Yeah, but Does College Really Matter?

When Instrumentalism Overrides Our Humanity

As a philosopher concerned about the fate of humanity, the role of the humanities in higher education, and even the point of such education in democratic societies, I sometimes feel like I am beating the same drum over and over and over and doing so in the middle of the ocean (or desert) far from where anyone can hear the rhythm.

On Trump’s recent trip to China, he took a bunch of CEOs with him, but he didn’t take any philosophers, or humanists for that matter. Why? Because the value proposition by which he conceived of his trip is purely instrumental. It is transactional. The point of all human relationships is an objective calculation. Whatever serves my purposes is good, whatever does not, is bad. Instrumental thinking almost always operates according to such stark binaries because the questions that “matter” are only those that lead to concrete outcomes and quantifiable achievements.

Now, of course in a bunch of areas of life such instrumental thinking is not only inevitable, but deeply necessary. If you are trying to get to Chattanooga from Charleston then there are better and worse ways to go. What counts as “better” or “worse” will always be framed within the ultimate goal of arriving in Chattanooga, but then other factors will enter in to make the decision not as obvious as it might otherwise seem. Maybe you want a scenic route through mountains, maybe you want to avoid interstates, maybe you want to get there as quickly as possible, maybe you want to stop by every Buc-ee’s along the way!

So, although instrumentalism is not always problematic, when it comes to thinking about who we are as people, it is exceptionally dangerous. The danger lies not so much in the instrumentalism, as such, but in the way that instrumental logic almost always will crowd out all other possible value theories. If the outcome is all that matters, then any argument for other things making a difference can quickly get ignored as not only irrelevant, but as unhelpful distractions.

Notice that part of the problem with instrumentalism is that it can’t wrestle effectively with what matters. It just asks what outcomes we desire, but not whether particular outcomes are worthy of our effort, allegiance, or existential investment.

One of the areas that this broad set of debates finds the most traction is when it comes to the goal/point/purpose/aim of college. A while back I did a post where I tried to offer the best arguments that I could find to support the claim that college is just about getting a job. In all honesty, I do think that college should take seriously the role that economic identity plays in so many ways given our broad capitalistic social frameworks. But, when college is understood as about making our students wealthy employees, it almost always comes at the cost of inviting our students to think carefully about becoming persons.

Again, I feel like I have been saying this to the point where my voice sounds like Vince Neil’s pathetic attempt to try to hit the high notes of “Kickstart my Heart” in 2026 (or, for you more metallic fans - like anything Chris Barnes has done over the past decade with Six Feet Deep, hahaha, sigh!). I used to say that if you go to a basketball game and don’t lose your voice while there, you didn’t cheer hard enough. Well, I often feel like I have lost my voice trying to cheer for the importance of the humanities to human flourishing, social wellbeing, and a general sense of existential purpose. And yet, like the pretty small audiences at contemporary Mötley Crüe shows, it is hard to get folks to come listen when your voice has given out.

Vince Neil and Chris Barnes

Ironically, when things feel the most hopeless, things also tend to matter the most. The stakes are higher. This is why I ask my students all the time whether what they are doing, what they hope to do, who they are, and who they hope to become is something that “matters”? I often hear them answer almost any question with a summary of their resume. To which I often respond, “Very cool, so you did an internship, ok, but did it matter?” “Sure, you are graduating with honors, but why does that matter?” “Awesome, you got that dream job, but is it inviting you to do something that matters?” “You just made your first million, well done, but are you ok with who you are becoming?”

I can hear many critics screaming that it “matters” if it leads to a successful career. But, then I would note that we are back into an instrumentalism that can’t own up to the costs of its own assumptions.

Instrumentalism will always require some degree of cost-benefit analysis. And, again, that is not necessarily bad. But, being unable to step back to ask whether such analysis can, itself, cost more than we are willing to pay is often just one of the “sunk costs” that don’t make it onto the P and L spreadsheet.

Businesses often wrestle with questions such as “How many deaths are okay before recalling a product?” Imagine, though, if this question were put off the table as inhuman and the CEO simply said, “human dignity is not something for which algorithms can be designed to quantify.”

Parents often wrestle with questions such as “Is college worth it?” But, I fear that more and more parents are unconcerned with anything other than a Return On Investment (ROI) - which is then understood in purely economic terms. While higher education is far too expensive, indeed it is unjustly expensive, that shouldn’t prevent asking complicated questions about how we might rethink society so that college is not so expensive, instead of just quickly concluding that the expense makes college a bad investment. It might be that college is “worth” substantial public investment. It might be that college is “worth” it as a space where we can carefully rethink the goals of our shared social lives. It might be that college is “worth” it not in terms of money, but in terms of the very project of human flourishing. Indeed, if we automatically think that such flourishing is exclusively an economic issue, we have already shut down the critical thinking that colleges are pretty good at fostering.

And yet, what happens when colleges and universities have embraced the very instrumentalist logic that undermines their “value” in the first place? When higher education markets itself as primarily about pre-professional job training, it stops doing the cultural work at stake in figuring out what “matters” in the first place. It has already drunk the corporate kool-aid and re-narrated itself as “valuable” precisely because it is an instrumental means to economic ends.

Even at my own institution I often hear about “re-envisioning the liberal arts” or “re-imagining the liberal arts.” If that means how can we make the case for the intrinsic value of thinking long and hard about who and not just instrumentally about what, then I am all in. And I think that such work can be fun, energetic, and innovative. But, if it means re-conceiving the humanities in terms of what they offer in terms of job-prospects in an age of AI, say, then we have missed the point entirely. AI is quickly changing all sorts of things, but who are the people who are entrusted with wrestling with what is at stake in such changes?

