The Making Caring Common project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been working for about 8 years to elevate the importance of raising caring, justice-minded children and to provide resources to teachers and parents to encourage children to care about others and the common good, treat people well day to day, and come to understand and seek fairness and justice. Making Caring Common Director and Senior Lecturer Richard Weissbourd and colleagues also consider ways to make ethical character more central in college admissions and higher education as well.

“We do a lot of work trying to send a signal through college admissions that not just academic and athletic achievement are important, but ethical character is important,” Weissbourd said.

The team has worked with over 200 admissions departments around the country, and is currently collaborating with the Common Application.

While the admissions process might encourage high school students to reconsider the primacy of achievement, what happens when students arrive at universities? The Making Caring Common Team explores ideas to expand higher education to be more diverse and flexible in ways that are affordable and cultivate character in a new white paper, “Innovation and Justice: Reinventing Selective Colleges.”

“I think there should be strong encouragement – not a requirement but strong encouragement – for all college students to do some form of service,” Weissbourd said. “Hopefully a certain kind of service: service that’s well structured, where they have choices about what kind of service they do, where they are in diverse groups, where they are coming to understand aspects of our humanity and different kinds of people, learning how to treat people with dignity.”

One way to achieve this is to make service affordable for students and to find more flexible ways for students to take classes.

“I think it would be a great thing if every university in the country said to its students, if you want to do a year of service during your undergraduate years, we’re going to reduce your tuition significantly, and you can take courses online at the same time — a few asynchronous, a couple synchronous courses—as well as get credit for your service. Synchronous courses are more expensive, but asynchronous courses don’t need to be expensive over time,” Weissbourd said. “This could be a low cost, really meaningful way for students to take a year or more off campus with cohorts of other students being engaged in meaningful work, getting credit for it, and not having to delay graduation because they can take at least a few courses online. Students might take online courses in history, sociology and many other fields that deepen their field experiences.”

“I think we have an extraordinary moment, that we’ve got to rebuild the country,” Weissbourd said. “We could rebuild it the same way or we could rebuild it differently. And I think young people could play a very important role in providing service.”