Read the full transcript of Episode 22 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Wendy Fischman, who directs research at Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Wendy and co-author Howard Gardner have just completed a national study of higher education and written a book about the findings, The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be. Wendy joins host Tim Fish to dig into the research and the surprising conclusions that might be drawn from over 2,000 in-depth interviews on college campuses.
Tim Fish: As our listeners know, we've been exploring a simple question since episode one of this podcast. What is the purpose of school? Why does it exist? What needs to be at the center of the designed experience for students?
Well, today, we're going to widen our aperture a bit on that question and we're gonna ask: What's the purpose of college? Why do students attend? How does college help them build intellectual capital, and what could college do even better? And what could we do, in K-12 schools, to better prepare students to enter into college?
To get at that question, we're gonna spend some time today speaking with Wendy Fischman. For more than 25 years, Wendy has directed research at Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
With Howard Gardner, she has just completed a national study of higher education and written a book about their findings called The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be. Wendy, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.
Wendy Fischman: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Tim Fish: So let's jump into it. You know, I loved the book. As I was just saying to you earlier, I came away from it— my father gave me one rule, when I was reading books in college, he said, don't highlight everything or you'll just have a yellow book. Well, I have to admit, I pretty much have a yellow book or a yellow copy of your book. And what I was so fascinated by, among many things, was how you went about doing the research.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you conducted it, and how you went about sort of picking schools to look at? Because it wasn't a traditional research method, from what I understand.
Wendy Fischman: Sure. Well, thanks for asking that question. I have written this book with Howard Gardner, and we carried out a large national study of higher education, which involved 10 disparate colleges and universities in the country. And we interviewed 2,000 people on these 10 different campuses, representing all the major stakeholders of a college campus. So incoming students, graduating students, faculty, administrators, parents, young alums, those who have graduated five to 10 years before we interviewed them. And also job recruiters. And the study really came out of our interest in conducting research on the development of young people and how they think about their work and their education.
And through that earlier research, we were struck that so many young people had never really thought about the purpose of college. And so we began a large scale project to delve into people's views about college. We wanted to collect rigorous data about people's perspectives. And at the time that we started the project, there were lots of books about higher education. There still are, but they're mostly based on opinion. Or the books about higher education are just focused on one particular college or type of college. So we really wanted to collect perspectives across all the stakeholders of higher education that I just mentioned, and across a range of colleges that represented the thousands of colleges and universities that we have in our country.
So as you said, we did approach our data collection in a very different way. We spent more than five years actually collecting data. We visited the campuses multiple times. And we met with everybody in their own offices, in their own spaces. Some of the student interviews we did conduct on FaceTime or Skype. Remember Skype? That feels like—
Tim Fish: I do remember Skype!
Wendy Fischman: That was pre-Zoom. But we ate in the cafeterias. We worked out in the gyms. We went on admissions tours and information sessions, and then we sat down with them for, for an hour to an hour and a half. And we asked about 40 different questions that were very open ended. And this is where our study is different, because it wasn't based on survey, and it wasn't based on very direct questions.
And our questions actually are not only important to our findings, but the way that we approached the research is also, I think, instructive for educators also, because we listened very carefully to what people said, but also what they did not say. So our qualitative approach was very important. In our research, we did have some standard questions, like, what are your goals for college? What do you hope to get out of it? What are some of the major challenges of the college experience? But we also had some different creative kinds of questions, questions in which students and faculty and administrators couldn't give us the quote, unquote “canned” answers.
And in many ways, this led to our very interesting findings.
Tim Fish: I love the notion of taking the time to do the interview. Cause I think you're a hundred percent right. The difference between an interview and a survey is unbelievable. You know, when we've done surveys or schools have done surveys in the past, they always ask parents like, what's the most important thing about a school for you?
And the thing they'll say is great teachers. But a great teacher, and how you define a great teacher, can be quite different. And so sort of asking, well, how, how do you define a great teacher? Really does lead you to understand what someone thinks and why they're choosing a school. And so it must have been fascinating. And, you know, in the book, you say what you think the sort of principle purpose of college is. There was a line— I was like, there it is! And you say, "The principle purpose of college is to create or amplify intellectual capital that ideally should last and be drawn upon for a lifetime."
So the big term in there is intellectual capital. What do you think intellectual capital is? And how do you all define it?
