Emelin Garcia-Nieto’s journey to medical school started in an unlikely place: a small, remote mountain village in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. In the 1990s, undocumented immigrants could pass through the U.S.-Mexican border relatively easily, and her aunt, who had already gone to the United States to work as a housecleaner, arrived back at the village one day to visit family. Seeing that baby Eme was sickly, and learning that her toddler brother had recently died, the aunt pleaded with her family to let her take the infant to America, where the young girl would have a better chance of survival and the hope of a good life.
Eme’s family wrote the aunt’s name as the mother on her birth certificate, and the woman found a way to smuggle the baby into California. The aunt and her husband, both undocumented, became Eme’s parents and moved their family to Columbia, S.C., for better opportunities, where Eme got a younger “brother” — a U.S. citizen by birth. Her brother could go to clinics that accepted Medicaid, while Eme and the rest of her family had to go to underresourced free clinics. By the time she was 8, Eme was already translating between her parents and the clinic’s doctor and nurses — and later, regularly volunteering at the clinic, helping to translate for other patients.
She began to envision for herself a future in health care, which would allow her to bridge these gaps in language, culture, ethnicity, and nationality — a meaningful way to make sense of her past and change the lives of her family and those in her community.
This is where Garcia-Nieto’s sense of purpose in her life began to emerge — fueling a drive that would carry her through discouragement, rejection, and obstacles in high school, college, and beyond. She had to work three part-time jobs that paid cash, while also grinding out her schoolwork to maintain a high GPA and volunteering as a translator for a local doctor. Every time Garcia-Nieto got behind the wheel of a car, she had to drive perfectly, lest a police officer pull her over to discover that she didn’t have (and couldn’t get) a driver’s license — a traffic stop that could lead to deportation.
Garcia-Nieto began to believe that she could become a doctor, but everyone around her told her to give up that dream. When she asked her high-school counselor about college applications and revealed she was undocumented, her counselor offered this advice: “You just need to go back to Mexico.” When Garcia-Nieto inquired about enrolling at the University of South Carolina and other colleges, admissions officers said she would need to get a visa and enroll as an international student, paying high tuition. Presbyterian College offered Garcia-Nieto a full ride based on her high-school grades but rescinded the scholarship after discovering she was undocumented. Only Columbia College — a women’s institution 20 minutes from Garcia-Nieto’s house, one she had never heard of — would overlook her citizenship status and offer her financial aid.
Garcia-Nieto had many moments of self-doubt, when she thought she might just settle for a job as a medical translator. But a deep sense of purpose motivated her to keep going. “They didn’t sacrifice all of this for nothing,” she thought of her adoptive parents in those moments. “I need to find a way.”
A glimmer of hope came in her sophomore year in 2012, when President Barack Obama signed into law the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy, allowing Garcia-Nieto to get a driver’s license and earn college scholarships. That year, Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine was the first and only medical school at that time to announce that DACA students were given equal status as applicants. Garcia-Nieto’s mentors at the college taught her to use her sense of purpose to craft an undergraduate program that would appeal to Loyola’s Jesuit sense of mission.
Garcia-Nieto used that personal calling to create opportunities to show her authentic commitment to working with the underserved in medicine. With advice from mentors at the college, she learned how to use her work with Latinx populations in clinics to line up experiential-learning opportunities at a local Federally Qualified Health Center, translating for patients while working closely with pediatricians, obstetricians, and gynecologists. These experiences got her into a pre-med intensive summer program at Stritch, focused on students who want to work with low-income populations. Her grades, her experiential learning, and the extra hours she put in at clinics on the weekends led to her acceptance to medical school at Stritch, where she continued working with clinics focused on pediatrics and Latinx families, and during one summer, for No Más Muertes, a humanitarian organization for migrants crossing the treacherous Southwest.
After finishing medical school, she was invited to interview for a pediatric residency at Emory University, where she met Alejandro Torres, a pediatric resident whose parents also came from Mexico. After Torres heard Garcia-Nieto’s story and about her work with immigrants, he recommended her to the admissions committee.
Even with Emory as a launching pad, Garcia-Nieto held fast to her vocational calling and took a job at a small clinic where a third of the patients are on Medicaid or pay out of pocket, where many of the patients are Latinx immigrants, and where physicians make less than their colleagues at other clinics. Garcia-Nieto picks up hours as a hospitalist some nights for extra income — for her, a willing trade-off for the families she gets to help every day.
Garcia-Nieto considered specialties, but she kept coming back to a question: “Where will I be most fulfilled and happy?” She knew the answer was going to be primary care.
“For me,” she says, “it wasn’t necessarily about the money.”
We know Garcia-Nieto’s story well. She worked closely with Ned through college and is one of many former students we interviewed for our forthcoming book — which argues, in part, that meaning and purpose should be a central driving factor in the college experience.
