Looking into the future | beast01 / Shutterstock
At the turn of last year, The Economist published an alarming statistic: In 2024, half of Harvard College’s graduating seniors left campus for jobs in finance, consulting, and technology.
For anyone who believes in the values of a liberal arts education, this is cause for concern. If we accept in good faith our elite universities’ claim that their primary mission is to educate students, then this statistic shows roughly half of Harvard’s immense financial and intellectual resources being channeled directly into the service of a technocratic elite.
But the problem is even deeper than where graduates end up, and it starts earlier. What this trend reveals is a crisis of the imagination at the very heart of our country’s universities and colleges. It evidences a diminishing range of compelling answers to the question of what, exactly, a university education is for. How can four years of careful study contribute to a life beyond a university campus? Or, to state the question in even more sweeping terms: What are the possible relationships between spaces of study and the world beyond?
This is a freighted question, and everybody has answers. Politicians have answers. Tech executives have answers. University presidents have answers. Many have published their thoughts in these pages. The assumption of all those opining is that this question should be resolved for students by the time they arrive on campus in September.
But this arrangement is perfectly backwards: It is students who should decide what their education can do (it’s their education, after all). What’s more, these competing visions miss the point, for they focus on answers at the expense of the question. And it is questions—the asking, the slow, deliberate unraveling, the framing and historicizing and interrogating of questions—that are higher education’s highest calling (and their greatest defense). Posing powerful questions, resisting easy answers, and equipping students with the tools to come to their own conclusions is what higher education is for. This principle applies when students are thinking at school. But it applies just as much when they are thinking about school.
What’s higher education for? Let students decide. But let’s not delegate this decision to them without the proper equipment. It is the responsibility of universities to equip students with as versatile a set of tools as possible to make this judgment.
What this means is taking the question of a university education’s value and tackling it head-on. This could take the form of a core course that examines a given area of study (sciences, engineering, humanities, social sciences) not on its own terms, but in terms of the ways that its knowledge and knowledge-producers have moved between the classroom or the laboratory and the world beyond. An academic discipline examining itself in context: not a history of the world but a history of history in the world. Not the science of public health but the relationship of public health science to the public. What such a course would ask, ultimately, is: How does what I’m doing here shape the world? How has it shaped the world in the past? How could it shape the world when I leave this place?
Students in this class would need to think historically—about the ways and the contexts in which universities and their various traditions of knowledge production have transformed over time. They would have to consider different value systems (theological, metaphysical, utilitarian) and the relation of knowledge to the social, cultural, and political formations that shape society. They would need to think about causation: Do ideas change the world? How? What does it mean to change a world that is always already changing? What is an idea, anyways? How have ideas changed the world in the past, and under what conditions? The more philosophically minded might pose this question in terms that cleave to the heart of the great mysteries: What is the relationship of knowledge to power? What is the relationship of knowledge to being?
Furthermore, puzzling out the relationship between university study and the world begs the question of what, exactly, can be meant by “the world”—an inquiry that opens onto the many ways (grammatical, literary, sociological, cultural, political, technological, infrastructural) that groups of people can create a shared reality. Examining how the world has been constituted in all these different traditions might even reveal that these world-building strategies (i.e., ways of producing shared meaning, shared language, shared identity, and shared values) are precisely what university studies are about in the first place.
If universities do their job, then students will leave such an introductory course with many ways of thinking about the value and function of their education. They may decide, in the style of the humanistic tradition, that study is worthwhile because it elevates the soul. They may decide that it makes them more effective citizens, or wiser leaders. They may decide that it gives them the tools to drive political change, or to create organizations that will increase the welfare of as many people as possible. Or they may decide that study is valuable because it sets them up to make lots and lots of money. It is not the job of universities to determine which option students choose. It is their responsibility to ensure that students get to choose, and to enrich the forms of judgment which they make that choice.
This kind of course would be good for students. But it would be good for universities too. For one thing, it would contextualize the attacks being made on universities from the Left and the Right. Founded or unfounded as they may be, these attacks tend to rely on a single-minded interpretation of universities’ role in society. Leftist protestors cast universities as enormous investment funds with educational window-dressing. Conservative politicians cast universities as a petri dish for elitist leftist politics. By pointing out that these attacks are based on one of many possible assumptions, this course would not neutralize these disagreements (nor should it), but it would complicate them. It might even lift these disagreements out of punitive administrative deadlock or budgetary warfare. After all, the idea that ideas can facilitate productive disagreement is at the heart of the liberal arts tradition. Let’s see if it’s true.
I went to one of these schools (Princeton) and graduated into the maelstrom of 2020. According to a sample of my peers, 52 percent of my graduating class planned careers in finance, consulting, and tech. While I took a different path, I’m not surprised by this number. As much as I valued learning during my four years, I spent a great deal of my time wondering how, exactly, this value corresponded to the world I would face—and the person I hoped to be—once I graduated. Princeton has a bevy of programs meant to connect students to a range of career options, plenty of them outside the corporate sector. But having options is not the same thing as feeling equipped to choose between them. Without a clear sense of the different kinds of value made available to us by our privileged education, many of my friends chose the form of value nearest at hand: money.
These days, I run an experimental school that offers programming for adults in New York City. Our seminars and workshops are spaces of study, but they are not degree-granting; the people who show up do so out of a love of thinking, asking questions, and growing together. Many of these people went to four-year colleges. What I’ve seen in these graduates (ages 23 to 60) is a deep desire to understand how the traditions of study they first encountered in school can continue to guide them in adult life. These people (myself included) are still wondering what our education can do. Imagine if we had studied this question at age 19.
It’s important to recognize that elite students’ attraction to high-paying corporate jobs has to do with factors beyond campus. Rising rates of inequality, a precarious job market, and the slashing of artistic and educational institutions create the conditions for this migration to high-paying industries. These are troubling shifts. But universities are best equipped to address them indirectly: By educating and equipping the next generation of students who will navigate these systemic problems—and, one hopes, will begin to fix them.
It all comes back to asking the right questions. This is what a university does: It fosters the ability to pose a question and then suspend the need for quick answers long enough to see the complexity hidden beneath it. The poet Keats called this suspension “negative capability,” and it represents, in great measure, precisely what makes universities necessary in these troubling times. In a moment imperiled by nihilistic politics, climate collapse, and technological determinism, study fosters the ability to think of questions not only as a prompt for answers, but also as the source of new questions, and thereby, of new possibilities. It’s up to universities to model this life-giving commitment, especially in conversations about the value of university itself. In other words:
What’s higher education for? That’s exactly the question.