Wendy Fischman: Sure. Great. Well, thank you. So we devised a concept, a new concept, called higher education capital. And as you said, this is what we believe should be the goal of college for students, is to build and amplify higher education capital. Briefly, higher education capital is the ability to attend, analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate on important issues. So it's what you used in planning for and facilitating this podcast. It's what I used in preparing for the questions that I thought you were going to ask me.
You had to think about our study, you had to read the book, decide on the major takeaways, craft good questions, come up with probes that you wanted to clarify, decide on some of the major takeaways. To figure out what others might wanna know, and maybe even connect it to some of your other podcasts or books or projects that you've read.
That's what we call higher education capital. It's what we did as researchers when we interviewed over 2,000 people. We wanted to make sense of what people were telling us. And indeed, it's what participants of our study demonstrated to us when they answered our questions also. Some demonstrated more HED cap, others demonstrated less HED cap.
Tim Fish: And HED cap is short for higher education capital.
Wendy Fischman: Exactly. So we scored our interviews, seven different questions that we asked every participant, and we also scored the entire interview. We scored these on a very simple basis from one to three, whether they had low HED cap, some HED cap, or a lot of HED cap. And in our scoring, we find that the responses to these seven specific questions was very similar to the scoring of the overall interview.
But we conceived of higher education capital to explain the qualitative differences in conversations we had with students. So when we asked students questions, we weren't looking for a right or wrong answer. We weren't looking for a response that would tell us specifically, oh, this student offered this suggestion, that makes it high HED cap.
That's not at all what we did. Instead, we looked at how they approached the question. Did they bring in responses that they maybe mentioned earlier, did they connect the dots for some of the other topics that we asked them about? Did they ask us good questions and good clarifying questions? So for example, when we ask participants to give us a title of a book that they might want to recommend to a graduating senior, without looking for HED cap, we would just be basing a response on the title of the book. Did this person give us, in our estimation, a good title? But that's not at all what we did.
In fact, sometimes students would say Moby Dick, and would get a low HED cap score. And other students would give us a children's book and get a high HED cap score, because what we were looking for was their reasoning, their rationale, how they approached the question, and that's what we wanted to measure.
We hope and expect that students who go to college will have the opportunity to develop and increase their own HED cap. And actually, students and parents should demand it. That's what they should be choosing colleges on. That's what they should be asking about. Rather than tout dining halls and schools' private islands, we wish that schools would promote their ability to increase HED cap. This is what should be the bottom line. And in fact, we think that school ranking should be based on what we call HED cap, and not simply the superficial measures that the rankings rely on. College is really the unique opportunity to focus on this.
Tim Fish: It sure is. And you're right. It is such a life skill. It's something you use all the time in everything you do. You know, when I was back at a school, and I was talking with students who had returned from their first or second year of college, and they would often come back, we ran this Thanksgiving Day breakfast where all the alums from the last five years could come back and hang out and eat pancakes with their friends.
And I would often ask students about what I call the engagement score of their college. That was my term. And what it, what it really focused on was this idea of how much are you finding at the college that you're engaging with complex ideas with other students? Now, of course, you're having fun and you're doing things college students do, but do you find that the college is a place of ideas, was the way that I would describe it. Right? Or do you find that most of the students are there for some other reason or don't seem to be engaging, or there isn't really this intellectual exploration, right. And students would give me a score. I had a one to five score. And I was always interested to see that, if students who attended the same schools would give me the same score.
Meaning, does one school actually seem to have a higher engagement score, or is it more about that student and who they're connecting with? Right. And what I did notice is that there was loosely some orientation, and it wasn't what I expected. It wasn't that the most selective schools always had the highest engagement score and so on.
And I'm curious, when you started looking for HED cap, this higher education intellectual capital. Did you notice any correlations with those schools that you looked at, from selectivity or other measures?
Wendy Fischman: Good question. So in general, across all of the students, which are a thousand students in our sample, we find that higher education capital increases over the course of college. And that's really good news, but we find that that happens in varying degrees at certain schools. And we need to be concerned about the schools in the sector that do not show substantial growth.
So actually, in fact, when we compare, interestingly, our young alums to our graduating seniors, we find that HED cap, higher education capital, doesn't grow that much after they graduate college. And that does once again highlight the importance of gaining this higher education capital while they are in college.
