Liberal Arts Education, Earnings, and Financial Well-being
An abbreviated version of this essay was published as an op-ed in University Business (May 2026).
Beginning in July 2026, a new federal accountability framework will tie universities and colleges' access to federal student loans to their graduates' earnings. Under the "Do No Harm" standard enacted through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, programs whose graduates earn less than the median high school graduate, measured just four years after degree completion, may lose eligibility for federal financial aid. The policy's premise is straightforward: post-secondary education is an investment that should leave students better off economically. While the impulse to protect students from predatory, for-profit programs is understandable, the underlying logic—that the value of a college education can be reduced to early-career earnings data—is misguided.
Early Earnings is Bad Economics
To start, the focus on early-career earnings misunderstands the dynamics of contemporary labor markets. Educators and policymakers need to acknowledge that today's labor market bears little resemblance to the stable career trajectories of previous generations. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that the average American holds 12 to 13 jobs over a working life, with young workers aged 25–34 maintaining a median tenure of less than three years at any given position (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024). The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 92 million jobs will be displaced globally by 2030, 170 million new positions will emerge, and 39 percent of skills currently valued in the labor market will be transformed or become obsolete within five years. These are driven by the confluence of technological change, the green transition, demographic shifts, geopolitical realignment, and economic uncertainty. In this context where disruption is the norm, students do not need an educational model that treats them as economic instruments to be fitted for occupational slots. Rather, they need an education that cultivates critical thinking, adaptability, resilience, and the capacity to pivot across multiple career transitions.
Research consistently demonstrates that liberal arts education cultivates precisely these capacities. An Ithaka S+R's 2025 study of over 1.3 million students confirmed that students with liberal arts education have higher GPAs, stronger graduation rates, no post-graduation earnings disadvantage, and greater career adaptability than their peers (Gray et al. 2025). Beyond earnings, surveys of hiring managers confirm that employers highly value critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and applied, collaborative problem-solving skills that liberal education cultivates (Hart Research Associates 2015, 2018). Detweiler's 2021 study of 1,000 graduates also found that liberal arts education fosters greater civic engagement, volunteer participation, and community leadership. Given this evidence, a limited metric like early career earnings fundamentally misrepresents the economic trajectory of liberal arts graduates and obscures the full value of their education.
At the same time, liberal arts educators and institutions must not dismiss students' and parents' concerns over economic precarity. Financial stress shapes students' lives and their learning in profound ways. A 2024 national survey of 1,500 college students found that 59 percent have considered dropping out due to financial stress, and nearly 80 percent report that financial concerns negatively affect their mental health (Ellucian 2024). Research identifies financial anxiety as a core driver of depression, anxiety disorder, and academic underperformance among college students ( Karyotaki et al. 2020 ; Adams et al. 2016).
A Path Forward
A COA student works on a whale skeleton articulation project for Dan DenDanto '91, the owner of Whales and Nails, whose work includes studying whales in the ocean and in the genetics lab, educating people about whale issues, and articulating whale skeletons for museums and educational institutions.
Liberal arts institutions therefore face a dual imperative. We must continue providing students with intellectual breadth, critical thinking, and adaptive capacities that lead to long-term economic resilience and flexibility in a turbulent labor market. At the same time, we need to make tangible the connection between liberal arts learning and sustainable financial well-being to students and their families. This means building infrastructure that explicitly links intellectual formation to economic preparation, helping students see how the skills they're developing translate into sustained employability across volatile labor markets. It means integrating career exploration throughout the curriculum, not treating it as an afterthought. It also means equipping students with concrete tools and opportunities to create economic and social value as part of their learning, not only after graduation.
Many liberal arts institutions, including those in the Endeavor Lab College Collaborative, are already doing this. On my campus at College of the Atlantic (COA), students are introduced from day one to the Career Exploration Lab, where professional advisors and peer mentors help them envision future careers that align with their values and design their own curriculum to foster the prerequisite skills for such careers. Students also complete both an internship and community volunteer service as graduation requirements. These concrete practices ensure that career development and financial well-being are an integrated part of students’ education. Across the Endeavor Lab Colleges, institutions are adopting similar models that address academic, career, and personal development together rather than as separate domains.
COA students work on a seabird monitoring project at the school's Alice Eno Field Research Station on Great Duck Island.
We can all do more, and this work must begin with faculty—the intellectual heart and mind of each campus. When faculty help students think critically, communicate effectively, and grapple with complex problems, we prepare students for meaningful lives and work. Academic advising and career advising are not separate activities but interwoven work that shapes students’ futures. Most critically, teaching the value of liberal arts education is itself pedagogical work that must extend beyond the classroom.
We can do so without treating liberal arts education as solely human capital development, optimizing for individual material success. Such narrow understanding of education risks producing graduates who see communities and ecosystems merely as disposable resources in their pursuit of private gain. This is what Adam Smith warned against in The Wealth of Nations when he observed that "insatiable appetites" for personal accumulation threaten the social fabric that enables prosperity in the first place. The true wealth of a nation is neither its GDP nor its stock market performance, but its people and the lives they live. An education accountability system that measures college graduates by their earnings has lost sight of this truth.
Dr. Hien Nguyen is the Cody van Heerden Chair in Economics & Quantitative Social Sciences at College of the Atlantic.