I have spent more of my life inside universities than most people spend in their first career. I earned two doctorates on two continents, one in health psychology (Western Sydney University, Australia) and one in religious studies (The University of Groningen, Netherlands). By the logic of a spreadsheet, I should be able to tell you exactly what that education was worth. But unfortunately, naively, I cannot.

My salary tells you something, but it does not tell you about the students who finished their dissertations or published their first research papers because I stayed with them through the difficult middle, or the pastors and parents who read one of my books and changed how they cared for the people around them. Much of what my education has produced does not live in my bank account, *unfortunately*. It lives in other people.

Consider a much simpler case. A teacher and an investment banker graduate from the same university in the same year. Twenty years later, one earns several times more than the other. If salary is the measure, the calculation looks easy because clearly one education produced a larger financial return. But suppose the teacher has taught 2,000 children. Some learned to read in her/his classroom. Some discovered abilities they did not know they possessed. A few stayed in school because she/he noticed them at the right moment. Those children grew up to become parents, engineers, bankers, nurses, business owners, pastors, artists, and perhaps teachers themselves.

Where, exactly, does all of that appear on his/her paycheck?

A policy fight

There has been a sense of urgency around the economic value of degrees in the United States. Beginning July 1, 2026, new federal rules eliminated Grad PLUS borrowing for graduate and professional students who are subject to the new system and introduced new federal borrowing limits. Graduate students can generally borrow up to $20,500 each year, with a $100,000 aggregate limit. Students in programs treated as professional degrees can borrow as much as $50,000 annually, with a $200,000 aggregate limit.

The definition of professional degree quickly became contested as a result of these changes. In June, a federal court temporarily stayed part of the Department of Education’s professional degree definition, as explained by the Federal Student Aid Definitions. The Department subsequently issued an interim list of programs that it will treat as professional degrees while the litigation continues, and it has cautioned that those classifications may change as the case proceeds.

The Department says the classification exists to administer different federal borrowing limits, not to declare that one occupation is more worthy or more genuinely professional than another. That distinction, I think, is very important and does have huge implications for education moving forward. Still, the controversy exposes a larger problem that reaches well beyond federal loan policy. One of those is how we should judge the value of an education when its financial return and its contribution to society are not the same thing.

What a degree pays

There are good reasons to ask whether a program pays off. Higher education is expensive. Debt can shape a person’s choices for years. Public resources are finite, and universities should have to answer difficult questions about tuition, completion, employment, and whether graduates leave economically better positioned than when they arrived. Earnings tell us something useful as well. Across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, adults with tertiary education generally earn more than adults with less education, and governments recover part of their investment through the taxes and social contributions associated with higher earnings.

A degree that imposes enormous costs while offering graduates weak prospects deserves scrutiny. Universities cannot answer concerns about price simply by appealing to their missions. The problem begins when a useful measure becomes our theory of value. A salary tells us how a labor market compensates a particular kind of work under particular economic conditions. It cannot tell us everything that work contributes to people’s lives.

The gap becomes especially visible in professions organized around the care and development of others. For example, a social worker may help keep a family together. A nurse may spend a career caring for people at their most vulnerable. A pastor may accompany hundreds of families through births, marriages, illness, grief, and death. A teacher may shape thousands of lives without ever knowing what became of most of them. Their salaries may record part of the exchange, but they do not record every consequence of the work.

The value goes beyond the graduate

We usually imagine the return on education as something that comes back to the person who studied. Someone gives years and money to a degree and receives income, knowledge, occupational security, status, or greater freedom in return. We might call this the private return of education. But education can also produce value that moves outward. The training of the counselor benefits the client. The learning of the physician benefits the patient. The knowledge of the engineer becomes infrastructure used by people she will never meet. The same can be said about the scientist’s discovery, which may eventually improve the life of someone living on another continent.

The return on education does not always come back to the person who received it. Sometimes it travels…

Let’s take for example a master’s-level trained counselor whose income remains modest throughout her career. A calculation of conventional return-on-investment can compare tuition and debt with lifetime earnings. This calculation, as you would imagine, tells us something important about whether the education was financially sustainable. But now pay attention to her work farther. Because a man remains employed because his depression improves. A marriage survives a difficult year because of the work of a poorly paid counselor. Children benefit because a parent received help from the counselor. A youth who had lost a sense of direction may even beging to imagine a future again because of same counselor.