So we, we do find, and in our book we mentioned some patterns of schools, that— in which higher education capital does seem to get amplified more than others. We do not show that this happens along selectivity lines. Sometimes we were surprised by our findings, but what we do find is that schools that have specific missions around teaching and learning and amplifying intellectual capacities are the ones that do show more HED cap growth, and that can happen at a high selectivity school or at a low selectivity school. Our most important significant correlation comes up when we look at higher education capital and what we call our mental models. And so let me just take a minute to explain.
Tim Fish: Yeah, sure.
Wendy Fischman: In our book, we discern four different mental models for the approach to college. The first is inertial, which is the belief that college is just the next step after high school. The second is transactional, which is the understanding that college is a way to earn degrees, build resumes, get into graduate school. The third is exploratory, which is that the approach for college is an opportunity to investigate lots of different fields and disciplines, to marinate and try out new ideas. And the fourth is a transformational mental model, that the purpose of college is to reflect about who you are as a person, to question your own beliefs and values, and to ponder how you might wanna change or grow, with the expectation and aspiration that you will develop new ways of thinking about things, including yourself. And so when you think about these four different mental models, it is interesting to know that we do find that students who are transformational, do show more higher educational capital than those students who are transactional. And that's really important for two different reasons.
First, because it matters how you view the purpose of college. If you're viewing college as just a means to get a job, to get a degree, to network, to build a resume, to get good grades, you actually might not be getting as much out of college as you would be if you showed up to college with the expectation that you wanted to reflect on your beliefs and values and potentially take in learnings, try new things, and really investigate who you are as a person and who you want to become. Also, it's important because our study shows that over the course of college, more students become transformational about the college experience. And so this is promising, and leads us to believe that higher education capital and mental models can be amplified over the course of college.
Tim Fish: Yeah, that's so interesting. You know, it reminds me of this research that we've been doing at NAIS. We've been frankly quite obsessed with it, which is this research called Jobs-to-Be-Done thinking. It came from Clayton Christensen and Harvard Business School. And it's about why people make decisions. And in fact, Michael Horn, who did a lot of work with Clayton Christensen and others, and a guy named Bob Nesta, the Rewired Group, got together and did a bunch of interviews and wrote a book called Choosing College, on sort of what are the jobs to be done for college. And they actually found five jobs, which are similar in some ways to your mental models.
I think there's a lot of similarity between a job to be done and a mental model. Their, their jobs were, help me get into my best school. Right. So that notion of sort of competing to get in the best school. The other was, help me do what's expected of me. That idea might be a little bit of the inertial job, that it's just the next step, it's what is expected of me. The other is, help me get away. That that job was really around this notion of, I just gotta get outta my current circumstance and get somewhere different. The next one was, help me step it up. Right, which is a little bit probably of that transactional, and then help me extend myself. Right?
And what's interesting about that is that I don't, I see elements of the transformational, but I don't see it called out as distinctly as you all do. And what I'm curious about is, you know, the distribution of students across those jobs was, was transformational the largest? And then I'm curious, did faculty at universities have a different outlook, do they end up in a different group maybe than most of the students do?
Wendy Fischman: Yes. So one of our interests in carrying out this study was not only to learn about students, but also to learn about the other stakeholders on the college campus. And so in addition to interviewing a thousand students, we interviewed 500 faculty and administrators, as well as other adults that I mentioned earlier, parents, young alums, trustees, and job recruiters. And we very carefully kept the questionnaire and the questions that we asked these individuals the same across every interview.
Sometimes we had to tweak something, but we wanted to compare the responses of the different stakeholders. And in fact, we do find a lot of discrepancy. We often find that students and parents are aligned or in agreement about their views on college, what they hope to get out of it, what they think the point of college is. And then we find that faculty and administrators are often on their own island. They often have very different views than the students and the parents. And this is really important. So for example, while about half of students approach college with this transactional approach, fewer than 20% of students approach college with a transformational approach.
However, on the other hand, 80% of faculty and administrators expressed a transformational view of college, and fewer than 10% see college as a transactional experience.
Tim Fish: That's amazing. So there's a mismatch, real mismatch. Students and their parents are also, I imagine, in that transactional mode as well. Correct?
Wendy Fischman: Exactly. So while parents and students who are the consumers of the college experience are in agreement about what they want, faculty and administrators are in complete disagreement with their consumers about what college is about. And this is what causes a lot of what we call mission confusion. What the point of college should be about.
