What if learning was at the center of college?

Call me crazy, but I always thought that learning should be at the center of educational institutions.

Unfortunately, over the course of my teaching career, I experienced firsthand the ways that learning becomes peripheral to the way colleges and universities operate. I’ve written many times about the problem of turning education into a transaction and how that reality leads institutions astray from what should be their core missions, and prevents students from having the kinds of educational experiences that will prove lasting beyond their ability to get that first job out of college.

Getting Learning Right: The Promise of Higher Education, is a forthcoming book from a trio of professors who have been deeply invested in re-orienting the work of higher education institutions through the central lens of learning. In this guest post, they argue why and how this will have significant benefits for the broader public perception of colleges and universities. –John Warner

The Real Mission of Higher Education Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Kristi Girdharry, Chris. W. Gallagher, and Kevin G. Smith

Jey had a plan. “I’m here for a very expensive piece of paper,” she told us when she started college. “I’m going to get this degree, go into investment banking, make a lot of money, get into private equity, retire by the time I’m forty, maybe buy an island.”

Honestly? Fair. Survey after survey tells us that students and their families come to college primarily for economic reasons: the credential, the salary premium, the return on a genuinely terrifying investment. Given what college costs, it’s hard to argue.

But a few years later, during a finance co-op in Australia, Jey got a panicked late-night phone call from her boss about some missing money. Something clicked. “All I do is get yelled at by rich people,” she told us. “This could be the next twenty years of my life, and I didn’t want that.” She still cared about her career. She just wanted her work to mean something.

We spent years following students like Jey through their undergraduate careers, listening carefully to what learning actually looks and feels like from their side. What we found is that students come to college with one set of questions and leave with a better, more complicated set. Careers still matter to them, but the way they measure a good career—a good life—becomes something richer than a return on financial investment. That transformation doesn’t happen tidily, or on schedule, or in three years instead of four. It happens messily, unevenly, over time, through exploration and experience that can’t be compressed or efficiency-optimized.

That finding feels especially urgent right now. In April, a Yale University committee released a major report on declining public trust in higher education. The report is self-critical and, unfortunately, quite relatable to us in higher ed. Trust has collapsed, and colleges and universities bear real responsibility. The committee names problems most institutions would rather not discuss publicly: soaring costs, opaque admissions, grade inflation so severe the median Yale undergraduate now earns an A (Harvard just voted to put a cap on A grades). The recommendations are thoughtful. Academics wrote them, so they are also quite long. But for a report lengthily focused on the academic mission, the word “learning” barely appears.

The report talks consistently about “teaching,” “the classroom,” “the academic mission,” “knowledge.” It talks much less about learning or about how students actually come to understand things, change their minds and develop into the adults we—and more importantly, they—hope they’ll become. And when the report’s recommendations finally turn to the classroom, they focus mostly on things to prevent or restore: Ban the phones, deflate the grades, stop the self-censorship, require a common curriculum. We can argue over whether these are good ideas, but the fact is, they’re defensive moves. They don’t add up to a vision of what learning should be.

That’s the gap we want to name. The trust crisis in higher education isn’t just a communications problem, or an admissions problem, or even a cost problem, though all of those are very real. It’s fundamentally a learning problem. Most colleges and universities are not actually organized around learning. They’re organized around teaching, research productivity, rankings, revenue, and the preservation of institutional prestige. Students sense this, even when they can’t articulate it. The public senses it, too. Academic researchers themselves have been making this argument for decades, but it has rarely felt more urgent than it does right now.

The Yale report says, wisely, that “trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do.” Universities say they’re about learning. The way to rebuild trust is to actually mean it and to build institutions that prove it.

What does that look like? Consider Boston College’s core curriculum, organized around what the school calls “Complex Problems and Enduring Questions.” Faculty from different disciplines co-teach courses built around challenges like climate change and racial violence or questions like, “What does it mean to be human?” Students work collaboratively on real projects with community partners. Faculty describe these courses as the hardest and most rewarding teaching they do. Students say the courses help them “connect schoolwork to life.” That’s not a small thing. That’s the thing.

This kind of work isn’t just reserved for well-resourced or selective institutions. Consider Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Fla., which is an open-access, tuition-affordable community college serving a diverse population. Hillsborough set out to do better for a group higher education has long failed: Black and Latino men. Drawing on decades of research about how learning actually works—about belonging, self-efficacy, and the power of high expectations—the college built a strategy called the Four Pillars of Academic Achievement. Students are paired with faculty mentors. They build cohorts with peers. They engage in intentional academic planning grounded in their own goals and lives. The approach treats students not as numbers to be moved through a system but as learners whose success depends on relationships, recognition, and sustained support. It has produced real outcomes for students the system has long underserved. And it is, fundamentally, an act of institutional honesty about what learning requires.

Neither BC nor Hillsborough has higher education figured out. Both face the same pressures every institution faces, and both have made deliberate choices to organize meaningful parts of the student experience around learning itself that focuses on real problems, real questions, real consequences. And the practices that get learning right—listening carefully to students, designing environments where learning can actually happen, connecting academic work to the world beyond campus, treating students as partners rather than customers—are available to every institution, selective or open-access, well-resourced or scraping by. They require intention and honesty about what a college is actually for.

The Yale committee calls on universities to “focus on the mission.” We agree. But focusing on the mission means more than refining a statement. It means organizing every decision—curricular, financial, architectural, pedagogical—around a genuine commitment to learning. It means asking, constantly and uncomfortably: Are our students actually learning? What are they telling us about what works? And what are we willing to change?

Jey kept thinking about her career throughout college. She never stopped worrying about her future. But by the time she graduated, the metrics by which she measured success had been transformed by what she had learned and lived. That transformation is what higher education is for. It’s also, we’d argue, what public trust in higher education ultimately depends on.

The Yale committee is right that trust must be rebuilt through action over messaging. The most fundamental action, and the one most often overlooked, is this: Get learning right.