Perspectives

FOR THE MONEY?

FOR THE LOVE?
Reconsidering the “Worth”
of a College Major
By Steven J. Tepper and Danielle J. Lindemann

S
tudents and their parents certainly deserve to know
the worth of their investment in education. In defining
worth, social scientists and policymakers typically use
economic yardsticks, evaluating the outcomes of vari-
ous college majors in terms of earnings and employ-
ment rates. However, different concepts of worth better align
with our mission as educators, match what students want and
graduates are satisfied with, and promote the nation’s eco-
nomic health.
There are many other, perhaps better, ways to measure the
value of a college education than employment and income.
We could, for example, rank majors and institutions by how
well they impart critical or creative thinking skills, by their
production of civic leaders or entrepreneurs, by student
satisfaction, by whether alumni indicate that the skills they
learned in college are relevant to their lives, or by whether
they are satisfied with their careers and whether their jobs
give them a sense of purpose. On this last point, recent
research indicates that we might want to provide a truth-in-
advertising label for families that are looking into the results
of each major—something like “engineers, on average, earn
more than performing artists, but performing artists, on aver-
age, are happier than engineers in their work.”
Which Majors Foster Resilience?
Our global economy, while creating expanded opportu-
nity for many, also produces increased anxiety and stress
related to job insecurity. Fewer people today can aspire to
long-term careers in the same industry, let alone the same
company or organization. According to the US Bureau of
Labor Statistics, in 2010, men and women 18 to 44 years old
had held on average 11 jobs, and a quarter had worked at 15
or more jobs.
Along with job insecurity, graduates must confront global
migration, demographic change, market instability, and
decreased public services. These challenges take their toll on
students’ mental health.
True to Garrison Keillor’s characterization of Lake
Wobegon, where everyone is above average, freshman
increasingly rate themselves as above average compared to
their peers in academic skills, confidence, and leadership.
Emotional health is the one area in which they see them-
selves as below average, with many more students reporting
lower levels of emotional health and much higher levels of
stress today than students of two decades ago.
The ability to act and think creatively is necessary to
navigate such rough seas and to give graduates the

Steven J. Tepper (Steven.J.Tepper@Vanderbilt.edu) is associate director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public
Policy, associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University, and research director of the Strategic National Arts Alumni
Project (SNAAP). Danielle J. Lindemann (djlind@work.rutgers.edu) is an assistant research professor and research director
of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University. She is the author of Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in
the Dungeon (Chicago, 2012).

20 Change • March/April 2014


Perhaps we should ask which
majors help students deal with
uncertainty, failure, and risk.
confidence and efficacy to deal with ambiguity and contin-
gency. Creativity scholar Ruth Richards finds that creative
people are more resilient and less anxious in the face of
change compared to those who score lower on creativity
assessments. Others have found that creative people are also
more politically tolerant, more accepting of diverse people
and ideas, and more comfortable with ambiguity.
Perhaps we should ask which majors help students deal
with uncertainty, failure, and risk. Perhaps we should evalu-
ate majors not by who is first to get a job out of college, or
who is fully employed at any one moment, or who earns the
highest wage, but rather by who is able to deal with contin-
gent employment or job loss by piecing together work and
getting back on their feet.
Who can creatively reinvent themselves, pivot, and
change directions? In a 2010 national study of academic
majors, supported by the Teagle Foundation and fielded by
Vanderbilt University, arts and humanities graduates were
more than five times as likely as their science and engineer-
ing peers to say that learning to deal with ambiguity was a
routine part of their coursework.
Higher Education for Sale
Still, researchers and journalists generally fall in line
with the broader trend of assigning everything in life a
market value. In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits
of Markets, Michael J. Sandel illuminates the contours of a
world in which pretty much everything is for sale.
People can buy their way into carpool lanes, even if they
are driving alone; you can buy your way to the front of the
line at concerts and movies; and corporations can sponsor
homeruns in major league baseball and advertise on school
buses. Many will argue that these trends produce greater
public utility, as people willingly exchange goods and ser-
vices at a price that is mutually advantageous to both parties.
In short, if people didn’t benefit from selling their souls, they
wouldn’t do it. But these narrow metrics place profit above
purpose.
Colleges are not immune to this way of thinking. Our
values are evident in the way we pitch our campuses to
prospective students. Typical admissions tour guides “sell”
their universities to prospective students like another con-
sumer good—emphasizing facilities, food, services, and
local attractions. Given this consumerist mentality, it is not
www.changemag.org 21
surprising that more than a quarter of undergraduates in
our survey of academic majors report that they should get
refunds for classes they don’t like.
But this one-dimensional conception of the value of a
college education does not fit with how alumni themselves
evaluate their degrees. Money is indeed one criterion they
use to think about their success. For some majors, it may
be the dominant criterion. For others, like those in the arts,
financial considerations take a backseat to considerations
such as personal satisfaction, the chance to be creative, and
the ability to contribute to one’s community and to society.
And across all majors, according to our 2010 national sur-
vey, graduating seniors rank creativity, leadership, personal
values, family, and work/life balance as more important than
income when considering their futures. Given the diverse
motivations and career aspirations of students, why do we
insist on focusing on employment and income data?
Ironically, this focus may actually hurt the nation economi-
cally, in the long run. Research by the Federal Reserve Bank
indicates that for tasks involving creativity and problem-
solving, performance is driven by intrinsic motivation; higher
financial incentives actually lead to worse performance.
Moreover, there is considerable evidence (see Trilling &
Fadel, Berman & Korsten, and Tepper in Resources) indi-
cating that creativity and flexibility are what will allow the
United States to compete in the global marketplace.
In fostering creativity in addition to value-driven, money-
making behaviors, in short, we are preparing our students for
what is very likely to be a turbulent future. Our 2010 national
survey suggests that many of today’s young people “get it.”
Eighty-four of students say that thinking creatively is “impor-
tant” or “very important” (compared to 60 who say the same
about solving quantitative problems), and 92 say that having
a career that allows to them be creative is important.
Perhaps it is naïve to think that higher education can
somehow sidestep the market logic that dominates the rest
of our lives. And even as students report that creativity is
important to them, about 81 percent of incoming fresh-
man continue to rank “being very well off financially” as
an “essential” or “very important” life goal. But do college
graduates—with some time, distance, and experience—see
Graduating seniors rank creativity,
leadership, personal values, family,
and work/life balance as more
important than income when
considering their futures.

