College outcomes should not be just measured on lifetime earnings

An organization called the Postsecondary Commission recently published a study analyzing the earning history of one million graduates of Texas public universities. The study calculated how much higher education contributed to a student’s earnings over 15 years and concluded that, in general, college pays off for students. 

This is good news. But their discovery that engineering students do best and liberal arts students lag behind feeds into an appealing but ultimately misguided logic that universities should direct resources toward the highest-earning majors and away from the ones that don’t pay off.

Before accepting that logic, it’s worth asking who is supporting it — and why.

The Postsecondary Commission is part of a crowded effort to reshape American higher education by redefining what it’s for, backed by politicians and think tanks. Alongside more groups like the Council for Public Higher Education, it is pushing to replace traditional accreditation — the peer-review process through which universities have long been held accountable — with an outcomes-based framework built around one question: What is the economic outcome for students? Or to put it bluntly, what’s the payoff? 

The federal government supports efforts to transform accreditation, and Texas has already passed legislation loosening the state’s relationship with its default accreditor. In light of those shifts, it’s clear that the Postsecondary Commission’s study isn’t neutral social science. It’s part of a broader argument with significant institutional backing at state and federal levels, and real policy consequences. 

Still, the study deserves a serious response, not because the earnings question is illegitimate, but because the approach built around it systematically obscures what public universities actually do for the 700,000 students they serve throughout Texas each year.

Consider the students at the University of Houston, where I teach, one of the public institutions this framework would judge. UH educates more Pell Grant recipients — students from low-income families — than all eight Ivy League universities combined.

These are students for whom a university degree is not a credential layered on top of existing advantages that contribute to earning potential. Rather, they are often the first in their families to attain a college degree. And that degree is both the product of enormous sacrifice and the foundation of everything that comes next. 

The earnings data, moreover, doesn’t tell the story the Commission claims it does. It’s true that engineering graduates out-earn humanities graduates early in their careers. But it’s also true that humanities graduates close that gap substantially over time, a fact the Commission’s methodology does not capture.

What the data can’t capture at all is the role that liberal arts education plays in producing the STEM graduates the framework celebrates. Every engineering student at a Texas public university has taken courses in writing, history and critical thinking, courses taught overwhelmingly by humanities faculty. The communication and analytical skills that employers consistently rank among their most sought-after qualities don’t materialize from STEM training alone. They are built, deliberately and at scale, by the departments the Commission’s return on investment model would marginalize.

There is also a budget reality this approach ignores. Humanities instruction is significantly cheaper to deliver than STEM instruction. In practice, humanities departments cross-subsidize the much more expensive laboratory sciences, generating the credit hours that fund the infrastructure STEM programs require. A university that followed the Commission’s logic to its conclusion would need to cut the programs that make its highest-earning programs financially viable.

This is the double bind a framework based solely on economic outcome creates: Liberal arts education enables student success, subsidizes institutional costs and gets penalized in the metrics anyway. That’s not a measurement problem but a fundamental failure to recognize how institutions function. 

If we are really concerned about the earning potential of liberal arts graduates, perhaps we could consider increasing the salaries of one of the major professions they enter: teaching.

The public university was not built to maximize the earnings of its graduates. It was built on a different and more demanding premise: that a democratic society requires an educated citizenry. Access to that education should not depend on wealth or background, and the measure of a university’s success is not what its graduates earn in their first job but what kind of people and what kind of society it helps produce. That premise has generated one of the most remarkable engines of social mobility in American history.

The Postsecondary Commission is asking us to trade that premise for a narrower one. We should at least be clear about what we’d be giving up.

Daniel Davies is an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston.