The Value and the Values of College

Critics of higher education have long sought to sow doubt about the value of a college education by casting aspersions on the values it allegedly promotes. Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist” has antecedents in “the 101 most dangerous academics in America,” 1980s and 1990s jeremiads like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, and, even further back, William F. Buckley’s 1951 God and Man at Yale.

The left-wing indoctrination myth has always been just that—a myth. Ed Burmila, Jeffrey Sachs and David A. Bell, among others, cite ample evidence that the political views of professors aren’t particularly radical in the first place and that those views have a negligible effect on students’ own (also see here and here).

In our forthcoming book, Getting Learning Right: The Promise of Higher Education (MIT Press), we share the results of a study that followed 20 Northeastern University students every semester from their first year through graduation. The study confirms what others have found: With few exceptions, professors welcomed diverse viewpoints and insisted that students formulate their own analyses and views. The students also described being influenced by a variety of people, not just professors—classmates, friends, family members, advisers, co-workers, bosses and more. Some intentionally chose mentors with diverse perspectives.

Recently, we caught up with eight of our study participants, now five to seven years after graduation. We weren’t surprised that certain professors, peers, courses and especially experiential learning opportunities had a lasting influence on them. What did surprise us: When they spoke about their experiences, they described the value of college largely in terms of helping them to identify and live their values. From their perspective, we in higher education are in the values-formation business—just not in the way our critics allege.

To be clear: These alumni were not saying they had been taught specific values, but rather that college gave them time, opportunities and support to figure out what kinds of lives they wanted to lead and what contributions they wanted to make to their families, communities and the world. We want to introduce you to three of these remarkable young people. They help us understand that in fact, value formation is a crucial purpose—and thus value proposition—for postsecondary education. They also suggest how educators and institutions can support students in this process.

Martha: ‘A Framework That Centered My Own Values’

Martha majored in human services and is now a minister and youth educator. She came to the university already identifying as an activist. She described college as a series of curated opportunities, inside and outside the classroom, to reflect on, clarify and live her values.

Martha received support and mentorship from faculty who taught her, for example, systems thinking and theories of social change. She spoke with special passion about her faculty-led summer study abroad program—Northeastern calls them Dialogues—to Zambia. This experience, she told us, challenged her thinking about the ethics of international “change making.” It drove home for her the idea that “people have different truths than you and that is a beneficial thing.”

At the same time, Martha’s two co-ops—six-month, full-time work experiences at a small nonprofit organization and a large international organization—offered her “way more clarity and opportunity to clarify my own professional values at a younger age than a lot of my peers.” The co-op program, she said, “felt like a safe, sort of lower-stakes, more well-supported space” where she could assess the kind of work she wanted to do and the kind of place she wanted to do it in. She felt well prepared to make career decisions “using a framework that centered my own values.”

Now, several years after graduation, Martha’s values framework—rooted in service to others and social justice—continues to guide her work “to build strong local resilience, nongovernmental communities of practice and connection.”

Riddhi: ‘A Bird’s-Eye View’

Riddhi was an international affairs major and is now a policy adviser at the Ministry of Environment in her Caribbean home country. Like Martha, she had an idea of what she wanted to do coming into college: to work on climate change, which was creating devastating consequences for her island home.

In addition to environmental studies coursework, Riddhi completed co-ops at a government agency and a consulting firm. She also went on two environment-related Dialogues. After graduation, Riddhi said, she “was able to apply a lot of my skills from experiential learning” to her work implementing critical infrastructure projects and policies for an international organization. Learning about models of sustainable development in her courses and experiencing them in the field, she said, “gave me a really big leg up” not just at work, but in building an “advocacy platform.” This included organizing a conference for young professionals working on climate across the Caribbean.

When we spoke to her in 2025, Riddhi was just starting her governmental position. “So,” she said, “instead of advocating on the outside, I am going to be on the inside and hopefully writing some policies that actually are cementing the sort of change that we want to see.” She told us that her diverse college learning experiences helped her develop a “bird’s-eye view [rather] than just … a very narrow perspective.” She learned the importance of approaching new experiences and unfamiliar cultures “with a very open mindset, learning, taking it in and then applying that to my theories of change or my observations.”

Max: ‘A Much More Gray World’

A political science major in college, Max now manages a project team at a transportation company. Until his senior year, he was on a prelaw track, completing one co-op at a U.S. attorney’s office and another in a private law firm. But for his capstone project, inspired by a book about Penn Station and by his travel experiences, he decided to do a comparative study of the Northeast Corridor’s Acela service and Japan’s high-speed rail.

During our last undergraduate interview with him, Max was still planning to go to law school and become a prosecutor. By the time we spoke with him again several years later, he had earned a master’s degree in urban planning from a prestigious British university and had established a career in transportation. What had happened?

In his postgraduate interview, Max explained that for much of his undergraduate career, he had a “black-and-white” view of what being a prosecutor would entail: going after the “quote-unquote bad guys.” But living and working in New York City during co-op and after graduation, Max observed the lives of people struggling with homelessness and drug addiction—people who “fell into … difficult life circumstances … and made a mistake.” He respected the people in the U.S. attorney’s office, but he came to see that the work might not be for him. It was a “much more gray area than I had thought.”

When Max shared his concerns with a mentor (a lawyer) at lunch one day, the response surprised him: “You know, you don’t have to go to law school to make a difference in the world.” That’s when Max began seriously considering urban planning.

With his undergraduate professors’ support, Max applied to the master’s program. After completing the program, he landed his current position at a transportation start-up. The job pays well, but he also feels like he is “making a difference” because “the whole point of our company existing is to make transit more efficient.”

Max didn’t end up doing what he spent most of his undergraduate career studying—that’s our point. Our study participants reminded us that the college experience is as much about figuring out what you don’t want to do as what you do. In the end, he thinks he could have “done fine” in a legal career and made a lot of money, but, he says, he’s “probably happier” because his life is well aligned with his values.

The Return We Miss

The eight alumni were doing well in their careers and seemed happy with their “return on investment” from college. But when they talked about the value of college, they talked mainly about how it had helped them identify, refine and learn to act from their values.

Not all of them spoke of explicit social ambitions like the students we’ve featured here. Brendan, for example, is a small-business owner. In his professional life, he told us, he makes more direct use of what he learned in his M.B.A. program than his undergraduate program. However, he said, his college experience was “great” and he “learned a lot.” More than anything, he told us, it helped him “grow up.” He added, “If you grow up, then you can figure it out when you get in your first job.” Brendan did not use the language of values, but he, too, thought of college as a time to figure out who he was and what kind of life he wanted to lead.

Students who attend Northeastern have extraordinary opportunities. But the core elements of the experiences they describe don’t depend on impressive co-ops and study abroad trips. They are: (1) a diversity of learning experiences, inside and outside the classroom, where they could try out different roles and identities; (2) structured support from faculty, staff and others to help them learn from and connect these experiences; and (3) frequent opportunities to reflect on their experiences in the context of their values. These elements can take different forms, but they are the building blocks of values formation—perhaps higher education’s most important value proposition.