Brett Levitt: Value of college isn’t found in simply what we teach

Is a college education still worth the investment?

Students and families want to know whether it will lead to meaningful opportunities. Employers want graduates who can contribute immediately. Those are reasonable measures of value.

I just don’t think they tell the whole story.

Before coming to higher education, I spent more than 20 years building and leading a business. I reviewed thousands of resumes, interviewed hundreds of candidates and hired people at every level. By the time someone walked into my office for an interview, that person’s resume had already answered the basic questions about education, experience and technical ability.

Once we sat down together, I was trying to answer a different question: Would I trust this person with one of our customers? Could he or she listen before speaking? Ask thoughtful questions? Admit when he didn’t know something? Identify the real problem rather than simply solve the first one she saw? Would others want to work with him?

I wasn’t hiring technical knowledge. I was hiring a professional.

That experience shapes the way I think about today’s debate over higher education. If we define the value of college only by a graduate’s first job or starting salary, we risk overlooking its greater contribution: preparing people for the decades that follow.

Technical knowledge matters. Every profession has a foundation that must be learned. But over the course of a career, technical competence is rarely what separates one employee from another. Professional judgment does. So does communication, curiosity, adaptability and the ability to earn trust.

The people who advance aren’t always the smartest people in the room. They are the people others wanted in the room.

This is where higher education has a unique opportunity.

Companies naturally develop employees through the lens of their own customers, culture, systems and priorities. Universities prepare students before those boundaries exist. One of higher education’s greatest strengths is helping students connect ideas across disciplines. In business, there are rarely accounting problems, finance problems or marketing problems. There are business problems. For Indiana employers competing for talent in an economy being reshaped by technology, that broader preparation matters more than ever.

One way universities can develop that broader perspective is through experiential learning, through which students work with real companies on real business challenges while faculty guide the learning. Unlike company-specific training, the goal is not to prepare students for one employer. It is to help them think and perform as professionals wherever their careers take them.

Technology will continue to change the tools professionals use. Artificial intelligence is simply the latest example. Universities should expose students to those tools. But technology has never been what ultimately distinguishes one professional from another. Judgment, communication, adaptability and trust still do.

The mission of higher education hasn’t changed. The world our graduates are entering has.

Every employer eventually asks some version of the question I asked hundreds of times: Would I trust this person with my customers, my team andmy organization?

Higher education cannot answer that question for employers. But it can help students become the kind of professionals for whom the answer is yes.

That, to me, has always been the real value of college.

Not simply what we teach. It’s who students become.•

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Levitt is a faculty member at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where he teaches accounting and experiential-learning courses. Before entering higher education, he spent more than two decades building and leading businesses.