What does it mean to learn at university?
For decades, higher education has largely emphasized knowledge acquisition, disciplinary expertise, critical thinking, and academic achievement. Yet students do not enter the university as purely cognitive beings; they learn while experiencing uncertainty, motivation, frustration, conflict, a sense of belonging, collaboration, and expectations about their personal and professional futures. This raises an important question: Can we fully understand university learning without considering its social and emotional dimensions?
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) offers one way of addressing this question. According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), SEL is the process through which young people and adults develop and apply knowledge, skills, and attitudes to understand themselves, manage emotions, establish supportive relationships, demonstrate empathy, pursue goals, and make responsible decisions. In fact, its framework identifies five interrelated areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Importantly, these competencies are not restricted to childhood; they can be developed across the lifetime, including adulthood.
Why, then, should SEL matter in higher education?
Research suggests that social and emotional dimensions are meaningfully connected to students’ academic experiences. A large meta-analysis by MacCann and colleagues, involving more than 42,000 participants, found a significant association between emotional intelligence and academic performance. The authors suggest that this relationship may operate through mechanisms such as regulating academic emotions and developing social relationships, while also cautioning that the evidence does not establish causality. More specifically, a 2025 systematic review of SEL implementation among college students identified 26 studies and highlighted institutional support, educator preparation, and cultural relevance as important conditions for effective implementation.
However, this evidence invites a broader question. Should SEL be understood simply as another set of skills that individual students are expected to acquire? I would argue that it should not.
If social and emotional learning is genuinely part of education, then universities also have a responsibility to create environments in which such learning can take place. How? SEL can be embedded in classroom interactions, collaborative learning, mentoring, reflective practices, teacher-student relationships, conflict resolution, student participation, curriculum design, and institutional policies. In effect, CASEL itself adopts a systemic perspective, emphasizing that social and emotional development is shaped by relationships, learning environments, and coordinated practices rather than by isolated interventions.
From this perspective, SEL in higher education is not merely about helping students become more resilient, manage stress, or perform better academically. It is also about recognizing that education involves the whole person. I consider that universities should prepare people not only to know, but also to relate, participate, make decisions, collaborate, and contribute to society.
Perhaps, then, the question is no longer whether social and emotional learning belongs in higher education. The more important question is: How can universities intentionally cultivate social and emotional learning without reducing it to another individual responsibility, but instead making it part of the educational experience itself?
References
- CASEL. (2020). CASEL’s SEL framework: What are the core competence areas and where are they promoted?Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.
- MacCann, C., Jiang, Y., Brown, L. E. R., Double, K. S., Bucich, M., & Minbashian, A. (2020). Emotional intelligence predicts academic performance: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146(2), 150–186. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000219
- Wang, D., & Ishak, Z. (2025). Unveiling the implementation of social-emotional learning among college students: A systematic literature review. International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research, 24(5), 376–399. Retrieved from https://www.ijlter.net/index.php/ijlter/article/view/2322
