The ROI Conversation Higher Education Really Needs
A response to the growing ROI debate in higher education and an argument for measuring whether institutions convert student aspiration into durable opportunity.
Higher education has a value problem.
Not because college no longer matters. It does.
Not because the liberal arts are obsolete. If anything, they are becoming more important.
And not because students and families are wrong to ask hard questions about cost, debt, completion, career outcomes, and the reliability of institutional promises. They are right to ask those questions. We should want them to ask.
The problem is that higher education has too often answered complex questions with either defensive slogans or incomplete metrics.
The February Deloitte higher education trends report captures the moment well. The sector is facing pressure from declining enrollment, weakened public confidence, funding instability, technological disruption, research uncertainty, and shifting global competition. Deloitte argues that institutions need to shift the conversation from the “cost of college” to the “return on a credential.”
That is a logical and necessary shift. But it is the beginning of the conversation, not the end.
If we define “return” only as the immediate wages earned by recent graduates, we risk misjudging the value of higher education just as surely as we have sometimes overstated it.
Cost is not the only question
For years, higher education has responded to skepticism by pointing to the aggregate wage premium of a college degree. On average, people with bachelor’s degrees earn more over their working lives than those without them. That remains true, and it matters.
But averages are not lived experiences.
Students and families do not enroll in “the sector.” They enroll in a specific institution, in a specific program, with a specific aid package, a specific advising structure, a specific set of faculty expectations, a specific labor market, and a specific level of access to internships, networks, mentoring, and career-connected learning.
That specificity is where the public-trust problem lives.
A student who borrows, stops out after the first year, and never completes has not experienced the average return of a college degree. That does not mean the student cannot build a good life or a stable future. It means the wage premium associated with degree completion is no longer the relevant promise.
A student who completes but never has the opportunity to apply what they have learned before graduation, build professional networks, develop social capital, or receive career mentorship has experienced something less than the promise on the brochure.
And a student who graduates into a rapidly changing labor market with narrow technical preparation and limited adaptability may see early gains that erode over time.
So yes, the sector needs to talk more honestly about return. But return has to mean more than a salary snapshot.
The danger of a narrow ROI frame
The current debate about ROI is understandable. Students pursue postsecondary education in large part because they want better job and career prospects. Policymakers are increasingly asking whether credentials lead to economic mobility. Deloitte names both realities, while also noting the growing complexity of the credential marketplace, including the expansion of short-term and nondegree credentials.
That pressure is not going away.
But a narrow ROI frame creates distortions.
If we measure only early-career earnings, we undervalue fields with high social contribution but weak wage structures: education, human services, public-interest work, the arts, nonprofit leadership, and other areas essential to civic and community life.
If we measure only program-level salaries, we may miss whether institutions are improving mobility for students from different starting points.
If we measure only job placement, we may miss whether graduates are prepared to adapt, lead, communicate, exercise judgment, and keep learning as work changes.
And if we treat degree completion as the final mark of success, we see only one point in a much larger student pathway. We do not see the full experience that shaped the outcome: academic momentum, advising, co-curricular learning, career services, internships, mentoring, financial pressure, belonging, or access to opportunity.
The answer cannot be to reject accountability. That would be a mistake. We know that because we do not claim to be degree mills. We claim to be mission-driven institutions committed to student learning, mobility, and contribution.
The answer is to build a better accountability model.
Return is really a question of durable value. Did the education hold up over time? Did it help students complete, adapt, contribute, and move through a changing economy with agency?
That is the deeper measure: not just what happens immediately after graduation, but whether the institution has created value that lasts.
Durable value is the better question
We cannot simply ask, “What is the immediate wage return of this credential?”
We should ask instead: “Does this institution convert student aspiration into durable opportunity?”
Durable opportunity includes earnings, but it is not reducible to earnings. It includes completion, but it is not reducible to completion. It includes employment, but it is not reducible to first-destination employment.
A better measure of return would connect the full student pathway: net price, debt burden, first-year retention, credit momentum, gateway-course success, transfer outcomes, completion, time to degree, access to paid experiential learning, post-graduation employment, underemployment, earnings growth, graduate study, and longer-term career mobility.
The point is not to build a larger dashboard for its own sake. The point is to understand whether an institution is actually converting student aspiration into durable opportunity.
