This past year was one of the most challenging in recent memory for American higher education. Colleges and universities navigated unprecedented volatility, declining public trust, and conflicts that tested campus communities across the country. Against that backdrop, we spent 2025 asking a straightforward question: When institutions invest in building dialogue capacity, what actually changes?

This year’s program data offers clear answers.

Live Programs: Building Capacity That Lasts

Our professional development programs are designed to equip faculty and staff with practical skills for facilitating constructive dialogue. What matters most is whether participants actually use what they learn—and feel more prepared to navigate difficult moments on campus.

The outcomes from our Dialogue Facilitation Certification program suggest they do. Among faculty and staff who completed the program, 99% reported a clearer understanding of the dialogue facilitator’s role. Ninety-eight percent said they felt better equipped to plan and facilitate dialogue. And 86% reported feeling more prepared to address and manage tense or controversial situations with students.

More telling, however, is what happens months after the training ends. We followed up with participants approximately 10 months after they completed CDI's professional development offerings. All of them—100%—reported still using the skills they learned. 92% were listening for values. 88% were asking better questions and inviting stories. And 71% had gone on to facilitate group dialogues themselves.

These results go beyond satisfaction scores. They're indicators that the skills we're teaching are transferring into practice and creating ripple effects across campuses. When faculty and staff build dialogue capacity, they bring those skills into classrooms, advising meetings, committee work, and student interactions. The impact compounds.

Perspectives: Equipping Students with Skills That Transfer

For students, the question isn't whether dialogue skills matter—it’s whether those skills transfer beyond the program. Perspectives, our online learning program for students, is designed to give them structured practice in listening, perspective-taking, and engaging constructively across differences.

This year, 77% of students who completed Perspectives told us the program helped them gain valuable professional and life skills. The same percentage — 77% — reported practicing what they learned in their personal or professional lives. Seventy-five percent felt more confident communicating across differences, and 74% felt more comfortable working with diverse others.

Those numbers matter because they speak to transfer — the hardest part of any educational intervention. Students aren't just completing modules; they're internalizing skills and applying them beyond the program.

We also heard from campus leaders about the effects they're observing. A vice president of student affairs at a large research university told us that after embedding Perspectives into their required first-year wellness curriculum, they've seen measurable shifts in campus climate. "Heckling is down. Engagement is up," they reported. "Dialogue has moved from aspiration to practice."

That kind of institutional-level change is what we're working toward—not just individual skill-building, but shifts in campus culture that create the conditions for constructive engagement to become the norm.

Proof of Concept at Scale: The CUNY Partnership

Our partnership with The City University of New York offered an opportunity to test whether these outcomes hold at scale. CUNY is the nation's largest urban public university system, serving more than 240,000 students across 26 campuses. The partnership represents one of our most comprehensive efforts to embed dialogue practices throughout an entire higher education system.

The early results are clear and encouraging. To date, 18 of 26 CUNY campuses have launched or are in the process of launching Perspectives with students. More than 90 faculty completed our Foundations of Constructive Dialogue Facilitation training, with 88% reporting they felt better prepared to manage tense or controversial situations. Fifty staff members earned certification in dialogue facilitation. And among student leaders who completed our training, satisfaction was universal — 100% — with 94% gaining clarity on the role and purpose of dialogue facilitation.

Across all three cohorts — faculty, staff, and student leaders—the outcomes were remarkably consistent. Participants reported clearer understanding of facilitation, greater confidence in their skills, and increased preparedness to navigate difficult conversations. Most importantly, 100% of student leaders who completed the program felt better prepared to plan and facilitate constructive peer dialogue.

Together, these outcomes reinforce what we've seen across individual campuses: when institutions make sustained, coordinated investments in dialogue capacity, the effects are measurable and durable.

What These Outcomes Tell Us

Three patterns emerge from this year's data.

1. Participants consistently report that CDI's programs build practical skills they can use. Whether it's faculty learning to facilitate difficult classroom discussions, staff navigating charged student situations, or students practicing perspective-taking in their personal lives, the skills we're teaching transfer into real contexts.

2. The effects persist. When we follow up with participants months after training, they're still using what they learned. That suggests we're not just creating short-term knowledge gains — we're helping people build habits and capacities that endure.

3. Scale doesn't require compromising quality. The outcomes at CUNY, where we're working across dozens of campuses with thousands of participants, mirror the outcomes from our smaller partnerships. Systematic, well-designed programs can produce consistent results even when implemented broadly.

None of this happens overnight. Culture change requires sustained effort, institutional commitment, and alignment across multiple dimensions of campus life. But the evidence from this year suggests that when institutions make that investment, meaningful change is achievable.

Looking Ahead

We're entering 2026 with clarity about what works. The question now is how we scale these approaches to reach more institutions while maintaining the quality and rigor that produce these outcomes.

That work will include expanding our Leadership Institute to public flagship universities—institutions that educate millions of students and face intense public scrutiny. It will include launching the CDI Institutional Change Model, a structured approach that helps campuses move from fragmented dialogue efforts to coordinated, system-wide culture change. And it will include continuing to pilot responsible uses of AI that can deepen student learning and provide more opportunities for practice and feedback.

Higher education is facing profound questions about its purpose, value, and ability to prepare students for democratic life. Building students' capacity to engage constructively across differences isn't the answer to all of those questions. But it is foundational. And the data from this year suggests it's work we know how to do well.

Read CDI's full 2025 Annual Report here.