Those effects do not appear on the counselor’s W-2 form. I think of this as the traveling return of education: i.e., value created through what an educated person enables in the lives of other people.

Economists have recognized parts of this problem for decades. And so, research on the social returns to education considers outcomes that extend beyond wages, including health, civic participation, productivity, and other benefits that can spread across communities. The difficulty is that private returns are usually easier to observe and it is lazy to rely only on this kind of metric. It is sloppy job to quantify outcome based on how many numbers attached to one’s salary. Many social returns travel through relationships and institutions before we even see their effects.

Flourishing widens the ledger

Human flourishing gives us a wider way to think about the problem. People need material resources and economic security. They also need health, close relationships, purpose, character, and opportunities to participate meaningfully in the lives of others. A flourishing society therefore needs a productive economy, but it also needs people who can teach, heal, discover, counsel, build, create, lead, and care. Education contributes to both.

The second question changes the unit of analysis because it asks us to follow education beyond the person who received it. We cannot place every consequence into a single monetary calculation. We cannot simply add a healthier family to an inspired student, a scientific discovery, and a stronger community and produce a dollar figure. Yet difficulty of measurement is itself consequential because public decisions naturally gravitate toward outcomes we can observe, compare, and price. Over time, easily measured outcomes can occupy more of our attention than outcomes whose effects unfold across relationships and generations.

Who gets to choose a life of service?

Imagine two students who are equally drawn toward counseling, teaching, research, ministry, or social work. One comes from a family that can help with tuition and living expenses. The other does not. The first student has more room to choose according to vocation. The second must calculate the debt, monthly payments, likely salary, and whether another profession would provide greater financial security.

Those calculations are responsible, and students should make them. But when thousands of people make the same calculation, individual decisions can accumulate into a social pattern. If training for lower-paid service professions becomes harder to finance, family resources may play a larger role in determining who can afford to enter them. The result is not simply a change in individual educational choice. In fact, it can gradually change who enters the professions on which communities depend.

That possibility should concern anyone interested in flourishing and the Department of Education for that matter. A society can need teachers, counselors, researchers, social workers, clergy, and other service professionals while creating financial conditions that make some of those paths difficult for people without private resources. The issue, then, is not only whether an individual degree generates enough income. It is also whether the way we finance education helps sustain the human capacities and professions a society needs.

Universities do not get a pass

A broader account of educational value cannot become an excuse for universities to charge whatever they wish. If a university claims that a program contributes to the common good, it also assumes a responsibility to make the program financially defensible. A degree can produce substantial social value and still cost too much.

Universities should examine tuition and program costs. Governments should study how financing rules affect access across fields and socioeconomic groups. Employers and communities should confront the compensation attached to socially necessary work because students deserve clear information about costs, borrowing, completion, and likely earnings before they enroll. The truth is that some programs cost just too much. Some provide weak training. Some institutions may ask students to assume debts that the likely financial return cannot reasonably support. Earnings data help expose these problems too.

The traveling return does not replace the private return. I think the main function is that it compels us to look farther because a serious account of educational value has to account for two important questions: whether the education is financially sustainable for the person receiving it and what that education enables the person to contribute beyond himself or herself.

My final thought

Every system of measurement carries assumptions about what deserves our attention. When we evaluate education primarily through earnings, we see graduates mainly as workers and education mainly as an investment in future productivity. That is part of what education does, for sure, but an educated person also becomes a colleague, parent, neighbor, mentor, professional, creator, and citizen. Knowledge is cultivated through these relationships. Skills become services. Ideas can become future classrooms, treatments, organizations, discoveries, and communities.

This is why the social value of education cannot be read directly from the income of the person who received it. The student-loan controversy therefore raises a question larger than the classification of particular degrees: what do we believe education is for?

If we care about the economic return of education, we should continue measuring earnings, debt, employment, and affordability. If we have entrepreneurs to run our Department of Education, I am not surprised that we are prioritizing private return. It is shortsighted. And on a positive note, those measures actually protect students and help institutions confront programs that cost too much for what they deliver. But if we also care about human flourishing, we then need to follow some of those returns beyond the graduate and ask what educated people make possible in families, institutions, communities, and the lives of people they may never know.

The teacher’s paycheck tells us what she earned. It cannot tell us everything that happened in the 2,000 lives she taught. Somewhere in those lives is another return on her education. Our challenge is learning how to see it.