We also, by the way, do find that young alums are more often similar to the students and their parents. So we really do find that faculty are, and administrators, are really on their own. That they find that they're speaking a different language, that their knowledge and expertise is not really realized or valued on the college campus, and that they don't feel that their purpose is to help students find and prepare for jobs. They hope that students will find jobs, but that's not what they see as their principal purpose on campus. And this discrepancy is, is easy for people to understand when you hear faculty complain that while their door is always open, the students never come for office hours. And at the same time, students complain to us a lot that the faculty, they don't feel as if the faculty are there for them. And this is really a mismatch in expectation about what each should be doing while they're on the college campus. The reality is that students want help, but not in the form of academic office hours. They want other kinds of help.
They want help with job preparation, creating the best possible profile, networking, and sometimes support around mental health issues. Faculty do not see that as the primary purpose of their job.
Tim Fish: So that is so interesting. Cause if you think about, if you're a professor and you're designing your class, what lens are you looking through? You're looking through the lens of a transformational experience. So you're designing readings and discussions and ideas and assessments that are aligned to transformational.
And then you're a student. You walk into that class with a transactional mindset. You're about, how's this thing gonna help me get a job? And you're reading this book and like, why am I doing this? Right. And you can see this idea, this two different islands that we're on. What a fascinating concept. You know, I wanna switch gears for just a second.
I wanna talk about what you just hit on. This idea of the culture or lived experiences that students are finding on college campuses. You know, during the last 10 years, but in particular, the last three years in K-12 schools, we have been seeing an emerging crisis around wellbeing, mental health, and belonging.
I'm wondering, did your research churn up some of the greatest challenges that young people are experiencing or any students are experiencing on college campuses?
Wendy Fischman: Yeah. So those sound familiar, mental health was one of the biggest challenges that every stakeholder talked about. So while I just said there were a lot of discrepancies between the views of different stakeholders, actually, every constituency talked about mental health as being the biggest challenge on the college campus.
Tim Fish: And that doesn't matter if it was at a selective school, at a non-selective school, if it was a teacher, if it was an administrator or a student, everyone—
Wendy Fischman: Exactly.
Tim Fish: —talked about that being a huge issue in colleges today.
Wendy Fischman: Exactly. And this was in 2012. When we started in 2012, when we began our study, when mental health was not on, in the headlines or on everybody's minds, as it is now. And while there are many contributing factors, including COVID, this is not a consequence or result of COVID alone. And this was actually one of our biggest surprises of our study, is the amount of mental health issues that every group talked about. While 20% of students did volunteer their own mental health issues, even though we didn't ask them, almost everybody spoke about it. So nearly 80% of students are commenting on what they see on campus, everybody else's issues.
And just a word about mental health on the college campus. While some students did talk about severe issues, including bipolar disorder or suicide or major depression, the majority of students talked about mental health issues as they relate to performing well, doing well, getting A's, and the anxiety about not performing and compiling the best possible profile when they graduate in order to get the job.
Tim Fish: Wow. So this was not really about mental illness, although it was present in some. What we’re really talking about here with mental health is the, the causal drivers of it, it sounds like, were things like you're saying. Academic success, academic pressure, workload. These were the drivers that were causing mental health, the mental health crisis on the campuses. Is that a fair statement, do you think?
Wendy Fischman: Yes. Yes. So students were talking about their anxiety of not being perfect, their anxiety about not having a 4.0 grade point average, their worries that they were, they were not gonna be viewed well on campus or in the job market later, if they didn't get their straight A's. And some of this, we can talk later, I do believe comes from the K through 12 experience. But this is the majority of issues that students spoke with us about.
Tim Fish: And this was not just at super selective schools. This was at all the schools that you looked at –
Wendy Fischman: All the schools.
Tim Fish: Across the spectrum of selectivity.
Wendy Fischman: Exactly. All the schools. Now, while I did just say that every constituency agreed that mental health was the biggest problem, which is true, faculty sometimes understood these problems differently. So while they might say that students are struggling in some ways, they didn't always see this perfection, the angst to be perfect, as the major cause. They sometimes expressed different causes. And so that's also interesting.
You do learn a lot by having conversations with people. And, and when I do think about how we might change our K through 12 system or even the college landscape, I think understanding people and what their beliefs and perspectives are and making the time for conversation is one of the most important things that we can do.
Tim Fish: That's right on. You know, it, it, it really brings up for me, something I've spoken about on other episodes, this idea of the impact, I think, of social media, phones, that kind of connectivity on driving, also, lack of a sense of belonging and a sense of alienation.
