Saving the Soul of Catholic Education: A New Survey
Boeing Airlines is not doing well. From mechanical failures leading to drops in orders to poor designs and ignoring whistleblowers, it is no wonder that they have come under federal oversight and negotiated a plea deal to avoid criminal prosecution. According to The Economist, the problems stem from Phil Condit, the CEO in the late 90s and early 2000s. He shifted the focus of the company from engineering to profits. He paid for short-term financial gains with long-term costs of people’s lives, consumer trust, and product quality. While it is debatable if this approach is good business, Catholics should be wary of such a proposition. What is it to gain the earth and lose one’s soul?
When it comes to Catholic higher education, this proposition is still tempting. Culturally, the value of a college degree is narrowing to a concern about its return on investment. Student debt increases, and so people worry if higher education is worth it. The concern is not just from parents and students. Major news outlets run stories asking, “Was your degree really worth it?” and “Is College Worth It?” The federal government is also focused on financial values. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has lots of studies on the economic value of a college degree. The Department of Education is looking to expand its Financial Value Transparency and Gainful Employment requirements this fall to require that a debt to earnings ratio be attached to every undergraduate program.
The concerns about costs and value are real. Catholic colleges and universities feel them in particular. Costs are going up, as they are everywhere, and most Catholic schools do not have endowments large enough to simply absorb the increases. They often serve first generation and lower-class students, so more grant and scholarship money is needed. The disastrous rollout of FAFSA adds another level of stress to the hundreds of small, Catholic liberal arts schools across the country. No wonder we have seen more than twenty Catholic colleges and universities close or merge since 2020.
If Boeing is tempted to toss quality for a financial boon, it is easy to see how financial pressures and the fear of closure would tempt leaders to exchange the value of Catholic higher education for money that could keep the school afloat. The formula for doing so is pretty straight forward. Cut non-revenue generating departments, cut tenure-faculty lines, cut theology, philosophy, and the liberal arts core. While cutting, focus on jobs. Align degrees with employment trends. Offer and orient classes toward professional ends. Market the ability of the school’s graduates to get jobs. Remove or suppress obstacles to attracting students, including the school’s religious identity. This approach has been tried. Even if we were to grant that such a strategy would generate the needed revenue, what would be lost in pursuing this strategy?
The Soul of Catholic Higher Education
In early 2024, I did a study comparing 1,000 graduates of Catholic colleges and universities to 1,000 graduates of secular (i.e., not faith based) colleges and universities. I was trying to get at the value of Catholic higher education beyond financial outcomes. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce already found that graduates of Catholic schools had good return on investments and high post-graduation employment rates, so there was good evidence that Catholic colleges and universities enabled students to get jobs, especially ones that more than covered the cost of the degree.
This value, though, is only a piece of the mission of Catholic higher education. Catholic social teaching holds that work is part of our human dignity, tied up with our ability to care for family and creation and our responsibilities toward neighbors and society. Drawing on the writings of John Paul II, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church calls this the subjective dimension of work. It is to be prioritized over the objective dimension of work—what is produced and the means for producing it—because “work is for man and not man for work” (§272). From their beginning, Catholic schools attended to the need of people to find jobs and earn money, especially given the immigrant nature of the Church in the United States. Still, jobs were never the main or exclusive focus. There was always a push for a broader curriculum and perspective. Michael Rizza’s Jesuit Colleges and Universities in the United States tells this story well. Professional schools would emerge from colleges that focused on what we would now call the liberal arts. As medical schools or business schools would take off, the Jesuits would insist on and build up this liberal arts foundation.
This is the soul of Catholic higher education. It is the belief that students should have more than job training. They should have an opportunity to learn and think about themselves, their families and neighbors, the common good, and creation. It is an education that is not just about getting a job but also about living a meaningful life. It comes from the Catholic faith. Jesus does not promise individual accolades or material success but a fulfilling life (John 10:10). It is a life that consists of loving your neighbor (Matthew 22:37–39), caring for those around you and in your community. And from this love comes the commitments not to lie, steal, or kill and to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and welcome the stranger. I have worked in Catholic higher education for more than two decades because of these commitments. Countless others have too. Students and parents come to Catholic schools because they also believe in this kind of education.
For my study then, I wanted to get at this soul of Catholic higher education. I wanted to highlight it as a way of speaking against the cultural trends narrowing higher education to an investment enterprise. I hoped to provide some evidence that would push back against the temptation of sacrificing the soul of Catholic higher education for promises of financial gain. Thus, I worked with YouGov to design the study and ensure its validity. We utilized measures on life satisfaction, life meaning, life fulfillment, goal and value alignment, volunteer activities, civic engagement, moral foundations, resilience, and locus of control. Was there evidence to support these beliefs in Catholic higher education? It was a real question going into the study. I thought we would get good results, but positive thinking is different than valid data.
Fortunately, across the board, the outcomes were better for Catholic colleges and universities. Graduates of Catholic universities were 10% more likely to report that their life closely matches their ideal and 9% more likely to have a clear sense of direction in life. These graduates were 15% more likely to feel fulfilled in their social life and 13% more likely to feel fulfilled in their community involvement. They were 9% more likely to be civically engaged. In moral decision making, Catholic university graduates were 19% more likely to say that the various aspects of morality surveyed are extremely important in decision-making.
Meaningful lives, community engagement, and ethical decision making—these were the outcomes of Catholic higher education. They were found across all demographic groups, so the schools—not just who attended them—seemed responsible. Through theology, philosophy, and the liberal arts, core curricula moved students to reflect on their lives, linking up their courses of study and career aspirations with questions about the meaning and purpose of life. The countless offices of community engagement and service learning, volunteer opportunities, and experiential learning courses reinforced the idea that people should connect with and invest in their communities. The ethics courses embedded in the professional curricula meant students received the message that, when engaged in business, medicine, education, or any career, they should make ethical decisions. The outcomes indicated that the soul of Catholic higher education was alive and well.
Saving Catholic Higher Education
These results are not just an opportunity to congratulate Catholic higher education and those who work in its schools. While we should celebrate, the survey results point toward action. For one, Catholic schools should not take the Boeing route to address their financial concerns. They should not sell their soul to save their schools. Cutting, focusing on jobs, neglecting Catholic identity, this approach reinforces the cultural narrative that a college degree is just about a return on investment. Worse than this, it would diminish the true value of Catholic schools. They would produce workers not people with meaningful lives. Pursuing money as the highest goal would betray all those at the schools and weaken the soul of Catholic colleges and universities.
For another, Catholic schools have a vision of what to pursue. They should order their institutions toward an education that provides for work, yes, but even more an education for a life of meaning and purpose, for the common good, and for ethical decision making. It would strengthen disciplinary knowledge but also reflect on life’s purpose, the value of the neighbor, and the importance of doing good and avoiding evil. It would not situate Catholic identity as part of any partisan camp but rather in a basic understanding of what makes a good life.
Finally, saving Catholic higher education cannot be solely or primarily a financial solution. For sure, there are real financial issues that need to be met, but neglecting the soul of Catholic higher education for more money is not the way forward. It is to care for people, students, and workers of Catholic higher education. It is to focus on what is good for human beings: jobs but also life, community, and the good. It resists the reduction of human dignity to productivity and of culture to work. It pushes for a way of living that we hope for ourselves and for our children, one of meaning, relationships, and doing what is right. It is a commitment not to sell the soul of our schools. It is a commitment to seek first the kingdom and work in the hope that all things will be given unto us.