If you’d asked me a year ago why so many American college students are struggling, I’d have told you a familiar story: Rising tuition rates fund bloated administrations and build bougier freshman dorms. Broken teaching styles don’t give students the knowledge or skills they need. And then there are the students themselves, widely reputed to be lazy, “functionally illiterate,” ChatGPT-addicted phone zombies.
There is truth to these charges, and growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, primed me to believe the accusations against students in particular. When Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves wanted to show just how much the modern male is struggling, he used my hometown as a case study. “Thanks to an anonymous benefactor, students educated in the city’s K–12 school system get all their tuition paid at almost any college in the state,” he wrote. But though the “program put rocket boosters on female college completion rates,” the “men’s rates didn’t budge.” Literally no change.
After a few years of teaching in Kalamazoo high school and college settings, I wasn’t surprised by those findings. It’s not uncommon for new educators to be crestfallen when their expectations meet the reality of classrooms in an age of smartphones and artificial intelligence. But as a Christian educator who connects education to knowing and imitating Christ, I was slowly growing a unique sense of discouragement. Many students are more interested in doing as little work as possible to get as high a grade as possible than in anything to do with Jesus.
But then I showed up to teach at Northpoint College, a Christian school nearby. I expected more of the same: doomscrolling during lectures and using chatbots with excessive force. Instead, by a few weeks in, I was texting every professor I know to enthuse that I’d never seen a group of students so devoted to education.
AI-use detection was zero on all assignments. The average paper looked better than my own submissions to academic journals. By the end of the semester, the biggest complaint I got in course evaluations was that I wasn’t challenging the students enough.
All my students were impressive, but having read Reeves’s work, I was especially struck by the men. Of the ten guys in my class, six were planning to get PhDs, and the rest had lined up impressive careers or made concrete plans to work at local churches after graduation. In between classes, I started interrogating other professors to see if their experiences lined up with mine. They did, unanimously.
I had to understand what was going on, so I reached out to Trent Roberts, Northpoint’s president. His account of his school’s success was in many ways what you’d expect from the leader of an Assemblies of God-affiliated college. The Holy Spirit figured prominently. But Roberts also highlighted Northpoint’s unusual pairing of very high expectations with abundant validation and resources for students.
Northpoint offers bachelor’s degrees but mostly uses master’s-level textbooks, and anything below a C is a failing grade. But the college introduces these expectations by explaining to students that high standards match high hopes.
In practice, this is a system built around relationships. When the academic dean reviewed my syllabus, his most notable change was adding my personal phone number and email. And where in previous roles I could count on one hand the number of times students reached out for help, at Northpoint my inbox is avalanched by student emails every week. That’s the kind of culture the school has cultivated, asking a lot from students but never leaving them to flounder.
Roberts’s account of the college’s approach reminded me of the work of psychologist David Yeager, who’s known for his research on motivating young people. In one of his studies, scholars had a teacher correct one group of students’ essays while leaving no additional comments. For another group, the teacher corrected just as rigorously but also left a “wise feedback” comment that said, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” The wise-feedback group made twice as many revisions to their essays as the group with no encouragement.
Yeager argues that young people want and need this kind of affirmation. That’s not because they’re vain, selfish, or obsessed with status, he says, but because recognition and respect are to young people what food and sleep are to infants: “core needs that, when satisfied, can unlock better motivation and behavior.” As Roberts and I talked, his philosophy of education at Northpoint struck me as a Spirit-driven version of this idea. “Our job is to make students feel capable,” he told me, “and to provide them whatever they need to reach our standards.”
In an increasingly postliterate age, faculty may be tempted to lower their standards, boosting students’ immediate performance but undermining long-term growth. But Northpoint is flourishing by raising expectations, asking students to grapple with “desirable difficulties” that build character alongside knowledge—while providing students with the relational and academic support to grapple well.
And generally, young people take that opportunity when offered. “It drives me nuts when older generations complain about Gen Z like they’re incompetent,” Roberts said. “It makes the next generation more likely to live out those critiques like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Stories of generational decline don’t have to come true.
Nor does the golden age of the university have to be in the past, and Christian colleges like Northpoint are perfectly positioned to train the next generation well. As Oklahoma Baptist University professor Alan Noble has noted, many problems present in secular universities aren’t occurring in Christian higher education to the same degree. With Noble, I’d argue this is because Christian institutions are grounded in a moral and theological understanding of education that their counterparts lack.
Christian schools should consciously train students to see the prestige, wealth, or opportunities their educations provide as secondary goals. “The end then of learning,” as John Milton put it in Of Education, “is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him.”
Our calling as Christian educators is not only to share knowledge but also to challenge our students to live into their status as “heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:12–17)—the utmost honor imaginable. It’s easy to blame the downfall of higher ed on 18-year-olds, but if we want students who don’t cheat with ChatGPT, then we need to teach students that getting a good grade is less important than imitating Christ.
Griffin Gooch is a writer, speaker, and professor currently working on his doctorate at University of Aberdeen. He writes most frequently on Substack.
