What Good Is College?

Source: Felipe Gregate / Unsplash

What did you gain from college? You can probably answer this question succinctly (“a degree,” “an education,” “debt”), but the real benefits of college are more complex. Personally, I can draw a fairly linear line from Albion College to graduate school to postdoc(s) to my iniative Persistence Plus. However, the greatest benefits of college were meeting my wife and my cat, friendships that persist to this day, and learning the basics of independent living.

These benefits are reflected in new research by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup. Gallup asked a representative panel of around 100,000 Americans about their careers, health, relationships, communities, and attitudes, and then compared those responses across five categories: no college, some college no degree (SCND), associate degree, bachelor’s degree, and graduate degree. The questions were based on prior research linking college to better life outcomes beyond just earning more money.

Lumina/Gallup found that people with more education were better off on 50 of 52 measures! That 96% hit rate is not easy to dismiss as a fluke. What’s easier is to posit non-causal explanations, the two most prominent of which are:

• Self-selection: People who are healthier, wealthier, and happier are more likely to graduate from college, and are destined for better life outcomes no matter what.
• Economics: People who earn higher degrees find better, higher paying jobs, which leads to better life outcomes.

My greatest benefit from college. Miss you, Bandit.

Source: Ross O'Hara

While impossible to determine whether college causes happiness—we can’t randomly assign people to college or no college—these findings add weight to the argument that college affords benefits beyond job prospects. And that should matter to a lot of people.

Why this matters to colleges

As we climbed out of the COVID-19 pandemic, wages in lower-income jobs surged by 5.7%, an unprecedented gain over just two years. Meanwhile, college enrollment fell by over 3%, with community colleges bearing the brunt of this attrition. Colleagues would ask how to convince students to stay in college when Outback Steakhouse was paying $18.50/hour, and I didn’t have great answers for them. In my mind, these students’ decisions were rational and expected when college had been defined for them solely in economic terms.

Although Lumina/Gallup reaffirmed college's economic benefits (compared to no college, those with SCND, an associate, or a bachelor’s earned 29%, 62%, and 133% more from wages, respectively), the personal benefits may mean much more. Those with a bachelor’s were 13%-23% more likely to report high life satisfaction than those without, and education was positively correlated with optimism for one’s future. Even if these differences are largely mediated by income, they still spark a different conversation about why people should go to college.

In fact, non-economic benefits may be as powerful in people's educational decisions, if not more so, than data like graduation rates, job openings, and expected incomes. A new study by Strada Education found that 54% of students attend community college for personal reasons, like self-improvement or being a role model. What's more, 60% of students said they fulfilled their personal goals at community college, compared to only 49% who said they fulfilled their work goals. While colleges continue to face declining enrollments in a recovering economy, non-economic benefits may reframe postsecondary education as not just a transactional experience but a holistic one that has more to offer than Outback (just not Bloomin’ Onions).

Why this matters to employers

A college degree is generally perceived as proof of the requisite skills to be successful in a given career. Whether those skills are “hard” or “soft,” our mental shortcut is that people with a degree have them, people without don’t. While debate continues around skills-based hiring that ignores degree attainment (see at least six op-eds in the New York Times just this year), findings from Lumina/Gallup suggest candidates with higher degrees may confer other advantages to employers.

First, employers collectively lose more than $225 billion annually due, in part, to employees who develop acute or chronic health conditions. Thus, it’s in employers’ best interest that their workforce remains healthy. Lumina/Gallup found people with a degree were at least 28% more likely to consider themselves in good health compared to no college. Specifically, associate or bachelor’s degree holders were 33% and 75% less likely to have a chronic disease, respectively, than people with no college, and education was negatively correlated with having any kind of debilitating health issue.

Furthermore, these differences may be due to people's health decisions, not just that healthier people are more likely to finish college (i.e., selection). In a separate study of more than 14,000 Americans tracked from youth into young adulthood, those who graduated college were 132% less likely to smoke, drank 72% fewer sugary drinks, ate fast food half as much, and were half as likely to be considered obese. These results held when controlling for graduates’ advantages in financial, occupational, social, and cognitive terms, perhaps the best possible evidence for a causal effect of college on health.

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The Lumina/Gallup report also suggests that a more educated workforce may be more retainable. People with an associate's or bachelor’s degree were 22% and 38% more likely, respectively, than those with no college to feel that their job fits their talents and interests. They’re also more likely to see challenges as opportunities for growth, to feel confident that hard work pays off, and to set and achieve goals that require years of preparation. These “durable” skills likely benefit employers in terms of lower turnover, willingness to take on major projects, and striving to move up in the organization rather than moving on.

Why this matters to everyone else

The last questions asked by Lumina/Gallup speak to colleges’ role in producing a more educated populace. They found that people who are more educated are more likely to…

• Trust, talk to, do favors for, and get along with their neighbors
• Engage in social, religious, or recreational/sports groups in the community
• Volunteer and/or donate to charity
• Vote in local and federal elections, and believe that those elections are free and fair
• Believe in human-driven global warming and make decisions to minimize harm to the environment

For the past 21 years, I’ve been connected to higher education as a student, researcher, professor, or employee. During that time, college has been gradually reframed as a job-training program, with the ultimate goals to benefit corporations and boost the economy. Meanwhile, we've watched misinformation run rampant, mass shootings triple, insurrections against democracy, pandemics deepened by mistrust of science, and many parts of the world literally burn. Much like the report itself, I cannot make a causal claim, but the correlations seem telling.

So what can we do? First, we need to better understand how college may change people’s behaviors and attitudes. This understanding needn’t come from well-funded research firms, either; if you work on a college campus, start talking to students and alumni about non-economic ways they've benefitted from college. Second, if some kind of college experience is necessary for a healthier, safer, and more trusting world, then we need to stop trying to circumvent college and double down on making college accessible to everyone. Because if any of the benefits highlighted by Lumina/Gallup have even a remote chance of being causal, we owe it to the planet, to our democracy, to our communities, and to ourselves to encourage and help as many people as we can earn a college degree.