As tuition rises and trust in institutions erodes, Stockton University finds itself at the crossroads of faith and frustration. Can a public university built on access and equity still deliver transformation? Or has higher education’s promise become more debt than deliverance?

The Promise and the Pressure

At Stockton University, the question of what college is truly worth has never felt more urgent. College once meant certainty: movement, upward and outward into the professional world. Now, it raises questions—about debt, about worth, about whether an institution designed to expand minds can still expand lives.

Stockton, New Jersey’s self-declared “anchor institution,” was built on the belief that access and equity can coexist with excellence, but the students who walk its Pine Barren paths tell a more complicated story; one of aspiration shadowed by exhaustion, progress dulled by cost, and faith tested by bureaucracy. The university has never worked harder to support its students, but it has also never faced greater doubt from them.

The Shape of a Promise

When Dr. Ana Edmondson, Assistant Vice President for Student Transitions, Access, and Retention, speaks about Stockton, she doesn’t just use words like “pipeline” or “output.” She talks about care.

“The biggest challenge students face in staying enrolled and completing their degrees,” she said, “revolve around balance and bandwidth.”

Of the 1,099 students who turned to Stockton CARES last semester—for food, housing, or simply to be seen—87 percent stayed enrolled. The statistic, clinical in isolation, becomes something human when examined closely: a parent who skipped meals to buy textbooks, a commuter spending more on gas than groceries. Each number is a portrait of endurance.

To an outsider, Stockton’s metrics look triumphant: Education Opportunity Fund (EOF) persistence rates of 94 percent, counseling outreach, and living-learning communities. To those within, the same data reads like a ledger of fragility—a testament not only to success, but to how close students come to falling.

The Currency of Readiness

Across campus, Sofia Abreu, Director of Career Education and Development, measures a different form of survival: employability.

“Success,” she said, “isn’t defined solely by employment outcomes but by personal growth and self-awareness students develop throughout their time here.”

Through Handshake and Forage, her team builds bridges between classroom and career. However, engagement is voluntary, and the students who most need help often don’t come. Universities celebrate opportunity, she says, but leave its pursuit optional.

Abreu’s metrics (resume rush participation, internship numbers, NACE competencies) promise relevance but reveal something subtler: Stockton can prepare students to adapt, but it cannot guarantee arrival.

Inside the Experience

For Jada McKinnon, a current student, the promise feels conditional.

“Certain classes I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth,” she said, “and others I can’t believe how ridiculously expensive it is for something I could have taught myself with a book.”

Her voice slices through the abstraction of policy. Professors, she said, can be transformative—or dismissive. One instructor told her, “I get paid whether you graduate or not.” The comment lingers, not just as cynicism, but as confession.

Still, Jada stays. She trusts her preceptor. She finds solace in counseling. “College is worth it,” she said, “but only if you use it well.” Her faith is pragmatic; conditional, but not extinguished.

The Afterlife of a Degree

Two years after graduation, Nicole Gregorio reflects with tenderness and frustration.

“I blossomed into the person I am today because of Stockton,” she said. “But I wish I made more networking connections while I was there.”

Her psychology degree gave her insight but little traction. “Finding a job in the psych field with a Bachelor’s degree has been a struggle.” Her professors taught her curiosity, not currency. “They instilled greatness in us,” she said, “but I had to build the career part myself.”

Gregorio’s story reframes worth. Her Stockton experience gave her confidence, but not security. What she bought was not social mobility, but self-understanding. What she didn’t receive was a bridge from the classroom to the world beyond it.

The Ground of Belonging

Dr. Robin Hernandez-Mekonnen, Associate Professor of Social Work, has lived through Stockton’s contradictions firsthand. She was a first-generation student, once homeless in college, but now she has turned her experience into advocacy.

“Stockton has come a long way in becoming inclusive,” she said. “Do I think it’s where it should be? Probably not.”

Her early Beacon Project laid the groundwork for programs like EOF and the Multicultural and Interfaith Center, but even progress has limits. “Belonging isn’t something you automate,” she said. “It’s something you cultivate.”

She calls Stockton an “anchor university,” not because it is immovable, but because it keeps the region steady in turbulent waters. “We’ve created programs,” she said, “but we haven’t yet created security.”

The Unmeasured Work

Stockton’s published numbers tell a story of stability and progress. According to Research.com, in 2024, the university reported a 6-year graduation rate of 76 percent and a retention rate of 78 percent for first-time, full-time undergraduates. The EOF program, which supports low-income and first-generation students, continues to outperform: Stockton News (2025) reports that 96 percent of its 2023-24 first-year cohort persisted into the next semester, compared to 92 percent of other first-year students.

In 2023, Stockton also rose 49 places to No. 26 in U.S. News’ “Top Performers on Social Mobility” ranking, a recognition of its success enrolling and graduating Pell-eligible students. The numbers suggest an institution doing something right—creating access, maintaining completion, and expanding its reach to historically underserved communities.

But, statistics are tidy in ways that people are not. Stockton’s third-semester retention for first-time, full-time students has fallen—from 87 percent in 2016 to 77 percent in 2022- revealing a quieter truth about persistence in an era of economic pressure and mental health strain (NJ Legislative Budget Report, 2025). The metrics that make it into annual reports measure who stays, but not why. They track completion, but not connection.

The most meaningful labor of education is the kind that resists quantification: the advisor who calls a struggling student instead of sending an email, the professor who finds a way to help someone finish the semester without losing their housing, a peer mentor who walks a fellow student to the counseling center instead of pointing the way. None of these actions appear in a dashboard, yet they hold the system together.

When universities define their successes through numbers alone, they risk mistaking endurance for excellence. Stockton is not immune to that temptation. It delivers access (sometimes with grace) but access without reflection can feel transactional. It opens doors, but sometimes forgets to walk through them with its students.

If the next test for higher education is not how many persist, but how many believe, then Stockton’s most important work lies in what it cannot yet measure: belonging, purpose, and trust. Those are not metrics. They are promises—and the worth of a university depends on whether it keeps them.

Rethinking Worth

When asked if college is still worth it, Dr. Edmondson doesn’t hesitate.

“[A degree] is absolutely worth it,” she said. “A degree signals to the world that you’ve dedicated yourself to growth, perseverance, and the pursuit of excellence.”

Her conviction is sincere, but for many, worth has become a spectrum, not a certainty. Stockton provides community but not always consistency, empathy but not elevation, and it has mastered the art of survival, but not yet the art of satisfaction.

Still, what lingers at Stockton—beneath the bureaucracy and the burnout—is the quiet insistence that education remains a public good worth defending. The university’s imperfections are not evidence of failure, but of possibility: proof that higher education can still evolve, if it chooses to listen to the people it serves.

To make college worth it again, institutions must reclaim the purpose that built them. Not simply to produce workers, but to grow citizens; not merely to grant degrees, but to open futures. That transformation begs proximity rather than policy, as well as knowing the names, needs, and stories of students who walk through the door.

Stockton may not yet fill every promise, but in its effort to become something better, it keeps alive the moral heartbeat of higher education itself: the belief that learning can change a life, and that a single institution, reimagined with care, can still change a generation.

References

NJ Legislative Budget Report. (2025). Grant funding to institutions of higher education.

Stockton News. (2025, July 8). Stockton’s EOF program creates family legacies.

Research.com. (2024). Stockton University.

U.S. News. (2025) Stockton University.