During his remarks, Fareed Zakaria told students they live in a world that is now more resilient and capable of bouncing back from crises.

Their faces beaming with excitement, members of the University of Miami’s Class of 2014 settled into their seats last Friday for what would be the first lesson of their fledgling careers in higher education.

It wasn’t a lecture delivered in a classroom but inside a spacious hall, where everyone from a former United States president to a surgeon general, financial wizard, and famous actress have all bestowed their wisdom and worldly advice on students.

That morning it was Fareed Zakaria, CNN host, New York Times bestselling author, and now Time magazine’s new editor-at-large, who addressed the thousands of students as well as faculty, staff, and invited guests at UM’s BankUnited Center, giving his outlook on world affairs and telling students “you are the vanguard of what will change America.”

His talk, “The Future of Freedom,” was part of UM’s New Student Convocation, an annual event that, along with Move-In Day at the Residential Colleges and the weekend’s Orientation activities, helps kick off the new academic year.

UM President Donna E. Shalala introduced Zakaria to students as one of their own—a Miami Hurricane. “He received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from UM in 2006,” she said, as the students cheered and applauded.

Electing to walk freely about the BankUnited Center stage instead of remain behind a podium that had been provided for him, Zakaria told students of how almost daily he hears talk of the gloom and doom of the current economic times that have swept across the nation and some parts of the world.

UM students had the opportunity to ask questions of Zakaria on a variety of issues.

“But what we’re missing is an important reality about the world we live in: its resilience,” Zakaria said.

He recounted for the audience several economic downturns of the past—the Stock Market crash of 1987, the recession of the early 1990s, the Mexican and East Asian economic crises, and the Russian debt crisis of 1998—and how in each case the affected economies recovered.

While difficult, America’s current economic slump, Zakaria said, won’t last forever. “My point is, there will always be a comeback,” he said, explaining that human resilience and people’s ability to adapt are factors that help in recovery.

He told students that they live in a “very different world,” noting that a significantly smaller number of people die in wars and from terrorism and other conflicts now than they did decades ago.

“That’s a huge dividend for your generation,” Zakaria said, calling such a reality “a pillar of stability.”

He identified other pillars of stability, including the death of inflation, describing a world of “moderate to low inflation” that translates into lower interest rates and the ability of parents to borrow money to send their children to college.

Zakaria also pointed to technological connectivity. “Information is traveling freely and faster,” he said, noting that some nations are now finding it more difficult to keep state secrets because of the public’s ability to spread news and organize themselves via mobile phone networks.

During a pre-speech meeting in a BankUnited Center press room, UM President Donna E. Shalala presented Zakaria with a black polo shirt bearing the UM logo.

The Indian-born, Yale- and Harvard-educated Zakaria, who hosts a weekly foreign affairs program that airs Sundays worldwide on CNN, told students that many countries have now risen from poverty to enjoy economic vitality, allowing them to obtain political power.

“More people are escaping poverty than at any point in history,” he said. “It’s a world of much greater competition.”

But students, he said, should not despair over that fact. “You start with the advantage of being born in the United States,” Zakaria explained, hailing the U.S. higher educational system for teaching its students to be problem solvers. He also cited an international survey stating that 38 of the top 50 universities in the world are located in this country.

Concluding his remarks, Zakaria singled out the “democratization of the world” as a phenomenon that will allow for the emergence of more singers, composers, painters, scholars, and other academics than ever before. “It’s an explosion of human knowledge we must all take advantage of.”

During the Q&A session that followed, new students lined up to get Zakaria’s views on everything from issues of growth and sustainability to security concerns related to the world’s super-connectivity to whether economic power will continue shifting Eastward.

Asked by a music engineering student from Colorado what he sees as the biggest problem students of this generation will have to tackle, Zakaria said he is concerned about the United States getting scared and turning inward, becoming less confident and more fearful rather than embracing global changes and finding ways to turn them into “win-win” situations rather than “closing down as a nation—and your generation can help change that,” he said. He advised them to travel, learn languages and, most of all, treasure the luxury of time afforded them by their college years—time to think, explore and, most importantly, to build deep and lasting associations.