A New Perspective of Student Success
By Drew Bartkiewicz, CEO of Copeify, Combat Veteran, Bronze Star Recipient
When we consider what we want for the 43 million young adults in America, what would be the answer? Would we suggest that they need more money? More things? More games? I seriously doubt it. The last 60 days have created an opportunity to revisit “student success” as something bigger, broader…maybe even better. If these circumstances have even introduced the deeper considerations of happiness, then revisiting student success after Covid19 is one outcome I am glad to see.
For those who are on the second half of their life‘s journey, we probably all would acknowledge that the simplest things in life are not only free, they are the essence of being human. Often times young adults do not see the clarity and the accessibility of this definition of success. It takes us too many years to feel real success, of being present with people that care for you and enjoying the quiet gratification that you matter in the lives of others. With this unexpected time at home and slower pace of life, reflections of success are likely becoming more aligned with what actually makes a young adult happy.
Success is often associated later in life with contentment, wisdom and utter appreciation for the soundness of your health and your ability to exercise a quiet mind. But when we are young adults, this nebulous path to success is often mired with distractions and diversions, creating a restless and often disconcerting sense that whatever would make us happy is either too hard to identify or continually escaping our reach. Hopelessness is on the rise. In a recent study, 36% of adolescent girls in the US self-reported depression before graduating high school, 25% of girls in the UK before age 14, and 70% of US teens age 13-17 said that anxiety and depression are the most critical issues facing themselves or their peers (Pew Research Center, 2019).
As a result of growing social media compulsion and relentless connectivity to peers, student success gets narrowly defined for too many young adults as an unsolvable answer to an unthinking question.
Drew Bartkiewicz, CEO of Copeify, Combat Veteran, Bronze Star Recipient
What I have witnessed in working with over 30 educators of high schools and colleges, is that the missions of student success and student wellness are too narrowly managed by too few people. It’s a scale problem. According to recent Pew Research, the number of severely depressed teenagers went from 2 million to 3.2 million from 2007 to 2017. Among girls, the rate was even higher; in 2019, one in five reported experiencing major depression. Of 2,468 inner-city adolescents surveyed, nearly 50% of males and 25% of females had moderate or severe feelings of hopelessness. America, we have a problem we can solve.
With mobile technology (yes even software), we have a unique opportunity to dramatically shift this generational perception of success and happiness, to better serve young adults at a much earlier life stage, in the mobile medium they know. The proximity of mobile devices affords us a rare window to begin to shape a more lasting definition and condition of success for these young adults. I was a student of managing stress and happiness for the better part of my youth, at West Point, then Italy and the Gulf War. My environment forced upon me a deeper question to ask myself, “what does success actually mean to me? what really makes me happy?”
Over those 10 years of young adulthood, I realized that stress and wellness, discipline and dreams, were not mutually exclusive; they are necessary companions to even realize success, to discover a more lasting condition for happiness.
The overwhelming burden of student success programs at most high schools and universities is not a result of ill prepared faculty and administrators. But rather, this missed opportunity is a function of young people spending 4 to 6 hours a day in front of a digital screen, on their desktop or in the palm of their mobile hands. But herein lies the new opportunity to deliver, at scale, the promise and the possibility of student success and happiness conditioning for a much larger and more diverse population than ever before.
We can shape software now to impact a most universal challenge for all young adults; how does a student define and pursue success, not for a grade, but for a greater pursuit of meaning and happiness?
Copeify is designed to be this steady source of substance and success conditioning. The goal of the cognitive learning app is to deliver earlier in the young person’s life that inevitable lesson that success is really quite achievable and attainable to practically anyone in the world. And true success always considers happiness at its core. The anonymous Copeify system is based upon life experiences and algorithms, intermixed with questions about health, leadership, purpose and service. The content generates a clean, rich and consistent interaction to help young adults reflect and iterate upon what success really means for them. Copeify is a high frequency, low touch training system to make student success something more daily, more regular and even more attainable.
We just have to meet these young adults where they are, delivering student success and happiness clues in the same frequency and modality as any other digital networks, games, follies and mediums. This is the student success puzzle Copeify aims to solve, especially to reach underserved and inner city environments that may lack the coping support needed.
As a society, there’s been no better time than to shine a bright light of purposeful technology into the hopelessness void for our 43 million young adults. Our early results on Copeify demonstrate that these young adults would not only embrace this conditioning for student success, but they would gladly share their success with others at a much younger age than any generation before.
So if there is one silver lining to Covid19, then I see it as inviting young adults to buckle down, manage their own curve of stress and wellness, and think about what matters most to them. The pursuit of happiness and true success is a much deeper and patient inner journey than a chaotic campus life would have one believe. Let’s remind young adults of that, every single day.
If we are lucky, we will see millions of young adults pursuing student success - maybe even an entire lifetime of success - from a much deeper place in their hearts and minds.
The students of life will operate in a wellness band that creates a resilience and reward system uniquely their own, a paradigm to pursue their own definition of happiness, and what is a better outcome of student success than that?