Students do not typically enroll
in arts school with dollar signs
in their eyes…Money is not what
makes artists happy.
the worth of their college education differently? Do they
begin to value other important life goals? Does purpose
begin to elbow out profit?
While we cannot answer these questions for all college
graduates, we do have access to a unique data set of gradu-
ates from arts schools and training programs. The Strategic
National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) is an annual online
survey and data management system designed to improve
arts-school education. SNAAP is the most extensive concen-
trated effort ever to track the training, careers, and lives of
arts graduates in the United States. Since 2008, SNAAP has
collected information from over 100,000 arts alumni from
hundreds of different educational institutions.
The responses of these alumni to the SNAAP survey not
only call into question how we evaluate the worth of an arts
education or the merits of a college degree in general—they
also challenge the metrics we use to privilege profit over pas-
sion and materialism over meaning in multiple spheres of
social life.
Art ≠ Money (and Arts Students Know This)
Students do not typically enroll in arts school with dollar
signs in their eyes. While this point may be obvious to any-
one who has majored in an arts field or known anyone who
has, this seemingly simple assertion cuts at the heart of long-
standing assumptions about schooling and success.
In fact, we find striking evidence that, despite their rela-
tively low median earnings, these graduates are satisfied
with their artistic training and their current work. Money is
not what makes artists happy.
Among SNAAP respondents:
• 76 percent would go back and attend their degree-grant-
ing institutions again.
• 90 percent say their overall experience in arts school
was either “good” or “excellent.”
• 87 percent are satisfied with their current jobs.
• 82 percent are satisfied with their ability to be creative
in their current primary jobs.
22 Change • March/April 2014
Even among those who are currently unemployed and
actively looking for work, 68 percent would attend the same
institution again, and 84 percent rate their overall experience
in arts school as “good” or “excellent.”
There is little relationship between the amount of money
these graduates currently earn and their satisfaction with
their work. For example, arts alumni who currently work
primarily as dancers or choreographers earn the least of
any artists. Yet they are the ones who are the most likely to
indicate that they are satisfied with their work: 97 percent
indicate that they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied overall
with their jobs.
Are Artists Weird?
One might argue that artists are the exceptions who prove
the rule when it comes to notions about educational worth.
Perhaps artists are particularly good at embracing their pas-
sions in the face of impending poverty. After all, numerous
studies have shown that arts students tend to be less econom-
ically oriented than their peers.
But it’s not just artists who value things like job satisfac-
tion, the ability to follow their passions, and the chance to
be creative in their careers. There is little evidence, in gen-
eral, that wealth is what makes human beings happy. In a
2012 New York Times article, Elizabeth Dunn and Michael
Norton point out that people who earn $25,000 a year think
their happiness will double if they earn $55,000, but it only
increases 9 percent. And after $75,000, more money does
not make you happier.
If this is the case, why is financial success the dominant
frame we use to designate merit, not just for arts graduates
or graduates in general but within numerous arenas of social
life?
Yes, Money Is Important!
Income and employment are two crucial measures of the
worth of a college degree. We do not have visions of some
utopian society in which artists are able to eat paint and
breathe passion. Money is important!
And while our SNAAP results reveal that the overall
picture of arts’ graduates employment is not all doom and
gloom—for instance, their unemployment rate is lower
than that of the overall population—we join multiple other
researchers in finding that arts graduates do not earn as
much as their peers with equivalent degrees.
Many professional artists are underfunded, underpaid,
underemployed, and exploited. These difficulties are exac-
erbated for different subgroups of graduates such as racial
and ethnic minorities, women, those who live in certain
geographic locations, and those without personal contacts
within the arts. As we argue in a recent report (Lindemann &
Tepper, 2012), there is an onus on arts schools to better pre-
pare their students for navigating both the opportunities and
challenges of the creative economy.
But we have a vision of a cultural context that does not
privilege earnings for earnings’ sake. It is important to take
into account whether our nation’s graduates are happy, are
finding meaning in life, and are resilient and creatively pro-
ductive—particularly in today’s economy, which increasingly
values creative solutions and requires graduates to be flex-
ible and prepared to deal with ambiguity.
Arts alumni may or may not be “successful” based on
the measures traditionally used to define achievement and
contribution. However, they express high levels of overall
satisfaction with their education and with their jobs, and they
have higher-than-average rates of volunteering, civic partici-
pation, teaching, and charitable contributions. In short, they
find work and happiness, and they give back to their com-
munities.
So what is a college degree worth? If SNAAP tells us any-
thing, it is that some of our nation’s lowest-earning college
graduates are not miserable and may, in fact, be uniquely
well prepared for today’s economic realities. C

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