Harvard’s Making Caring Common project, in collaboration with the Center for Innovation in College Admission at the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), released Turning the Tide in 2026: Preparing Students for Lives of Caring and Purpose, a report outlining the critical role of college admissions leaders, high schools, and parents in preparing teens to be ethical community members and citizens. Drawing on conversations with dozens of college admissions deans, the report also makes the case that colleges, parents, and high schools shouldn’t expect teens to have a single purpose or passion but should instead help teens clarify what they find meaningful and how their values are connected to their college choices.
“We are in a moral free fall in this country,” says Dr. Richard Weissbourd, Faculty Director of Making Caring Common. “Americans struggle to engage constructively across differences, often retreating into division and demonization. There’s too much hostility in our public life and unchecked self-interest is too common. And our research shows ‘34% of teens and 51% of young people ages 19-25 report lacking meaning or purpose or both.’ That’s a huge problem, but one we believe college admissions leaders, schools, and parents can do a lot to address.”
The report, Making Caring Common’s fourth in the Turning the Tide series, describes the urgent need to help young people develop six moral and civic capacities: caring across differences, humility, curiosity, valuing the truth, upholding principles of human rights, and a sense of collective responsibility.
The report also provides college admissions leaders with action steps they can incorporate into their admissions process in order to better assess and weigh these capacities when considering prospective students.
“A student’s academic journey should do more than just prepare them for careers,” said Angel B. Pérez, NACAC CEO. “It should also prepare them to be engaged community members, critical thinkers, and compassionate leaders. That’s why we are excited to collaborate with Making Caring Common on this important report.”
Making Caring Common released its first Turning the Tide report in 2016, with hundreds of college deans and admissions leaders endorsing the report, affirming the need to value students’ genuine love of learning alongside qualities like caring, honesty, and fairness. This new report builds on that work, also expanding the role schools and parents play.
“We’ve seen some encouraging progress over the past ten years,” says Trisha Ross Anderson, Making Caring Common’s Senior Director of Higher Education and College Admission Initiatives. “But there’s so much more to do—both for college admissions leaders, high schools, and parents of college-bound students—and the work is more urgent than ever.”
Says Weissbourd, “Together with NACAC’s Center for Innovation in College Admission, we’re renewing the call. We’re asking college admissions leaders, schools, and parents to help cultivate students’ capacity to contribute to their communities and the common good and to find meaningful purposes and goals. We're also suggesting ways to reduce toxic achievement pressure.”
The free report is available today at MakingCaringCommon.org.
Making Caring Common, a program of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, supports educators, parents, and caregivers in cultivating in children and young adults the capacities to care for others, to act with decency and integrity, and to pursue justice and the common good.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), founded in 1937, is an organization of more than 28,000 professionals from around the world dedicated to serving students as they make choices about pursuing postsecondary education.
