What We Lose When Knowledge Has to Pay Rent
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Doctor. Leslie Poston. This week we're talking about why the value of education has almost nothing to do with whether or not it leads to a job. There is an article making the rounds arguing that United States colleges are producing more graduates than The US labor market can absorb, using a framework economists call elite overproduction.
Leslie Poston:Degree counts are up, entry level hiring is down, and a growing share of new grads are working jobs that don't require a degree at all. Sure, the numbers hold up, but the assumption that a degree's work is measured entirely by what it gets you employed to do doesn't. Let's look at the research and pull that assumption apart. It's doing damage to how we talk about what the pursuit of knowledge is for, and it's letting people and systems who are actually responsible for the jobs crisis off the hook. My own position is that education and the pursuit of knowledge and critical thinking skills matter no matter what job you do.
Leslie Poston:Articles like this one treat employment as the only outcome worth measuring, where a graduate either lands the job the degree was supposedly for or the system failed somewhere along the way. And that framing can sound neutral to us because it shows up with data about unemployment rates, wage data pulled from federal surveys, etcetera, but it's not neutral. It did become the default lens sometime over the last few decades until it's reached a point where asking whether college is worth it has started to only mean whether it directly pays off in a salary. That assumption is leaving out what a person's mind is actually capable of after spending years being pushed to read, comprehend, analyze difficult texts, defend their position out loud, or wrestle with new knowledge that doesn't easily resolve into a clean answer. That critical thinking skill doesn't show up on a W-two.
Leslie Poston:This framing also teaches an entire generation that the years they spent forming their worldview and building their knowledge only count if they can currently sell that worldview on a resume. Most 18 year olds are not the ones who chose that trade off. The choice was made for them by parents worried about debt or guidance counselors who'd been trained to talk in return on investment terms and sometimes by marketing from the schools themselves. That leaves a specific kind of grief for people who did the reading, wrote the papers, and became genuinely sharper thinkers, only to be told years later that none of it counted because the job market couldn't absorb them. That grief, I don't think, is really about the job.
Leslie Poston:It's more about being told that the person you became along the way was beside the point. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know I cover how often the people who benefit from a system relocate a systemic economic failure onto individuals instead of the systems that produced it so the people and institutions with actual power don't have to answer for any of it. This is what's happening with this. The core product of a good education is the capacity to hold more than one fact or idea in your head at once long enough to weigh them against each other before deciding what to believe. And that's harder than it sounds.
Leslie Poston:Most of the reasoning failures we've talked about on this show, motivated reasoning, black and white thinking, falling for a confident liar over a hesitant expert, etcetera, come down to a mind that collapses complexity too quickly because holding it open feels uncomfortable. A mind trained to sit in that discomfort just a little longer tends to make better decisions in the voting booth or relationships, at their job, or in a doctor's office, for example. An education that includes the humanities, done well, trains that discomfort into a skill rather than something to escape. It teaches you to sit with ambiguity instead of trying to resolve it prematurely. It teaches you to follow an argument you disagree with all the way to its conclusion before you're allowed to reject it, and to revise a belief when new evidence shows up instead of defending the belief you already had because changing your mind might feel like losing.
Leslie Poston:Those are the skills underneath every other skill since you can't do critical thinking, empathy, or good judgment without them. No employer writes a job posting for tolerates cognitive discomfort, but that's exactly the trait they're hiring for when they look to hire someone with this training. We have a name for the opposite of this trait as well: the need for cognitive closure. It's a well studied tendency to grab the first available answer just to end the discomfort of not knowing. It's associated with faster, more confident judgments and with worse ones because the search stops at relief instead of accuracy.
Leslie Poston:An education that trains you to tolerate open questions a little longer trains you out of that vulnerability. You can see this trained capacity in something as ordinary as a seminar discussion, where a student has to hold their own position, the professor's counter argument, and a classmate's completely different reading of the same text in their mind at once without letting any one of them collapse the others so that they can evaluate their argument. The content of that seminar fades and the capacity to hold the complexity doesn't. It gets used in every disagreement or challenge that follows. This kind of learning also works better when it's not chasing a paycheck.
Leslie Poston:The research on why distinguishes intrinsic motivation, doing something because it's inherently interesting, from extrinsic motivation, doing something for an outside reward, like a grade or a job prospect. Decades of research in that tradition have found that students driven by intrinsic motivation to know consistently gravitate toward deep learning, engaging with material to actually understand it. While students motivated mainly by external rewards tend towards surface learning, memorizing just enough to clear the next hurdle. Learning for its own sake produces sturdier understanding than learning for a reward, even by the market's own standard of competence. Long running research on liberal arts education backs this up.
Leslie Poston:Large multi institution studies that track students across their entire college careers have found measurable lasting gains in critical thinking, tied specifically to reflective and integrative learning rather than memorization, and to what we call the need for cognition, a stable trait describing how much a person actually enjoys effortful thinking. And this comes from decades of longitudinal data across multiple universities following the same students over time. And none of it has anything to do with whether those students later got hired. It's measuring a change in how their mind works. Take the field where the just teach me the concrete stuff argument sounds the strongest.
Leslie Poston:Medicine. You'd think if any degree should be pure technical training, this might be the one. But the research on medical education complicates that instinct. Empathy is known to decline over the course of standard training, worn down by volume, exhaustion, and the grind of memorizing pathologies. It's one of the more consistent findings in medical education research.
Leslie Poston:Programs that bring humanities coursework back in reflective writing, literature, ethics seminars measurably reverse that decline. And a review pooling results across many of these programs found a large effect on empathy. Students who take that coursework score meaningfully higher on clinical empathy measures than students who don't. This pattern extends past empathy as well. Physicians with that kind of training also show better tolerance for uncertainty, which translates into fewer unnecessary diagnostic tests and lower reported stress they're not chasing fault certainty in situations that are genuinely uncertain.
Leslie Poston:Researchers have even found that a physician's comfort with ambiguity predicts which specialty they gravitate toward. Higher tolerance pulls people toward fields like internal medicine, where diagnosis means weighing incomplete or contradictory information, while a lower tolerance pulls people toward procedural specialties with clearer, more immediate feedback. This trait is shaping which kind of medicine gets practiced and by whom. This coursework closes a documented gap in the training itself, using exactly the material people tend to dismiss as impractical. Medicine has about the strongest case of any field for staying purely technical, and even there the case falls apart under the data.
Leslie Poston:The same pattern shows up wherever a person's judgment about other people is part of the job, which covers most of what people actually do for a living. In these settings, the humanities aren't decoration, but instead they're the part of the pursuit of knowledge that teaches you to imagine a person who isn't you clearly enough to act on their behalf. We're watching what happens when we skip it play out with artificial intelligence right now. The people and institutions building the tools reshaping how we work, communicate, and in some cases wage war are trained overwhelmingly in technical disciplines with very little formal exposure to ethical reasoning or the humanities built into that training. A recent review of AI related course syllabi at top U.
Leslie Poston:S. Computing programs found that fewer than one in 10 included any meaningful ethics content at all. A similar review of computing programs abroad found an even smaller share, just under 2%. Formal codes of ethics exist in these fields on paper, but research on whether these codes actually change engineers' decisions in practice has found that the effect is minimal. A code posted somewhere isn't the same as years spent practicing the reasoning it claims to represent.
Leslie Poston:This next part is argument not finding. The gap in the data is that it doesn't hand us a straight line from this engineer never took an ethics class to this specific harmful tool that built. What the data does support is a field building systems this consequential, while giving this little form a weight to reasoning about human consequences, is structurally set up to produce tools that are technically impressive but ethically thin. Some of those tools are already being deployed in ways that harm people and the planet, and that outcome looks less like a coincidence than a predictable result of what got left out of the training pipeline. And this certainly isn't unique to AI.
Leslie Poston:That's just the most visible current example. The same pattern shows up anytime a field optimizes hard for technical competence while treating ethical and humanistic training as optional enrichment instead of part of the core curriculum. Law, business, and even public policy all have their own versions of this. Fields where people making consequential decisions about other people's lives were selected and trained almost entirely for a narrow kind of competence, with broader human judgment left to be picked up informally if it got picked up at all. None of this means the jobs crisis in that article is imaginary.
Leslie Poston:Wages have stagnated for years, and entry level jobs are genuinely harder to find than they used to be. That's a material problem affecting people's lives right now. But the framing in pieces like this puts the blame for the failure in the wrong place, in a way that happens to be convenient for the people and the systems who cause it. Employers, not graduates, added degree requirements to jobs that never needed them. Research out of Harvard Business School, using a large sample of job postings, found that nearly two thirds of postings for roles like production supervisor required a bachelor's degree, while only about one in six of the people currently doing that job actually held one.
Leslie Poston:That's a picture of employers using a degree as a cheap screening filter rather than assessing whether someone can do the work. Other researchers tracking postings across recessions found that for every one percentage point rise in unemployment, postings requiring a degree rose by close to half a percentage point. And that increase tended to stay in place for years after the market recovered. So the credential gap isn't primarily students choosing the wrong major or too many people getting educated, it's employers inflating requirements during downturns and never walking them back, then blaming the pool of, quote, overqualified applicants for the shortage they created themselves. That's a hiring practice and policy problem.
Leslie Poston:And framing it instead as a crisis of too much education shifts the burden on to students and colleges the two parties with the least power to fix any of it while employers and policymakers face no pressure to change. Why do we reach for individuals make bad choices before we reach for the system is failing, even when both explanations fit the same numbers equally well? That's the kind of question the show usually lives in. Social psychologists have documented this tendency for decades under the name fundamental attribution errorour habit of explaining other people's outcomes by their character or choices while explaining our own outcomes by circumstance. Applied at a cultural scale, the same bias shows up as a preference for stories about individual failure over stories about structural failure.
Leslie Poston:Part of it is comfort, certainly. An individual choice story feels more fixable and less threatening to people already doing fine under the current arrangement than a structural story does. And part of it's power. Employers, policymakers, media outlets, and more have the loudest say in how this story gets told, and none of them are implicated by the systemic version of events. Grads and colleges don't have a comparable platform, so the more convenient explanation gets repeated until it sounds like common sense.
Leslie Poston:And I want to close out this section with a brief comment that another part of the problem is certainly the cost of college. But again, that is a systemic issue and perhaps one for another episode. There are two problems and two fixes for this situation, and we should separate them because conflating them blocks solving either one. Fixing the labor market means employer accountability around degree requirements, wage growth, and actual policy for a job market in transition, none of which has anything to do with how many humanities credits someone took. Fixing how we talk about education publicly means resisting the reflex to measure every degree one to one against a future paycheck, and recognizing that a mind trained to think clearly and treat other people as fully real isn't some consolation prize for a bad job market.
Leslie Poston:You can hold both of these ideas at once without contradiction. The job market is genuinely broken, and a person's education isn't wasted just because a broken job market fails to absorb them. Treating those as one problem with one fix is how we end up with proposals that make both things worse. Humanities departments losing funding because they don't show up cleanly on an employment outcome spreadsheet, while the employer behavior actually driving the credential gap goes unexamined. Even if every graduate from that article found a stable, well paid job tomorrow, that still wouldn't measure whether their education mattered.
Leslie Poston:What matters is whether they came out able to think clearly, sit with people unlike themselves, and hold complicated things in mind without flinching away from the discomfort. A culture that only funds what's immediately monetizable keeps being surprised when the things it stopped valuing turned out to matter anyway in the doctor's office, the courtroom, or the code shaping the next tool that reaches the rest of us. Personally, I'd rather live in a culture that measures education by the quality of mind it produces the one that measures it by a starting salary six months out? Unsure that's a values question, but we've let economics answer it for us for a long time without ever looking deeper. Fix the labor market because it's broken.
Leslie Poston:Fund and protect the pursuit of knowledge because it doesn't need a paycheck to justify its value. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a show.
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