Why Education Is Important

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College is seen as job training, but it should be where students learn to think and live well.

Skills matter, but without reflection, they may not lead to a meaningful life.

The humanities reveal how different paths to happiness can lead to success or failure.

When people question the value of a humanities education today, they often ask what appears to be a practical question: “What can you do with it?” This isn’t new. When I went to college more than 20 years ago, people asked me the same question. It didn’t matter that I went to work in real estate finance after college. When I told them this, they just changed the question to, “Why didn’t you major in business?”

Behind this question lies an assumption that education should primarily prepare students to obtain a job, financial security, or a chance to jump one or two levels in socio-economic status. These goals are valid. Students want stability. Parents want reassurance that their children will be able to support themselves. Universities want to demonstrate measurable returns on investment.

However, these aims are also connected to a deeper aspiration that parents want for their children and that societies want for their citizens—happiness. Parents tell me that they want their children to be happy and live good lives. They then tell me that the way to do that is through that high-paying job, financial security, and their chance to jump one or two levels in socio-economic status.

College education has become seen as a step toward a long-term plan for happiness. Yet now that step is being challenged. Companies are beginning to recruit with “no degree required” strategies, offering applicants the opportunity to develop skills necessary to advance and achieve the happiness we all strive for.

When universities justify the humanities only as preprofessional training, they won’t be able to compete…and they leave a lot of value on the table.

Taking humanities courses instead of courses in marketing and accounting may not give you the skills directly related to your first job (if you go into marketing or accounting), though they will teach critical thinking and perspective-taking, and give you a more fully developed sense of curiosity as well as provide a broad base of knowledge that could be beneficial for any type of problem solving in the future. Yet, when it comes to happiness, a humanities education can offer one of the most valuable lessons of all—how to live a more fully engaged life by deepening your understanding of who you are and what you care about—through the vicarious experiences found in what you learn. It will also teach you not to confuse happiness with external goods, such as pleasure, honor, or wealth.

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian pursues a life devoted to enjoyment and indulgence, believing that pleasure will lead to fulfillment. Freed from the visible consequences of his actions, he fills his days with excess without restraint. The portrait that ages in his place “protects” him from having to face what he is actually doing to his life.

At first, this arrangement appears liberating. Over time, however, his inner life becomes marked by regret and corruption, even as his outward appearance remains unchanged. The novel illustrates a tension that philosophers have long recognized: Pursuing pleasure as an end in itself may fail to produce the happiness it promises.

Why Education Is Important

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Shakespeare’s Macbeth portrays the path to happiness as being grounded in social status and power. Macbeth’s ambition drives him forward, yet his ascent is accompanied by increasing isolation, anxiety, and mistrust. The honor he attains depends on others’ perceptions rather than his own character, making it unstable and difficult to sustain. Even as he acquires power, he becomes more dependent on the approval and loyalty of those around him, many of whom fear rather than respect him. In the end, the status he sought to achieve becomes a source of paranoia rather than satisfaction.

We can easily see a parallel in contemporary life in the pursuit of online visibility, where social approval is quantified through likes, shares, and followers. Recognition becomes a measure of worth, even when it does not foster genuine connection. Individuals may appear successful in terms of garnering attention or influence while experiencing a growing sense of disconnection from others.

Economic security can improve quality of life in important ways. Access to resources affects health, education, and opportunities for personal development. Yet research suggests that beyond a certain threshold, additional income contributes less to subjective well-being. The difference between having enough and not having enough is significant, but the difference between having more and having much more may be less impactful on how people experience their daily lives.

The humanities have long anticipated this insight. Literary figures such as Ebenezer Scrooge (though personally I am a bigger fan of Scrooge McDuck) illustrate how the accumulation of resources may fail to produce what we want from them. It may even detract from our greatest needs and wants when it is detached from meaningful relationships or purposeful activity. Wealth can expand our options, but it cannot tell us what to choose. To paraphrase The Beatles, money can’t buy you love.

Across these examples, a common lesson emerges: Happiness cannot be reduced to external markers of success. Those markers may accompany happiness, but they aren’t the means to it. This distinction matters because it shifts attention from outcomes to activities. When the work one does, the relationships one cultivates, and the communities in which one participates speak to your sense of self, you can find happiness coming along for the ride. When you do things for the sake of other people’s approval—whether through money, fame, or power—you will always be chasing something that you can never fully attain.

A humanities education does not simply transmit this insight as an abstract theory. By engaging with narratives, characters, and historical events, students encounter examples of lives that succeed or fail in different ways. They learn to consider how ambitions, desires, and social pressures shape decisions over time. But this is only the case if students take the lessons to heart. Rather than simply ask, “What does this story or idea say?” they must be taught to ask, “What does this story or idea say to me? How might it shape the way I understand myself, my values, and the life I am trying to live?”

Reading literature allows students to inhabit perspectives other than their own. Studying history reveals how values and priorities shift across time and contexts. Philosophy provides tools for evaluating competing conceptions of the good life. Together, these disciplines encourage self-reflection. They provide more than cultural knowledge; they offer a framework for evaluating what it means to live well and achieve the happiness we all want.

As debates about the practical value of the humanities continue, it may be worth remembering that assumptions about happiness have practical consequences.

So, “What can you do with a humanities degree?”

You can achieve the life you want to live.

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