Case is associate director for research at Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program.
This story appears in the September 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “A Full Measure.” Learn more about how to subscribe.