You know, my daughter has spoken about when she's in college now, she's a rising senior, and has spoken about how, when I was in college in the eighties, we had it so much better. Cause we didn't have phones. She was like, you guys would just sit around and talk to each other, or you would do fun things together.
And she said, now everybody has their face in their phone. And I'm curious about, did you notice along with this mental illness, an increase in a lack of belonging, a feeling of alienation among students?
Wendy Fischman: Good question. So, as I've mentioned, we began our study in 2012, and the words belonging and alienation were not necessarily on the tip of everybody's tongues. But when we did analyze our data beginning in about 2018, we coded, we read every interview, to determine the degree to which students and faculty and administrators felt like they belonged or felt as if they were alienated.
We did talk about belonging and alienation, and we do in our book. This is a chapter in our book. It—to three different realms. So belonging and alienation to their academic program, to the peers, then thirdly, to their institution. We do find that overall, a third of students express feeling alienated from one or more of those three different realms. And that's important. While it's only a third, it's millions of college students nationwide. And so again, like mental health, this existed, even though students weren't using the term belonging or the term alienation, this existed long before COVID, long before remote school. Interestingly, they felt more alienated from their peers and from the institution. They felt more of a sense of belonging to their academic program when we compared the three different realms. And when we delved into what students were telling us, they acknowledge that they have trouble connecting with other peers on campus.
They feel as if they silo themselves and attract, and want to have conversations with, students who look like them and maybe believe in the things that they believe in. And they ask us, they recommend, that colleges begin to help them with communicating with people who are different than them. And it's interesting that beginning in 2012, students were expressing this.
They need help with diversity. Again, DEI wasn't a term that they used in, beginning in 2012, but this is what they were telling us. We want help with this. And we can't help but to think, this is the purpose of a liberal arts and science education. And yet so many students were completely missing this point of going to college, but they do recognize that they need help feeling a sense of belonging with their peers.
Tim Fish: That's so powerful, you know, and it really drives me to this question of what can we do in K-12 schools to begin to develop that HED cap, that higher education capital? To develop that sense of belonging, to build those skills around building connections with people and knowing how to do that. Do you have thoughts on that?
Wendy Fischman: I do have a lot of thoughts on this. Tim, I have four children of my own. Three now are in college. Well actually, two just graduated, but they were in college last year. So three, three in college, basically, and one high school student. So I've given a lot of thought to the K through 12 experience. Today high school has become more of an exercise about preparing students to get into college, rather than preparing them for the college experience.
And I do think there's a lot that we need to do to help students and also to help their parents. So, first, for example, in high school, or even earlier. This is when students are beginning to develop what I term the transactional mental model. We need to find ways in the high school experience and even maybe earlier, to incorporate these kinds of essential questions in our conversations with students, and also in our college counseling, so that they don't just form this very transactional view about college.
I think that teachers should be more open with students about their own college experience. Why not talk with students about their own goals that they had for college? What some of the challenges were that they faced, maybe even what they regretted? Possibly what some of their favorite courses were, what it was like to learn something that they didn't expect, maybe how it felt when they failed a test.
I think that the more teachers in high school can open up to students and talk about college, the better off we will be in terms of students understanding what the experience is, what it can be, and what it should be.
Relatedly, in our current work with college students, we're hearing a lot from them about their nervousness or fear about how to communicate perspectives on important issues. They're very nervous about being misunderstood and judged and labeled. And I think we're living in a really complex time right now, so this is understandable.
Tim Fish: We sure are. Yep.
Wendy Fischman: But I think we need to help students in high school and earlier help them talk about hot button issues. This might begin in private journals that they begin to keep, or in discussions in safe classrooms in high school, but we need to teach them how to respectfully disagree, or agree. How to debate on an issue, how to understand a range of perspectives. College students often complain that, as I mentioned before, that they don't know how to talk with others who are different from them. And I think this is really important before students go to college, that we address this.
Here's one last suggestion. One of our more surprising findings in our study is the similarities we find across students at all schools. These are students at schools that range in selectivity, in geographical location, in the mission of the college, residential or commuter campuses, but we find more similarities than differences in their words, their goals, and even their challenges. And this finding often challenges our assumptions about schools and various categories of selectivity. So I think at early stages, we should be helping students to understand that their goal is not about getting into the most selective college, because sometimes it may not make a difference. It's about finding the college that speaks to the student's goals, what they wanna get out of it.
