The Real Value of a Catholic Education
Over the past year, I have had conversations with presidents and mission officers through the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, with admissions directors in the National Catholic College Admissions Association, with faculty and staff at places like St. John’s University and Fairfield University, and with boards of trustees and program directors at my own and other institutions. In these settings, people were hopeful, encouraged, and relieved. The 2024 Holistic Impact Report (now published in academic form with an emphasis on methodology) gave them a language for their experience of Catholic higher education. The study found that graduates of Catholic colleges report greater meaning in their lives, stronger community engagement, and a deeper commitment to ethical decision making. These results captured what people had already seen in their graduates and why they believed Catholic higher education mattered.
And yet, in all those conversations, one question always emerged: “How do you talk about this to seventeen-year-olds and their parents?” It is a pressing question for Catholic higher education. Prospective students are looking at high tuition costs, taking on a debt that can only be justified with decent wages, and feeling strong family and social expectations that college is the path to a successful life. The immediate pressure is intense, making money matter more than meaning and the bill due in August matter more than life after college. From this vantage point, it is difficult to see the value of the kind of education Catholic colleges offer. If they cannot see it, they will not go, and if they do not go, what will happen to Catholic higher education?
The Problems of ROI
This return-on-investment view of college is understandable. Families see the price of higher education rising and the national student loan debt climbing past $ 1.6 trillion dollars. They also hear political leaders and prominent figures in Silicon Valley questioning the value of what students are learning. Alex Karp, founder of Palantir, openly argues that higher education is broken and so promotes a fellowship urging teenagers to “skip the debt, skip the indoctrination.” In this climate, it is not surprising that many people doubt college is worth the cost. Parents and students feel they have little room to think about anything beyond employment and salary. Catholic colleges and universities feel the pressure too, convinced they must show good returns on investment.
Yet there is a cost to narrowing college to financial outcomes. In the classroom, I see it in students like Alex, who returned to school after years in manufacturing and focused only on those aspects of college that were directly related to employment, forgoing both curiosity and community, and in students like Maya, who took seven classes a semester so she could graduate in three years and save money. They represent a generation of students who desperately want college to be “worth it” and who cannot afford to think about it in any other way. As Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner argue in The Real World of College, the prevailing “transactional mindset” reduces education to purchasing credentials and skills. That pressure breeds exhaustion and anxiety. It feeds on external markers like grades, internships, and salaries while ignoring intrinsic goods like insight or understanding. Teaching becomes a struggle because students worry more about employability than learning.
When Catholic colleges lean into this ROI view of education, they fail their students and begin to lose their soul. Without that soul, they do not survive, either closing or abandoning their Catholic identity. Catholic higher education was never meant to only be a means to a job. Its aim is a full life, one marked by purpose, concern for one’s neighbor, and a commitment to what is good and true. It rests on the conviction that each person has value, exists in relationship, and bears the image and likeness of God.
What the HIR Shows
This purpose is what the Holistic Impact Report (HIR) captures, first in 2024 and again in 2025. It shows up most clearly in three areas. The first is that graduates of Catholic colleges consistently report lives of meaning and purpose at higher rates than graduates of secular institutions. About 60 percent describe their lives as close to their ideal, compared with just over half of other graduates. They are 12 percent more likely to rate the conditions of their lives as excellent and 19 percent more likely to say that, given the chance, they would change nothing in their lives. They are also 40 percent more likely to describe their lives as having clear purpose and direction.
Next, graduates of Catholic colleges are more likely to engage with their communities. They were about 20 percent more likely to have volunteered in the past six months and, when they did, offered nearly 50 percent more hours than graduates of secular institutions. Their service included mentoring youth, serving on local boards, helping seniors, and supporting schools and food banks.
Finally, graduates of Catholic colleges show deep ethical commitments and broad moral frameworks. They were 19 percent more likely to describe moral considerations such as compassion, fairness, loyalty, respect, and integrity as “extremely important” values, and they were also more likely to consider all of these values “extremely relevant” in their decisions.
The newly released 2025 findings add details that sharpen the portrait of Catholic higher education. Catholic college graduates reported stronger mental health, with 15 percent more describing satisfaction in that area than graduates of secular institutions. This aligns with the broader pattern of lives marked by meaning, purpose, and satisfaction. On matters of faith, graduates of Catholic higher education were, unsurprisingly, far more likely to say their college encouraged faith-based discussions, 66 percent compared with 14 percent of graduates from secular institutions. What was surprising was that these graduates also indicated that their Catholic colleges were 14 percent more likely to foster dialogue across different viewpoints and 7 percent more likely to say they were exposed to a wider range of viewpoints than secular institutions. The faith commitment of Catholic campuses was accompanied by greater engagement with diversity.
The newly released 2025 findings begin to answer the ROI question by showing that Catholic colleges deliver strong financial outcomes. Graduates of Catholic colleges fare well. Sixty-two percent report household incomes above $ 100,000, compared with fifty-two percent of graduates from secular institutions. Homeownership follows a similar pattern, with sixty-one percent of Catholic graduates owning their homes compared to fifty-seven percent of their peers. Employment rates also tilt higher. Fifty-nine percent of Catholic college alumni hold full-time positions, while fifty-two percent of secular graduates do.
Independent research confirms this pattern. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that Catholic colleges, represented by members of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, outperform national averages in long-term financial return. At fifteen, twenty, thirty, and forty years, graduates of Catholic institutions surpass both public and private nonprofit benchmarks. By the thirty-year mark, Catholic college graduates earn an average return of $ 852,500, compared with $ 727,000 for other private nonprofits and $ 694,000 for public colleges.
Responding to ROI
Based on these numbers, focusing on ROI looks like the answer. It is not. It would ruin Catholic colleges. Some other school or enterprise will inevitably emerge with a faster credential or a cheaper path to the same job and salary. Even more damaging, organizing around ROI forms students for a life of exhaustion and anxiety, teaching them to measure their worth by wages and productivity. That is a fundamental betrayal of the soul of Catholic higher education.
Catholic colleges and universities should speak about financial outcomes in a different way, placing them within a larger vision of what a life is for. This is what the 2025 HIR results suggest they are doing. Seventy-two percent of Catholic college graduates agree that they see their careers as meaningful callings, compared with sixty-five percent of graduates from secular institutions. That seven-point gap marks a real distinction. Even as they earn more, graduates are more likely to understand their work as a vocation rooted in their values, guided by purpose, and directed toward the good of others. In practice, this means they find stable work, build homes, and become the kind of people who invest in the communities where they live.
The real answer to the concerns of parents and students about tuition and earnings is this larger perspective. Money matters. Jobs matter. They are part of a good life and part of why Catholic colleges were founded. But taken alone, those concerns distort education and so the students. Financial outcomes make sense only within a larger vision of what a life is for. A person’s worth does not come from productivity or salary. It comes from being a person who is meant for purpose, relationships, and responsibility to others. Catholic colleges serve their students by forming them toward this broader horizon, helping them discover who they are, what they value, and how their work can serve the world. The financial outcomes follow because the person comes first.
Catholic higher education already shows that money and work belong within a larger vision of what a life is for. The Holistic Impact Report makes this unmistakable. Graduates do well financially, but they also become people who find purpose, form communities, and commit themselves to the good of others. That combination is not accidental. It is the soul of Catholic higher education. Catholic college should hold fast to this view, strengthen it when they can. If they do, they will do more than survive. They will remind all of us that work is part of a life, not its purpose, and that an education worthy of the name prepares people to live fully.
