Every week seems to bring another headline questioning the value of higher education.
“The Most Regretted College Majors.”
“The Degrees With the Best Return on Investment.”
“College Degrees That Aren’t Worth the Cost.”
“AI Could Replace Millions of White-Collar Jobs.”
Collectively, they tell a simple story: The value of education can be reduced to a financial calculation.
After nearly 30 years as a professor, I believe we’re asking the wrong question.
Not because money doesn’t matter. It does.
Not because college is the right choice for everyone. It isn’t.
But because a salary at age 25 tells us very little about a person’s quality of life at age 55, or even at 25.
I’ve never had a former student call me 10 years later to tell me that a starting salary changed their life. But I have had many tell me that finding their purpose, community and sense of direction did.
As a public health professor, I would never describe a person’s health using a single measure. Imagine a physician saying, “Your blood pressure is normal. Congratulations, you’re healthy.” No competent provider would make that claim. Health is complex and multidimensional.
Yet when it comes to higher education, we often do the opposite.
In the classroom, I’ve watched quiet students become leaders and students who doubted themselves discover talents that changed the trajectory of their lives. Those outcomes rarely appear in rankings of college majors.
When I speak with employers, I hear a remarkably consistent theme. They aren’t asking for people who have memorized the most information. They need people who can build trust, communicate effectively, solve problems and work productively with others.
In other words, they need deeply human skills.
As a public health professor, I’ve watched debates about vaccines, nutrition, substance use and countless other health issues take center stage. What consistently emerges is that people rarely change their minds simply because they are given more information. More often, they change when they trust the source, feel respected and believe someone is genuinely listening to them.
Many of the challenges we face today are not failures of information. They are failures of trust, connection, communication and community.
At a time when loneliness is rising, trust is declining and polarization is deepening, these skills have never been more important.
Those are precisely the kinds of human capacities higher education helps cultivate.
This is one reason I keep returning to the work of Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program. Researchers there ask a simple question: What does it mean to live a good life? Their answer includes health, purpose, relationships, character and financial stability.
Income matters. It simply isn’t the whole story.
In public health, we’ve known for decades that education is one of the strongest predictors of health and longevity. In fact, a major international review published last year found that each additional year of education was associated with a lower risk of premature death.
We routinely debate whether college is worth it based on earnings while overlooking evidence that education is also associated with living longer, healthier lives.
When we consider whether college is worth it, we are really asking a much deeper question: What helps people build meaningful, healthy and fulfilling lives?
That is a question salary rankings cannot answer.
If we measure educational value primarily through potential earnings, we shouldn’t be surprised when programs that produce teachers, social workers, counselors, journalists, public health professionals, artists and community leaders begin to look expendable.
But if education contributes to health, civic engagement, social trust, innovation, community leadership and human flourishing, then these decisions affect the kind of society we build.
The real question is not whether higher education is worth it. The real question is how to make those benefits more accessible.
How do we reduce unnecessary financial barriers? How do we help students graduate with less debt? How do we create pathways to meaningful work? How do we ensure students from every background have access to opportunity?
A salary at 25 isn’t a life at 55.
Yet we increasingly evaluate higher education as though it is.
