Higher education cannot neglect social-emotional learning

One significant impact of the pandemic on higher education is how it has shifted the view of the role of social-emotional learning.

The psychological toll the pandemic took on young people especially – due to isolation, dislocation and the death and illness of loved ones – has heightened awareness of the importance of social-emotional skills.

For many years, the higher education community has recognised the importance of the so-called soft skills that underpin employability, such as creativity, grit, problem-solving and empathy. But they also help students to live fruitful personal lives and enhance their overall mental health and emotional resilience, so should not be seen only as a tool for getting and keeping jobs.

Universities need to make social-emotional learning part of their operations if they want to keep their students engaged, thriving and learning. It is no longer sufficient to assume that the building of these skills, traditionally emphasised by primary and secondary schools, is enough.

Interesting educational models

We are starting to see interesting tertiary educational models emerging that put social-emotional learning front and centre, with programmes that seek to build new skills in students and reinforce ones learned before they move to the tertiary level.

The South Africa-based Maharishi Institute, for example, uses transcendental meditation techniques to help students who struggle academically due to post-traumatic stress disorder.

This practice is helping more students make it through college to graduation, putting them on a path to higher-paying jobs. In a recent interview, the institute’s CEO Taddy Blecher stressed that to reap these benefits, institutions must provide pre-planned, budgeted, purposeful focus and training on social-emotional resilience.

In other words, it doesn’t just magically happen.

In Mexico, Universidad Tecmilenio, which provides secondary and tertiary education to more than 60,000 students, makes social-emotional learning one of its core pillars at the curriculum design phase. Tecmilenio places a strong emphasis on positive psychology, well-being and happiness.

Another institution moving in this direction is Georgia Tech in the United States, which has developed a support system with a strong social-emotional component aimed at preventing dropouts. As online and hybrid offerings continue to expand, limiting dropouts will be an issue of growing importance.

Why social-emotional skills matter

While much of this work is still at an early stage, there are already some lessons to share. Firstly, although these skills should be nurtured at an early age, universities cannot assume that this has happened or, if it has, that such learning is sufficient. The skills need to be integrated into higher education too.

Secondly, it is important to measure these skills throughout the student journey, from admissions to student enrolment and graduation.

Thirdly, educators should remain mindful of how closely related the issue is to student employability, especially in an age when more and more jobs are being done remotely and digitally, requiring high levels of emotional resilience and a sharpening of cross-cutting skills such as digital skills, teamwork, resilience and time management.

Fourthly, recruiters are increasingly looking for these skills too and they claim that they will tip the balance among candidates in young talent selection processes.

Innovating for student resilience

Universities are having to reinvent themselves in all sorts of ways. Amid the pandemic, we have witnessed higher education’s ability to adapt to an online learning mode of instruction at short notice.

Universities have fine-tuned existing technologies and expanded them to reach a much wider swath of the student population, notably 18- to 22-year-olds and working adults enrolled in campus-based universities.

Innovative solutions were developed on the fly to ensure affordable connectivity for students. Kenya-based Strathmore University, for instance, negotiated data packages with telecom providers and subsidised them to ensure students from lower-income households would have continued access. Many other universities in emerging markets followed a similar path.

But while the experience has been a success on the technology side, it has been a more mixed picture as regards educational outcomes. This is partly because most of the focus has been on how to deliver education remotely and far less on how learning by individual students was taking place.

Now universities are starting to pay greater attention to, and increase investments in, developing social-emotional skills, not only to prevent technological advances from negatively impacting educational outcomes but also to prepare their graduates for an increasingly competitive labour market and a more complex society.

A university is not the only place where students can develop social-emotional skills, but they should at least be able to acquire some while attending.

Alejandro Caballero is principal education specialist at the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank.