Americans have a staggering list of demands for their colleges and universities, and of course they do.
When I sent my daughter off to college last year, I wanted everything for her. New friends, new interests, a bigger vision for her career, her life, her place in the world. I wanted tangible skills and soul-stirring ideals, practical guidance and world-changing ambition. I want her to get a better job and be a better person.
There’s been a raft of concern over the past year about whether higher education needs to make smaller promises, focus more intensely on the economic payoff to a degree. “Is college worth it?” almost always gets framed as a return-on-investment calculation, an individual cost-benefit ratio for students and their families.
Some of that is fair, given the investments families have to make. Much of the lagging trust in higher education is driven by rising costs and the elevated risk that presents for students. When the Institute for Citizens & Scholars polled thousands of Americans about what matters in higher education, helping people succeed in their careers ranked near the top.
But the research suggests that a narrow focus on jobs and earnings isn’t what people want from higher education. It turns out there’s something Americans value even more than the economic impact of college: preparing people to be committed citizens, equipped with shared civic values.
Fully 90% of respondents thought citizen formation was an important mission for higher education, as close to a consensus as you can get in our contentious era. Across the usual divides of party and class, people want to know that higher education is living out its public mission, not just delivering personal gain.
There is an understandable temptation in our fraught political moment to keep civic initiatives in the background. But Americans want to know that colleges are responding with urgency to the crisis in our public life, not retreating from it.
Touting the personal benefits of a college diploma does nothing to persuade the majority of Americans who don’t have a bachelor’s degree that they should care about the health of higher education; it may even be alienating. Our fellow citizens need to know that we aren’t just granting college graduates greater earning potential, but instilling a genuine sense of civic kinship and commitment.
The pitch for career advancement — get a degree, get a job, get ahead — was always too small for what college actually does. Most colleges have been so eager to defend individual return on investment that they have failed to make the larger, more honest, more important argument that education is how we make citizens.
In the past few years, we’ve seen a resurgence in interest among college presidents and faculty in that foundational work. A snapshot from the College Presidents for Civic Preparedness coalition — 135 campuses from Ivy League schools and HBCUs to regional public universities and community colleges — shows that 85% increased investment in civic preparedness in 2025.
That renewed energy is being driven less by political pressure and more by an earnest recognition that students often aren’t getting the civic skills they need to be hopeful and successful. The same trends that concern policymakers and the public — students more reluctant to speak up, less willing to hear disagreement, more pessimistic about the future — are driving college leaders to take action.
At James Madison University in Virginia, all 5,000 first-year students now go through a program called Better Conversations Together, making clear from day one that talking to people with different political views is a core expectation of college life.
In Minnesota, the president of liberal-arts Macalester College partnered with the evangelical University of Northwestern to bring faculty, staff, and students together for regular dinners to “Reduce the Rancor,” pushing people with very different values to talk honestly and find common ground as Americans.
At Rollins College in Florida, a student named Joseph Pool founded Breaking Bread as an experiment in “culinary diplomacy,” getting students from different backgrounds around the dinner table. He was inspired by a religious studies professor who pushes students to value dialogue and curiosity when they encounter different worldviews.
Experiences like those are critical in getting students ready for the contentious society they face. What my daughter is gaining after a year on campus is not just progress toward a credential. It’s the capacities and habits of mind she’ll need to navigate life in a polarized, anxious America.
She is learning how to think well when information is unreliable and data alone can’t deliver a clear answer. She is learning how to have hard conversations with people who see the world differently — not to win an argument, but to connect and understand.
In an era when AI generates convincing falsehoods at scale and a third of teenagers report being deceived by fake content online, the ability to weigh evidence critically is not an academic exercise but a plain necessity. In the face of big-tech algorithms that promise optimized solutions to all of life’s hardships, the ability to weigh tradeoffs and make value judgments is core to both our civic life and our humanity.
Most importantly, she’s getting the chance to work alongside people who think differently from her, finding enough common ground to do something useful together. Seventy-seven percent of employers now identify this capacity as essential for the workplace. It is even more essential for democracy.
Given a moment to reflect, Americans genuinely believe this is what college is about. The need to educate critical thinkers and informed citizens rates higher than career preparation, than research, even higher than economic mobility. This finding holds across political parties, income levels, and educational backgrounds.
People don’t need to be persuaded about the importance of civic commitment; they need to know that colleges share it. The challenge for college leaders is to stop treating civic skills as a controversial third rail and instead celebrate them as the central promise of American higher education.
Make citizen formation visible. Make it a measurable outcome for students. Show the wider community that you’re getting students invested in something beyond their own economic prospects.
My daughter came home from her first year of college a little less anxious about her career prospects and a little more focused on the kind of person she wants to become, and the kind of future she wants to help shape. She can discuss what she’s reading with more confidence than before, and I’m having to bring my A-game to dinner table debates. She has developed a clearer sense of her own mind, and continued to cultivate a healthier respect for the views of others.
She will need those civic skills, because the next generation of Americans won’t have the luxury of waiting for a less polarized, less tech-addled time to tackle the nation’s problems. Americans of all backgrounds can see that plainly. They want to know higher education sees it, too.