If we hand the keys of the kingdom over to the very people who have claimed that college is not worth it because of an instrumentalism that pervades all of their thought, then we are nearly guaranteed that those people are ill-equipped to understand the question in the first place. And, hence, we see Trump taking CEOs to do the work of diplomacy because the only relationships that matter are business transactions. Unless colleges and universities fight such tendencies, they are actively participating in their own erasure.

Well, in light of such reflections, today I read an interview by a friend of mine, a fellow philosopher who ran a liberal arts program until it was shut down according to very sorts of instrumental values that the program did such a good job of interrogating. Dr. Jennifer Frey is a tremendous thinker and even when we disagree on things (which we most certainly do), I am always productively challenged by the rigor of her thinking and the virtue she takes so seriously as a model for human existence.

Jennifer Frey

Frey was interviewed by The New York Times about the very things that I have been saying in so many ways for a very long time now. Check out that interview here. It is well worth your time to read all of it, but let me just highlight a few key passages that I take to resonate with my own commitments.

For Frey, the crucial move is to abandon instrumentalism out of the gate:

I think the deeper question is about what I would call liberal learning, a kind of learning that is the cultivation of the higher capacities in a person and the cultivation of those capacities as it were for its own sake, because it is good and important to cultivate them because we’re human.

Her focus on the existential depth of our social lives, rather than just the contingent economic ways in which our lives get navigated is refreshing and deeply constructive:

This idea that a higher sort of learning and self-cultivation is truly liberating, that it helps people have a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in their life and also helps them to cultivate a space of genuine leisure.

In a way that reminds me of the philosopher, Aaron James’s notion of “leisure capitalism,” Frey rightly notes that leisure is not about transactional engagement whereby our “worth” as a person is determined by our bank account and ability to vacation on a beach.

Interestingly, Aristotle — this always really strikes students, they just think it’s so wild, like so unbelievably wild — says the goal of education is leisure. And we forget that the Greek word, the root for “school,” is leisure. But leisure is not idleness or amusement. And it’s definitely not just resting up so you can get back to work. It is that space that we need to set aside to cultivate the highest parts of us.

Yeah, the “higher parts of us” - the stuff that really “matters.” Sure, we can disagree about the specifics involved here (and Frey and I are likely to slide in slightly different directions on some of how this might play out), but returning to the question of something being “worth it,” ask yourself whether a big salary is “worth it” if it requires treating your employees like disposable objects? Is it “worth it” to dominate in a business field if it comes at the cost of minimizing the capacity of others to afford healthcare and basic housing? The point is that cultivating the highest parts of us requires that we break out of the narrow transactionalism of a world run by what James terms “corporate assholes,” where running a business somehow qualifies you to narrate the values of a society.

Accordingly, Frey is right when she claims that:

I believe that we’ve really dropped the ball when it comes to general education in this country. Students have no sense that their education is anything other than this externalized instrumental means to an end. We have to look at how to recover that first.

Ultimately, the very instrumentalism that not only corporate assholes, but also college administrators, seem to be so thoroughly embracing as the only option for continued traction in the marketplace will lead to the radical dissolution of our very humanity. The rise of AI basically guarantees this. As Frey explains:

We will not really, in any meaningful sense, be free. I don’t care what the political system is. If you haven’t done that work of deep, humane reflection and self-cultivation, you are not really engaged in that project of becoming a person.

I genuinely enjoyed reading her interview and I found myself repeatedly shouting “Amen!” at the coffee shop where I was sitting. I do hope that you will read all of it and wrestle with the weight of her claims. Yeah, a university might get more students by reimagining the liberal arts as no longer about the liberal arts, but does that university even matter at that point?

I can imagine other critics reading this and simply saying that it sounds like a bunch of liberal clap-trap reflecting the privilege of the highly educated who are already disconnected from the material realities of the working class that does require such an instrumentalism at the heart of how most folks navigate the world. Sure, it would be great to sit around at read Plato, but doing so is the kind of stuff that people who have to work for a living don’t have time to do - they are too busy dealing with the messed up world produced by so many generations of the disconnected educated class.

This objection is important and must not be quickly dismissed. And yet, I actually think that the more universities have become pre-professional training schools, the more they have cultivated the sort of competitive individualism that undermines the possibility of bringing about a world where we are implicated in each other’s flourishing. Instrumentalism easily facilitates a zero-sum game of self-interest in ways that make it exceptionally difficult to invite our neighbors to think with us about how we could do things differently. When colleges start reflecting the logic of corporate assholes, they fail to do the work of creating cultures that shape what corporations emerge tomorrow.

So, while I fundamentally oppose an economy that requires higher education and advanced degrees for economic survival, I think that the best tools we have for moving society away from such a world actual are found in spaces where we encourage each other to think deeply about what really matters. Colleges are not the only place where that can happen, but increasingly as liberal arts education gets undermined from inside and out, it is becoming much harder to find people willing to do the work of thinking about how to make such spaces more common in our broader society.

Being invested in each other’s humanity is much harder work than getting the training to outpace our competitors in the job hunt. In this way, perhaps the greatest irony of instrumentalism is that it keeps telling us that we have to be the most skilled in order to be competitive while actively making us worse at everything that matters most about who we are. The belief in an economic model of competition that overrides what is most deeply human about us serves to make us ever less human. Maybe that is why so many instrumentalists are excited about AI replacing human labor?

When you suck at being human, you will likely need to turn to machines in order to think that you matter at all.

But since we are still human, at least for today, here is a picture of a sunset I took a few days ago. Such a view is of no obvious instrumental value, it is still beautiful, and yeah, that does matter.

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