Care means paying conscious and responsible attention to the growth, excellence, and flourishing of different dimensions of another being and encompasses fundamental concepts such as love, compassion, empathy, and moral support. In the complex process of student development in higher education, care plays a decisive role in the formation of a dynamic and effective relationship between professor and student, and as a result, simultaneously improving the quality of specialized learning and moral education. The main issue of this research is to accurately explain the dimensions and components of “care” in student development, so that the scope of the professor’s caring behaviors and its place in educational interactions can be clarified in a systematic and model-based manner.

Using a descriptive-analytical method, this research first examines the concept of care as a moral virtue in educational traditions and moral philosophy, and then identifies its constituent components by examining the subtle relationship between care and student development. In the following, the dimensions of caring-centered student development in higher education are formulated and analyzed in three areas: "knowledge", "attitude" and "behavioral". The research findings show that the realization of caring-centered student development requires the professor to have a kind of intelligent, multidimensional and continuous sensitivity to the changing situation and needs of the student; in such a way that neglecting these subtleties can pose serious challenges to the learning process and the educational effects of teacher-student interaction. The main innovation of this research is that by integrating the aforementioned areas and presenting a native conceptual model, it elevates caring from a purely personal and scattered attribute to a "strategic system" and strategy in higher education that can be used as a practical model in the design and implementation of educational processes by professors.