John Wells, President, Young Harris College

In an interview with Focus:, President John Wells of Young Harris College discussed the impact of technology on how students learn, and highlighted the importance of problem-solving and flexibility in today’s higher education landscape. “Our traditional emphasis on liberal arts is going to become increasingly important as we teach people what it means to be flexible with their thinking and to be problem solvers,” said Wells.

What changes over the past year have most impacted Young Harris College, and in what ways?

Over the course of the last several months, we have been establishing the Center for Professional Readiness and Experiential Programs. Our goal is to make certain that when you come to Young Harris for an education you know we take very seriously the task of helping and teaching our students how to learn.We recognize that with superintelligence and the rapid advancement of AI and robotics, our workforce development will need to look very differently. Our traditional emphasis on liberal arts is going to become increasingly important as we teach people what it means to be flexible with their thinking and to be problem solvers. 

In this particular center that we are building, we’re going to make certain that every student has some personal finance, business ethics, and leadership opportunities. Our goal is to make sure that we’re preparing our students for the world of work in a rapidly changing environment of employment.

The college is well-recognized for career education and development. What is the college doing differently to prepare students for successful careers?

One factor is that we want to make sure every student has a firm understanding of money and personal finance. We don’t take anything for granted in terms of what understanding of investments students come to college with and their understanding of how to build wealth over time, so all our students moving forward will be exposed to a rigorous education in terms of how to build wealth and be successful over time. 

We are putting in place a very aggressive career services model; career services at a lot of colleges has just tended to be an office that’s maybe tucked away in the administration building somewhere and students who find it are able to access its resources, but at Young Harris we’re being much more proactive, matching what the students are doing in the classroom with how they can apply that in the professional world. 

Because we are in a beautiful area surrounded by a national forest, we’re using our outdoor setting as well to provide students with outdoor leadership opportunities so they can be confident in the world and really develop the skills they need to be successful. 

And finally we are creating a structured ethics curriculum. There is no quicker way to destroy a career than having an ethical lapse, and we want to make certain that our students and alumni have the ability to problem solve not just the things that need solving in terms of analytics but also in the increasingly morally complex world in which we live. Students need to be able to understand how to morally and ethically solve problems.

What trends are you seeing in higher education nationally that could reshape how colleges operate over the next decade?

We know that students learn differently today, as they’re coming of age in a digital-heavy world. We know from neurological research that students’ approaches to learning have become significantly different. There is a profound difference between approaching the world through the page, which is where we were up until 30 years ago, versus approaching the world through multiple screens. If you’re approaching the world through screens, you have the tendency to need an image in front of you and it sometimes makes it less likely that you’ll think abstractly. One of the things that we are doing in leveraging our outdoor setting at Young Harris is giving students in-person experiences. When you are in one of the most biodiverse regions on the entire North American continent, giving students the opportunity to have the individual personal experiences in the outdoors, studying from a scientific perspective, from leadership development and even from a poetic perspective, really gives students a hands-on approach to learning that perhaps they don’t get when learning is so screen-heavy. Now, to be sure we’re an institution that’s invested mightily in technology, our classrooms are smart classrooms, but we also recognize that students need to have real-world experiences as part of that learning experience.

What are the biggest opportunities and challenges ahead for the college, and how are you preparing for them?

A problem that all higher education faces are devices like phones. Just because this device gives you ready access to a tremendous amount of information doesn’t mean that you necessarily know how to curate that information, how to really recognize what information has factual veracity, and what information doesn’t. Young Harris, as well as all higher education, is committed to helping students make sense of information overload.

Where we are today is very different from a half century ago, where maybe if you didn’t come from a family of means you didn’t have access to a lot of information because you didn’t have magazine subscriptions,or you didn’t have access to books. Now, information is all around us, but what information is really useful? What stands up to interrogation and investigation? What’s the difference between advertising, propaganda, and truth? 

Higher education is in a very unique situation right now of helping people to navigate their way through an information bridge in a sometimes factually impoverished world.

How is the economic climate, including inflation and shifting labor demands, affecting the role of colleges in workforce development?

It’s still a bit soon to see how tariffs are going to have an impact, but we have certainly seen over the course of the last several years what it means to have students who come wanting to make certain that their investment in time and resources is going to give them an advantage in the market. One of the things that students and their families have been telling us is that living in a world where we’ve had inflation return and where we’ve had a sense of a little indeterminacy about what the future is going to hold, a place such as Young Harris that invests in helping students develop flexible ways of thinking and giving them the habits of mind to make them successful is highly important. There is a broad awareness that from our changing political landscape to the rapidly evolving technological landscape, the world we have when we exit the 2020s is going to be a very different world from that when we entered the 2020s. This is a significant decade. It isn’t just static skills that you need; you need the ability to evolve and to be flexible, and Young Harris is certainly committed to that. 

It’s a challenge to make certain that people understand that just because the world is the way it is in 2026, it doesn’t give you any guarantees that that’s the way it’s going to be in 2027 or 2030. Things are changing rapidly. It matters when you learn at a young age how to be flexible in your thinking and how to be a problem solver.

What impact do you hope to make as president in the next few years and how do you define long-term success?

I think success for any college president comes down to whether they left the institution healthier than they found it. It is my goal to do that. I’ve been associated with Methodist-related higher education for much of my career and I want to make sure that this tradition continues. Also, the proof of the success of any college is whether or not our alumni are successful. I want to make sure that we don’t just give our students what they need to make a living, but that we give them everything they need to make a life. That is the measure of success.