Studies have shown that many students struggle through college because they experience their courses as isolated (and sometimes incompatible) fragments of knowledge.
Knowledge can be trapped within disciplinary silos; classroom and dorm room are different worlds; faith is isolated from education.
Students report that they want to make sense of how their lives and education fit together. College is critical to the formation of students’ habits and sense of the world. They yearn, sometimes without realizing it, for an integration between belief, education, and practice.
We live at a time where Catholics have achieved great success in American society (business, entertainment, academia, politics).
Yet, over the last fifty (50) years fewer and fewer students have had the opportunity to integrate their faith with their professional lives because they have emigrated away from Catholic higher education.
Over 30% of all Catholic colleges and universities in the United States have closed or consolidated in the past fifty (50) years.
About 90% of the 4 million American Catholic undergraduates now attend public, private and online universities, where they tend to be both spiritually and intellectually unmoored.
Catholic higher education now serves approximately 400,000 Catholic students and can no longer shoulder the burden of integrating knowledge with faith.
At The Newman Idea, we believe that Catholic students everywhere should have the option to be formed in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.
What makes TNI unique is that it is the only nonprofit with accredited interdisciplinary IKON courses to Catholics at non-Catholic universities in New Orleans, and is planning to expand across the region and then across the U.S.
Our proven model, including the IKON courses and method as well as partnering with campus ministries and colleges, has the potential to reach thousands of Catholic students across the US.