Beginning in July 2026, a new federal accountability framework—the “Do No Harm” standard enacted through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—will tie universities and colleges’ access to federal student loans to their graduates’ earnings.
The policy’s premise is sound: post-secondary education is an investment that should leave students financially better off. However, reducing the value of a college education to early-career earnings data is economically misguided.
To start, the focus on early-career earnings misunderstands the dynamics of contemporary labor markets. Today’s labor market bears little resemblance to the stable career trajectories of previous generations.
Nowadays, the average American holds 12 to 13 jobs over a working life, with young workers aged 25–34 maintaining a median tenure of less than three years at any given position (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024).
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 92 million jobs will be displaced globally by 2030, 170 million new positions will emerge, and 39% of skills currently valued in the labor market will be transformed or become obsolete within five years.
In this context where disruption is the norm, an educational model that treats students as instruments to be fitted for occupational slots is myopic. Rather, what students need is adaptability, resilience, and critical thinking so they can pivot across multiple careers.
Social value of college
Research consistently demonstrates that liberal arts education cultivates precisely these capacities. An Ithaka S+R’s 2025 study of over 1.3 million students confirmed that students with liberal arts education have greater career adaptability than their peers (Gray et al. 2025).
Hiring managers consistently rank critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and collaborative problem-solving among their most valued skills—strengths that characterize liberal arts graduates (Hart Research Associates 2015, 2018).
Detweiler’s 2021 study of 1,000 graduates also found that liberal arts education fosters greater civic engagement, volunteer participation, and community leadership. Given this evidence, a limited metric like early career earnings fundamentally misrepresents the economic trajectory of liberal arts graduates and obscures the full value of their education.
At the same time, liberal arts educators and institutions must not dismiss students’ and parents’ concern over economic precarity. Financial stress shapes students’ lives and their learning in profound ways.
A 2024 national survey of 1,500 college students found that 59% have considered dropping out due to financial stress, and nearly 80% report that financial concerns negatively affect their mental health (Ellucian 2024). Research identifies financial anxiety as a core driver of depression, anxiety disorder, and academic underperformance among college students (Karyotaki et al. 2020; Adams et al. 2016).
Liberal arts institutions therefore face a dual imperative. We must continue providing students with intellectual breadth, critical thinking, and adaptive capacities that lead to long-term economic resilience and flexibility in a turbulent labor market.
At the same time, we need to make tangible the connection between liberal arts learning and sustainable financial well-being to students and their families. This means building infrastructure that explicitly links intellectual formation to economic preparation, helping students see how the skills they’re developing translate into sustained employability across volatile labor markets.
It means equipping students with concrete tools and opportunities to create economic and social value as part of their learning, not only after graduation.
True wealth of a nation
Many liberal arts institutions, including those in the Endeavor Lab Colleges collaborative, are already doing this.
On my Endeavor Lab Colleges campus at College of the Atlantic, students are introduced from day one to the Career Exploration Lab, where professional advisors and peer mentors help them envision future careers that align with their values and design their own curriculum to foster the prerequisite skills for such careers. Students also complete both an internship and community volunteer service as graduation requirements.
These concrete practices ensure that career development and financial well-being are an integrated part of students’ education. Across the, institutions are adopting similar holistic models that address academic, career, and personal development together rather than as separate domains.
We do so without treating liberal arts education as solely human capital development. Such narrow understanding of education risks producing graduates who see communities and ecosystems merely as disposable resources in their pursuit of private gain.
This is what Adam Smith warned against in The Wealth of Nations when he observed that “insatiable appetites” for personal accumulation threaten the social fabric that enables prosperity in the first place. The true wealth of a nation is first and foremost its people and the lives they live.
An education accountability system that measures graduates solely by earnings has lost sight of this truth.