And if they've thought about it and talked about it, they ought to be able to articulate it and then look for a school that matches with their particular goals. So many students don't think about these goals before they go to college. And so then they feel that their only goal is to get into the best or most selective college that they can get into.
And I think that we can unravel that belief and help students. We hope that students will say, I want to go to the college that builds the most higher education capital. That's what we hope.
Tim Fish: That's what you hope. That's fantastic. You know, Wendy, thank you so much for those suggestions. I too have four children, and I've thought an awful lot about this question. And some of my kids have already made it through college and thankfully have, have done well and have moved on, and hopefully I think they have a high degree of education capital, you know. But it, it also comes, for me, it comes back to this thing we've discovered in a lot of our conversations around the importance of giving students what we call agency. This idea of control over their own lives, the ability to explore their passions, their ability to develop mastery, this idea of sort of self-determination or self-efficacy about where they're going and why they're going there.
And when students have that, they can make that informed choice about the best college for them. And when they don't, they might chase that more transactional model, right? Or even that inertial model of college. And so I think we can be sort of investing more in the students. You know, a lot of the work that many of our schools are doing around thinking about mastery learning and moving away from transactional grade based thinking. These are all conversations that are so important, I think, to the future of how we think about school.
My last question for you, and this has been such a great conversation and thank you so much, is what are your greatest hopes for the future of education and for the future of higher ed?
Wendy Fischman: I would say that my biggest hope is that students will see college as a once in a life opportunity to learn and not just to earn. Earning is a benefit, but what we need college for is to help students learn. To learn about specific disciplines and domains and the possibilities for work, but also how to be a citizen of the world.
And I think students miss this point of college. And as we've discussed, in part, it's because of their parents' misconceptions about what college is, it's also about how our high schools haven't talked with students about what the purpose of college is, but we're gonna have a problem in our society if students only see the purpose of college as a way to improve their own self status in society.
Now, one of the things that we didn't talk about is that we find that students use the word "I" over "we" 11 times, so that students—
Tim Fish: 11 times more frequently, they use the word "I" over "we," when they're answering the questions?
Wendy Fischman: Over we. Exactly. And this only increases actually, as students get older and we find more of a discrepancy in that, in our young alums that we interviewed. And we wanna get students to focus on the “we.” How can we improve problems? How can we think about the environment, pandemics, homeless people? We need students who know how to approach these societal problems, first of all, to recognize them, second of all, to approach them from different perspectives, different views, to understand the perspectives and views of other people, so that we're not just focused on our own jobs and the "I."
And I guess my hope is that students grow their own intellectual capital, what we call higher education capital, so that they can not only have productive working lives, but also productive lives as citizens in a community.
Tim Fish: You know, that's so interesting. I've been reading, recently, a lot of the work that Arthur C. Brooks publishes in The Atlantic. Another Harvard educator, social scientist. And he talks a lot about happiness. And where does happiness come from? And, you know, and often we think happiness is associated with money, power, fame, et cetera.
And what he says is that actually all the research, all the social science research, shows that it's really associated with this notion of faith, being faith in something larger than yourself, it doesn't necessarily have to be explicitly religious. Family, this deep connections with members of your family, people you love. Friends, deep friendships, in-person, relational friendships, with all kinds of different people. And then having a job or something you do in your life that you find purpose in.
That idea of purpose is key. It has nothing to do, in fact, what he talks about is that there's almost no correlation between income and happiness once you get above a certain threshold. Once you get above a sort of normal, just able to live, you know, cost of living threshold, money doesn't track to happiness at all.
And yet in this transactional model, we just keep chasing it sometimes. And I think what we're really talking about is this idea of using college as an opportunity to explore those ideas, to go transformational, to think about yourself, to develop the intellectual capital, that's gonna help you in any job, and in all those other areas that lead to happiness. Because when I talk with families, what I hear most often is the number one thing that parents want for their children is for them to be happy in their lives, however they live them as they go forward.
This has been such a great conversation, Wendy. I just wanna say thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much for doing the research. Thank you so much for having the discipline to do 2,000 conversations and to code them. These insights are powerful, and I do hope that everyone in our schools reads your book, has conversations about it, and begins to think about how can we shape the K-12 experience to better prepare students for the college experience that can really lead them in the right direction for their lives.
This has been so lovely. Thank you so much.
Wendy Fischman: Thank you Tim, for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.