If you have studied a foreign language, you know that you start forgetting what you learn soon after you stop using it. But this phenomenon is not restricted only to foreign languages. In the 1880s, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus identified a “forgetting curve” when he found that people steadily forgot syllables they were given to remember over time. The forgetting followed a pattern represented below, which more recent experiments have confirmed (Murre & Dros, 2015) (Figure 1).

Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that