Durable value asks whether students leave an institution with:
- a completed credential of recognized value;
- reduced risk of preventable academic or financial loss;
- human capabilities that AI, or any disruptive technology not yet imagined, cannot easily replace;
- career-connected learning and access to professional networks;
- the capacity to adapt across jobs, sectors, and economic cycles; and
- a realistic pathway to mobility, contribution, and continued learning.
That is a more demanding standard than saying “college pays.”
It is also much more useful.
Student success is where value becomes real
This is where institutions need to get more precise.
Before a college or university can credibly claim value, it should be able to answer a basic set of pathway questions:
- Where do students first fall off track?
- Is the primary problem first-year retention, credit momentum, gateway-course performance, transfer loss, financial pressure, belonging, advising, career connection, or the structure of the academic program itself?
- Which students are leaving the institution but continuing elsewhere?
- Which students are leaving higher education altogether?
- Which programs produce completion but weak mobility?
- Which programs produce strong career outcomes, but primarily for students who arrive with the most social capital?
- Which students get access to paid internships, undergraduate research, clinical placements, co-ops, alumni networks, and employer-connected experiences, and which students do not?
This is also where mentoring and networks have to become visible. Too often, relationships operate as a hidden curriculum: available to students who know how to find them, ask for them, or already have proximity to professional networks.
If mentoring, alumni connection, employer engagement, and career guidance are essential to opportunity, then they cannot remain informal benefits. They have to be designed, resourced, measured, and equitably distributed.
Those are not peripheral questions. They are value questions.
A degree has value when an institution has built the conditions that allow students to complete, connect, adapt, and advance.
A credential has value when it is not merely awarded, but translated into opportunity.
AI makes this more urgent, not less
Deloitte also points to the tension between today’s emphasis on measurable ROI and the longer-term value of broad, human-centered learning in an AI-disrupted economy. That is the right tension to name.
The rise of AI should make higher education more accountable to workforce outcomes, not less. But it should also make us more careful about what we mean by workforce preparation.
If the labor market is changing quickly, preparing students only for the first job is insufficient. Institutions need to prepare students for work that is being redefined in real time.
The answer is not to abandon liberal education in favor of short-term training. Nor is it to defend liberal education as an abstraction.
The work is integration: broad human capabilities connected intentionally to applied learning, technical fluency, employer engagement, civic purpose, and real-world problem-solving.
Students need technical fluency, yes. They also need judgment, ethical reasoning, communication, teamwork, creativity, quantitative reasoning, cultural competence, and the ability to learn new tools without losing sight of human purpose.
In other words, the AI era does not weaken the case for liberal education.
It raises the stakes for proving that liberal education is intentionally designed, career-connected, and accessible to all students, not reserved for those who already know how to convert it into opportunity.
The leadership challenge
The institutions that rebuild public trust will not be the ones with the most elegant mission statements. They will be the ones that can show how mission, money, learning, and outcomes connect.
That requires more than marketing.
It requires academic program review that considers student demand, labor-market relevance, instructional cost, completion patterns, and contribution to mission.
It requires advising and career development to be treated as core academic infrastructure, not optional student services.
It requires paid experiential learning to be part of the educational model, not a privilege reserved for students who can afford unpaid work.
It requires transparent data that helps institutions see where students are being lost, and whether interventions are working.
It requires governing boards and senior teams to ask not only, “What does this program cost?” but also, “What student opportunity does this program create, for whom, and with what evidence?”
And it requires higher education leaders to be candid: not every program is equally strong, not every credential has equal value, and not every institution has built the systems students need to succeed.
That honesty is not a threat to higher education.
It is the path back to trust.
A better compact
Higher education should not allow its value to be defined solely by critics, rankings, or short-term earnings dashboards. But neither can it retreat into broad claims about transformation without evidence.
The next compact with students, families, employers, policymakers, and communities has to be clearer:
- We will help students complete.
- We will reduce avoidable loss.
- We will connect learning to work without reducing learning to work.
- We will measure outcomes honestly.
- We will preserve the human purposes of education while preparing students for an economy being reshaped by technology.
- We will show where value is created and where it is not yet being created well enough.
That is the ROI conversation higher education actually needs.
Not a narrow definition of value.
A more rigorous one.
READ MORE
Essays on Higher Education, Research, Innovation, and Public Impact
Ongoing writing and analysis on higher education, research, innovation, institutional adaptation, and public impact.
Let’s Connect
I welcome opportunities to connect around higher education, research, innovation, student success, and cross-sector collaboration. Whether related to institutional strategy, public engagement, research partnerships, or applied innovation, I’m always interested in thoughtful conversations and meaningful work.