What Students Know About College That Critics Don’t (opinion)

A student paused before she answered. I had posed a simple question to a group of students: Ten years from now, how would you want to describe the person you have become? She finally responded, quietly, “I want to be someone my community can count on. Someone who gives back what was given to me.” Around the table, nearly 20 students offered their own versions of the same answer—not one mentioned salary, status or job title. Each student spoke of purpose, of contribution, of wanting to matter to the people around them. I left this meeting feeling something I was not entirely expecting: genuine hope.

It is easy, these days, to feel discouraged about higher education. Enrollment is declining at many institutions. Public confidence has dropped sharply. A political climate increasingly skeptical of higher education’s value has led many to question whether a four-year degree, let alone one rooted in the liberal arts, is worth the investment. The American campus seems like a place of transactional stress rather than transformational growth. But what if the problem is not that higher education is failing—but that we are measuring and reporting the wrong outcomes altogether?

I have spent more than five decades in higher education—as student, professor and college president—and, for the past decade, have been researching its long-term impact. I was recently invited to Eastern Connecticut State University, or Eastern, as it is known to those who call it home. I was asked to share my insights with this public liberal arts institution that takes its mission seriously. I met with faculty, midlevel and senior administrators, and higher education leaders from the region. It was one of dozens of similar presentations I have been invited to make at private and public institutions in recent years.

But it was the quiet, unscripted conversation with a group of students at Eastern that proved remarkably illuminating. Instead of presenting my findings to them, I asked two questions. The first—about the person they hoped to become—produced the scene I described above. Their responses were not anomalous: They align with research on the life and work priorities of this generation.

My second question asked how their college experience was shaping that vision of their future selves. Every student pointed not to a textbook or a facility, but to relationships: a mentor who saw their potential before they did; a conversation with a professor who challenged their worldview; the experience of living alongside peers with vastly different backgrounds and values.

What struck me was not merely the content of their answers, but their convergence. Twenty students, unprompted, described similar aspirations and the same formative experiences. That is not coincidence. That is a pattern—and it is one that decades of research consistently affirm.

My own research, described in The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs (MIT Press, 2021), draws on more than 1,000 college graduates across four decades. It found that the experiences most strongly linked to fulfilling and successful adult lives were not about what students studied, but about context—the relationships, the informal conversations, the exposure to different lives and values. Students who engaged frequently with faculty or a mentor outside the classroom were more likely, decades later, to lead civic lives and report what I call “lives of consequence,” as well as to be successful and fulfilled. Academic content matters, but the relational ecology of the educational context matters more than most institutions, and virtually all critics, acknowledge.

The Gallup-Purdue Index confirms this at scale. This study of 30,000 graduates found that students who felt a professor cared about them personally, or who had a mentor who encouraged their goals, were about twice as likely to be engaged at work and about 1.7 times as likely to be thriving over all. Crucially, the same study found that where a student went to college mattered far less for long-term flourishing than whether they felt genuinely supported.

This formula for transformative education is not a mystery; it is a deliberate practice. Richard Light’s Harvard Assessment Seminars and the research of Alexander Astin, Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini, and Vincent Tinto all demonstrate that informal faculty contact, peer relationships across difference and a genuine sense of belonging produce measurable, lasting effects on graduates’ civic engagement and personal development. Eastern, where about half of students in the first-year class are first-generation college attendees, is a vital example of how these principles can be democratized.

The transformational power of a liberal arts education is not—and should not be—reserved for the elite. Indeed, my research finds that the impact of this relational context is two or three times greater for students such as these who do not come from college-educated families. By fostering an environment where out-of-class relationships are prioritized, students enter society not just as workers, but as people of consequence.

These students are not living in a vacuum. They read the same headlines the rest of us do. They know that higher education is under scrutiny, that their degrees will be questioned and that the economy is uncertain. And yet, when asked what they want for their lives, they articulate something research confirms is both genuinely valuable and achievable—not through any elite credential, but through the character of the educational experience itself.

This is the promise of the liberal arts approach to education that has undergirded American higher education for centuries: not a nostalgic attachment to the humanities, or a rejection of practical career preparation, but a commitment to educating the whole person in and outside the classroom, through both the content of study and the educational context. We must continue to create relational, intellectually stretching, community-embedded experiences to produce not just capable workers, but citizens, leaders and contributors to the larger human project.

The current moment is genuinely difficult, and the skepticism directed at higher education is not entirely without basis. But the answer lies in the broader context of the education we provide—in hallways and lounges as well as in classrooms—where students are doing the timeless work of learning who they are and how they can serve.

The stakes could not be higher, and they demand that we resist the pressure to reduce higher education to a transactional enterprise measured almost entirely by salary data and first-job placement. Strengthening graduates’ readiness for the job market is not only appropriate, it is essential. But it is a floor, not a ceiling. Our deeper obligation is to prepare people for lives of meaning, contribution and resilience—lives the evidence shows are also, by nearly every measure, more successful.

This means we must do more than defend the value of what we do; we must actively change the terms of the public debate itself. The question before higher education is not how to become something smaller and more easily quantified, but how to make the long-term human impact of education visible, compelling and central to every conversation about our future. Instead of simply reporting starting salaries, we should be measuring and then obsessively talking about the civic involvement, leadership, fulfillment and success of our graduates in the decades after graduation.

The students I met last spring at Eastern already know what matters. It is time for the rest of the country to catch up.