Assessing Academic Flourishing
- Tyler VanderWeele
- Oct 20, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
Restoring mission in higher education.
By Tyler J. VanderWeele Ph.D.
Key points
Many colleges and universities aspire to grand visions of the transformation of students.
College life has the potential to help students flourish academically and in life.
Assessing flourishing has the potential to change our discussions and focus.
Receive Tyler's monthly insight and research updates from the Human Flourishing Program team.
University Vision and Mission
Many of our colleges and universities put forward admirable mission and vision statements. Harvard University states on its website, “The mission of Harvard College is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society. We do this through our commitment to the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.” As part of its mission, William and Mary states, “Through close mentoring and collaboration, we inspire lifelong learning, generate new knowledge, and expand understanding. We cultivate creative thinkers, principled leaders, and compassionate global citizens equipped for lives of meaning and distinction.”
What many of these colleges and universities are aspiring to is the transformation of students, the enabling of their flourishing, and the empowering of them to help society flourish. For many students, these institutions may well succeed at accomplishing this. For others, college life may be a struggle.
Colleges and universities of course carefully track graduation rates, along with the employment and income of their graduates. During university life, surveys are often administered on mental health and on instances of bias and discrimination. Prior to students’ arrival on campus, considerable attention may be given to standardized test scores and grade point averages. All of these things are undoubtedly important, and many of them form the basis of college rankings. However, the aggregation of these various matters still seems to miss the grander visions of flourishing and transformation often embedded in the mission statements of our institutions of higher education.
One way to broaden the focus and aims of our colleges and universities is to also broaden the assessments being used. We can better assess whether students are flourishing. We can better assess whether our colleges and universities are flourishing as communities. We can better assess whether university life is helping students to grow in wisdom and in justice, and whether students are being prepared for leadership and citizenship so as to bring about a more flourishing world.
Academic Flourishing
At the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, we are making efforts to bring about such expanded assessments to college and university campuses. Our own flourishing measure, focused around the six domains of happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security has been used now on numerous campuses, including either campus-wide efforts or more specific studies at University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, West Point, Yale University, Harvard University, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and several others. We have, more recently, also been carrying out assessments on whether colleges and universities are flourishing as a community, and we’ve adapted our community well-being measure to college and university contexts. Such assessments include evaluating whether there are good relationships within the community; proficient leadership to provide vision and direction; healthy structures and practices to sustain the life of the community and to resolve conflict; a sense of belonging, welcome, and satisfaction; and a shared common mission.
Most recently, in a newly published paper on academic flourishing, we have further developed a series of questions on student formation, evaluating their perceptions on the extent to which university life has helped them to find meaning and purpose, to grow in character, to develop the capacity for critical thought and for leadership, and to flourish as a person. The questions cover a broad range of matters, but matters concerning which many colleges and universities rightly aim at transformation. As we've argued elsewhere, even the pursuit of the cognitive and epistemic aims of colleges and universities require some degree of character formation. The 24 questions we currently are using in this regard—questions we think students and university staff alike would benefit from reflecting on—are as follows (each is self-rated from 0=“Has not helped” to 10=“Has helped a lot”):
Cognitive and Epistemic Capacities:
To what extent has university life helped you to increase your knowledge?
To what extent has university life helped you to think clearly?
To what extent has university life helped you to pursue truth?
To what extent has university life helped you to recognize when you are in error so as to be able to change your understanding?
To what extent has university life helped you understand perspectives different from your own?
To what extent has university life helped you learn how to express yourself well?
Virtues for Academic Flourishing:
To what extent has university life helped you to become more honest?
To what extent has university life helped you to develop courage?
To what extent has university life helped you to have a love of learning?
To what extent has university life helped you to become more wise?
To what extent has university life helped you to become more just?
To what extent has university life helped you to better lead a moral life?
Citizenship and Societal Contribution:
To what extent has university life helped you develop character strengths in order to make meaningful contributions to society?
To what extent has university life helped you understand what you can contribute to your country?
To what extent has university life helped equip you to positively change the world?
To what extent has university life helped you to treat everyone respectfully?
To what extent has university life helped you in creative problem solving when working with others?
To what extent has university life helped you to work with people with diverse political and religious beliefs?
Meaning and Growth:
To what extent has university life helped you to find meaning in life?
To what extent has university life helped you to appreciate beauty?
To what extent has university life helped you to flourish as a person?
To what extent has university life helped you to pursue your goals?
To what extent has university life helped you learn how to live your life in a healthy way?
To what extent has university life helped you learn how to have good relationships with others?
We have piloted these questions with a number of colleges and universities this academic year, including campus-wide data collection at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, to help understand in what ways students perceive university life as having contributed to their own personal and character development, and how this might vary across students and institutions. In fact, through our collaboration with the Oxford Character Project, four of these questions (on growth in wisdom, justice, contributing to society, and positively changing the world) were embedded in the Wall Street Journal’s Annual College Rankings this past year so as to better take into account these matters of character. Examining how students perceive their institutions as contributing in these ways provides an alternative view of college life. We'll be analyzing this data further in the months ahead but, perhaps unsurprisingly, even a crude comparison of means of different institutions on these questions gives a rather different perspective than most traditional college rankings as we've described in our recent op-ed!
Broadening Our Focus
We are expanding this work on academic flourishing in the year ahead and inviting colleges and universities everywhere to join this Academic Flourishing Initiative. We've prepared a brief two-page description of the initiative, and more information in a longer brochure, and on our website. We'll also be hosting a webinar at 1:00pm EST on August 20th, 2025, for more information as well. If your college or university might be interested in participating in this work on student flourishing, community flourishing, and academic flourishing, please do contact Brendan Case (brendan_case@fas.harvard.edu) and our Associate Director for Impact Reece Brown (reece_brown@fas.harvard.edu) for further information, or write to us at academicflourishing@fas.harvard.edu.
These academic flourishing assessments are intended to supplement, not replace, more traditional metrics. Our conventional college assessments of graduation and income, of mental health and discrimination, and of academic test scores are all critical, and should not be neglected, but we should also broaden our focus. We should consider flourishing both academically and in life more generally. What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, what we aim for, and the policies put in place to achieve those aims. We hope that this work will help enable the flourishing of students and perhaps also help restore a focus to the beautiful mission and vision statements of so many of our colleges and universities around the world.
Receive Tyler's monthly insight and research updates from the Human Flourishing Program team.
References
VanderWeele, T.J. and Case, B. (2025). Academic flourishing and student formation. International Journal of Wellbeing, 15(2),5003, 1-29.
Case, B. W. and VanderWeele, T. J. (2025). Virtues for academic flourishing: an argument for the importance of character in higher education. British Journal of Educational Studies, 73:637-654.
Kristjánsson, K. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2025). The proper scope of education for flourishing. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 3-4:634-650.
VanderWeele, T.J. and Hinton, C. (2024). Metrics for education for flourishing: A framework. International Journal of Wellbeing, 14, Article 3197: 1–35.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2022). The importance, opportunities, and challenges of empirically assessing character for the promotion of flourishing. Journal of Education, 202:170–180.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2019). Measures of community well-being: a template. International Journal of Community Well-Being, 2:253–275.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 31:8148–8156.
