Published on: October 20, 2026 at 11:36 am
By Tom Davis
Careerism has always loomed over business education, but it now threatens to consume higher education entirely. We, the public, have become inured to shaky logic around hard proof of ROI and narrow thinking about the value of a college degree.
Both lines of reasoning frame higher education exclusively as a driver of workforce development, thereby diminishing the value of the skills that the job market will increasingly require. However, the best business administration and management programs are the stewards of those very skills.
Examples of the current malaise in higher education include variations on the question of whether a college degree is still worth pursuing. However, it is the wrong question altogether. It sets up a false dichotomy whose fundamental flaw is its implication that, at some earlier point in time, earning a college degree was in fact “worth it” for securing a stable white-collar job.
However, a college degree has never been either a necessary or sufficient condition for securing a job—and it never will be. A college degree is not necessary because there have always been—and still are—many other paths for workforce skills development, including vocational training, apprenticeships, and military service. A college degree is not sufficient because earning a degree in and of itself does not guarantee that a graduate will land a good job. Rather, securing a job requires a myriad of aptitudes, opportunities, and even luck. As much as anything else, it increasingly requires foundational skills.
Daniela Amodei, president and co-founder of Anthropic, studied literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In her view, “when we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ [emotional quotient] and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people … I think the ability to have critical thinking skills and to learn how to interact with other people will be more important in the future, rather than less.”
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, studied economics and psychology as an undergraduate at Tufts University. His advice is even more direct: “Develop critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ, learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write. You’ll have plenty of jobs.”
Therefore, what do business administration and management programs need to do when faced with doubts or questions about the value of higher education? They need to bring reason to the forefront, emphasize discovery and innovation, develop creative capacity, prioritize real skills and systems thinking, and, as Caroline Field Levander of Rice University argues, “open the aperture of how we define our own success and our university’s success.”
An equally important piece of advice: Do not heed the siren song of careerism, accept its illogical premise, or validate its narrow measure of success. Rather, embrace, communicate, and take pride in the fact that higher education is not merely a means to a vocational end but a collaborative, creative, and critical end unto itself. The productive struggle inherent to earning a college degree is, in fact, what has always made it worth it.
