- A graduate with a four-year degree will make nearly a million dollars more than a non-graduate over their lifetime. That gap has narrowed — in part due to growth in the returns to skilled trades – but it remains clear and massive.
- Earning a post-high school degree, whether an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree, is the single most common determinant in moving someone from low income to middle class.
- Even if a graduate’s first job is suboptimal, they hold an advantage over others to secure the better, next job when it opens.
AI now has injected an additional, powerful answer.
A quality college degree provides an enormous ROI — return on investment — and makes graduates AI-proof.
Like the automatic textile loom, the assembly line, and the internet, AI is likely to lead to what economist John Maynard Keynes called “technological unemployment” — the loss of jobs due to efficiencies gained through innovation. But which jobs get lost? And what new jobs will emerge?
I frequently meet with corporate executives, and they describe the skillset they need in an AI economy: the ability to ask good questions, to analyze unrelated problems and find the connection, to work well with a diversity of coworkers and customers. These executives say they can teach technical skills. What they need are team members with the capacity to discern what is valuable, correct and true. When algorithms took over stock trading in the early 2000s, college-learned skills helped one-time floor traders pivot into wealth management. The same skills made college graduates Great Recession-proof and dotcom-bust-proof.
And those skills and perspectives are what you get at a liberal arts college. Full disclosure: I am president at one – Davidson College. Six months after graduation, 95% of Davidson’s class of 2025 were employed or in grad school.
The Wall Street Journal earlier this year asked five AI luminaries, from companies such as Anthropic and Microsoft, what they tell their children about college education and careers in an AI-driven world. Two leaders specifically recommended liberal arts colleges and two others offered descriptions that sound like the dictionary entry for graduates of those schools: broadly educated, human-focused, thinking critically, adaptable in the face of change, ready to challenge ideas. Caroline Hanke is global head of organizational growth and health at software giant SAP. She told the newspaper:
“The technical skills relevant for today are not going to be relevant even two years from now. It really is more soft skills – critical thinking, adaptability. Also ethics—where human judgment comes into play.”
Liberal arts colleges generally have an enrollment in the low four digits, fostering a strong community and mentoring from faculty. Davidson’s mission statement includes cultivating “humane instincts” and “lives of leadership and service.”
“I might orient my kids toward more socializing and understanding,” Anthropic President and Co-founder Daniela Amodei said in the article, “how they relate to people in their own unique way.”
Erika Dean, a 2005 Davidson College grad, earned a degree in Spanish, worked at Bank of America and graduated from law school. Instead of litigating, she now is a global product lead at Google. The leadership and communication skills she learned at Davidson enable her to help course-correct teams of diverse backgrounds and credentials, including PhDs in engineering who are surprised at her bachelor’s degree in a foreign language. Those kinds of problem-solving and listening skills took Brian Fork on a similarly exploratory career path. The 2001 Davidson grad started as a football coach, earned a law degree, won high profile cases at a law firm and moved to the top staff job in the North Carolina state Senate. Since 2024, he has served as CEO of the Carolina Hurricanes, who just won the Stanley Cup.
Higher education has served students and societies for 1,000 years. It has added value over time, through the advent of the telegraph, telephone, television and the internet. Higher ed may shift slowly, but it does adapt. And, amid fake news and artificial intelligence, our great moral and social traditions guide us to see what is real and what is genuinely human. Liberal arts colleges provide graduates with stability and adaptability in an AI-driven and politically charged environment and, at this moment, deliver an incredible ROI.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
