Why Higher Education is About More Than Building the Workforce

“Is college worth it?” is the wrong question

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Any conversation about education reform tends to collapse almost immediately into positions. Tuition is too high. Degrees are useless. Universities are elitist. Students should learn practical skills. The system is broken. Everyone arrives ready to argue, often before we have agreed on what it is we are arguing about.

So I want to slow this down.

Rather than asking whether higher education is good or bad, broken or redeemable, I want to ask a more fundamental question: Who is education even for? And perhaps just as important, what do we believe it is supposed to produce?

I don’t have a single settled answer. Education is not one thing. It is an institution, an experience, a cultural signal, a sorting mechanism, and a deeply personal period of life. My goal here is not to take a side, but to think through the tensions that sit underneath our current debates. To notice the assumptions we rarely name. To invite reflection rather than escalation.

Let’s start with the part of the system that feels hardest to justify.

In many countries, particularly the United States, post-secondary education requires young people to take on enormous amounts of debt before they have had a chance to attain financial stability or even develop a clear sense of who they are. This debt is framed as an investment, a necessary sacrifice for future opportunity. But for many, it becomes a constraint that shapes their choices for decades.

Education is supposed to expand possibility. What does it mean when access to education narrows it instead?

For those of us outside the American system, the normalization of this debt is startling. Not just the scale of it, but how rarely it’s questioned at the level of values. The conversation tends to focus on whether the degree will pay off, whether it will lead to a sufficiently high salary to justify the cost. That framing already tells us something important about how we think education works.

Which raises a larger cultural question. When did we decide that the primary value of education was its economic return?

Over the past several decades, we have increasingly treated education as a direct input into the labor market. Degrees are evaluated by earnings data. Majors are ranked by job prospects. Universities market themselves using placement statistics and salary outcomes. Students are encouraged to think of themselves as future workers first and developing humans second.

This shift did not happen in a vacuum. It reflects a broader cultural logic that values efficiency, optimization, and measurable output. Education, under this logic, becomes a service that prepares individuals to be economically useful. The institution is in service to the economy rather than to society more broadly.

It’s worth asking what gets lost when that framing becomes dominant.

If education is primarily about producing workers, then time spent exploring ideas without obvious applications begins to look wasteful. Learning that does not map neatly onto a job description feels indulgent. Curiosity without a clear payoff becomes suspect.

We see this most clearly in the way we talk about productivity.

We live in a culture that privileges visible output over invisible process. We want results that can be measured, compared, and optimized. Learning, however, is rarely linear. Understanding often arrives slowly and unpredictably, through confusion, repetition, and contradiction. When education is pressured to prove its value through constant output, the act of learning itself gets compressed.

What kinds of thinkers are produced by a system that rewards speed over depth?

This cultural pressure helps explain the ongoing devaluation of the humanities. Degrees in philosophy, history, anthropology, literature, and the arts are frequently dismissed as impractical or useless. The assumption is that if a field doesn’t lead directly to a specific kind of job, it doesn’t justify its cost.

But this framing misunderstands what these disciplines offer. The humanities train people to interpret context, to understand how meaning is constructed, to recognize patterns across time, and to situate the present within a longer historical arc. They develop the ability to sit with ambiguity, to question assumptions, and to see systems rather than isolated problems.

In a world defined by rapid technological change, political instability, and information overload, these capacities aren’t ornamental. They are foundational. Yet they are increasingly treated as optional because they don’t translate cleanly into short-term economic metrics. What kinds of knowledge do we decide are worth protecting when resources are scarce?

There is also an aspect of higher education that rarely appears in cost–benefit analyses: the social and developmental experience of it.

For many students, university is the first sustained experience of independence. The first time living away from family. The first time being embedded in a community of people with different cultural backgrounds, political beliefs, and life experiences. These encounters matter. They shape how people see themselves and others. They teach negotiation, disagreement, and coexistence.

Much of this learning happens outside the classroom. In shared housing. In late-night conversations. In moments of discomfort and exposure. When education is reduced to credentialing alone, this dimension disappears from the conversation entirely.

So when we talk about reform, it is worth asking what we believe education is supposed to provide beyond skills and credentials. Is it meant to offer time and space for exploration? For intellectual risk-taking? For identity formation?

Or is that considered an inefficient use of resources?

None of this is an argument against change. The system does need to evolve. Access matters. Affordability matters. Structural inequities matter. But the current narrative often treats the economy as the only legitimate reference point. As if the purpose of education can be fully captured by labor market outcomes.

That narrow framing shapes not just policy, but culture. It influences what students feel permitted to study, what parents feel comfortable supporting, and what institutions feel pressured to prioritize.

So perhaps the most important question is not whether education is worth the cost, but what kind of society we are designing when we decide what education is for.

If education is only for producing economically efficient workers, then the current trajectory makes sense. If it is also meant to help people understand the world, themselves, and their responsibilities in society, then we may need to rethink what we value.

And maybe the real work begins there.

An invitation to continue the conversation

Some questions that stayed with me as I was writing, and that I’m curious how you’re thinking about:

• Who is education even for?

• What do we believe education is supposed to produce?

• What does it mean when access to education narrows possibility rather than expanding it?

• When did we decide that the primary value of education was its economic return?

• What gets lost when education is framed primarily as workforce preparation?

• What kinds of thinkers are produced by a system that rewards speed over depth?

• What kinds of knowledge do we decide are worth protecting when resources are scarce?

• What should education provide beyond skills and credentials?

• What kind of society are we designing when we decide what education is for?

If one of these questions sparks some ideas or reflections, I invite you to use the comments as a space to think out loud. I would love to hear what you think.

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