We also recognize that Garcia-Nieto, having found that thing in her life, is among the lucky ones. Many students, rich or poor, never take the time — nor are given the opportunity — to clarify their sense of meaning and purpose. Sometimes that sense of purpose can be about improving social welfare or advocating for important political issues. Or it can be driven by an innate talent in language or poetry, or an entrepreneurial itch to satisfy a personal consumer obsession, or a fascination with motorcycles or Star Trek that leads to Harley-Davidson or NASA. Most of the time, students are never shown how these often-hidden talents, interests, and convictions can become real jobs, nor taught how they can be leveraged for competitive advantages, to open up opportunities the way Garcia-Nieto did.
Instead, much of the national conversation about the relationship between college and the work force is framed largely in terms of money, focused on outcomes measurable by the median salaries associated with majors, the average return on tuition investments at various colleges, and the top institutions sending students to “high-paying careers in finance, tech, and consulting” — among the handful of sectors that consistently get all the attention. Students in this churn are bombarded with messages about the “right” school and the “top” majors that will lead to a plum career, financial security, a lifelong social network, and the good life. In many ways, colleges themselves have framed their value in terms of money — perhaps because meaning, purpose, and well-being are difficult to quantify and even harder to sell to parents and students hyper-focused on tuition costs and measurable outcomes.
Many students, rich or poor, never take the time — nor are given the opportunity — to clarify their sense of meaning and purpose.
That pressure on young adults and their families is stratified. Wealthy students face the expectations of their families, friends, and neighborhoods, where status and income are the anticipated outcomes of college. Low-income students also get a message from their families and from high-school counselors, nonprofit organizations, and the media: Forget about a personal interest, pick a “useful” major, and shoot for a solid, well-paying career to climb the social-mobility ladder. Much of the work of the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, for example, focuses on moving students from the bottom quintile to the top quintile of wealth, and he advocates admitting more low-income students to “Ivy Plus” institutions to usher them into high-status jobs.
Amplifying the pressure about college and financial security is all the social, civic, and economic turbulence that makes students, both rich and poor, want more certainty about the future: falling life expectancy, lockdown drills, record-heat summers, crazy housing prices, automation in the job market, and the maddening political discourse.
Shelby Fortin, a sophomore at Goucher College, considered majoring in history and education before she became fascinated with the great philosophers. “That’s definitely my passion now,” says Fortin, who comes from a rural middle-income family north of Baltimore. “I would want to sit down with all of the great thinkers — like, have a dinner with everyone that’s crafted the thought of the world.”
But she says she is “stressed about everything, 24/7,” especially when she starts thinking about what philosophy could lead to. “I’m constantly having conversations with my mom about what I’m going to be doing after college, and we always just come to a blank,” she says. “The common conclusion to the conversation is always, Well, we have to find something that ends up making you enough money to live off of.”
One of the only jobs Fortin sees on campus: philosophy professor. “I always wanted to be an educator, but then I really realized there was no money in it,” she says. “Eventually I would like to try to get into ministry — I’m really interested in the history of the Bible. But there’s another aspect of that where it’s not going to make me much money.” She worries her college debt will be a long-term burden.
Summer Zubey, a Goucher freshman and commuter student, started dancing in seventh grade, and then used dance as her emotional and physical outlet when she was isolated during the pandemic. She says if she could get up every day and do something for the rest of her life, it would be to dance.
“I know that majoring in the arts is a really risky thing,” she says. “So I’ve been really trying to navigate recently — like, what do I want to continue on with in my education?” In high school, Zubey felt overworked, without much time to think about what motivated her, before she was “pushed off into college.” When she has asked about the career possibilities of a dance major, her professors and others have mainly mentioned the limited options of becoming a professional dancer or teaching dance in a school or college.
Actually, there are many career options that incorporate dance. Zubey could create a life in dance in counseling and therapy. Dance, which can be just as physically challenging as football, could be preparation for graduate kinesiology or physical-therapy programs. Putting on a dance production requires the discipline and skills that could be applied to any kind of business — including dance itself, which requires marketing, fund raising, event planning, and education and community programming. Ned’s own daughter was a dance major at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, then later harnessed her training in performance as a courtroom litigator for the Department of Homeland Security.
I have heard so many stories of people going to school for something they’re not passionate about but they know it’s going to make money, and then they end up in a career where they’re miserable and switch it up anyway. I don’t want to end up like that.
On the average campus, who is talking to students like Zubey or others about the range of possibilities in dance, or how to navigate to them? Without these kinds of conversations, students are mainly left to make decisions based on average salaries by major — which, for dance, is about $40,000. This does nothing to resolve the internal conflict of money versus meaning.
“I do worry about the money a lot — and I wonder if I made the right decision, trying to pursue dance,” says Zubey, who says she comes from a middle-class home where finances are always a source of stress. Although she wants to be financially secure when she gets older, she also feels pulled toward doing something that makes her happy. “Maybe that’s just because I have heard so many stories of people going to school for something they’re not passionate about but they know it’s going to make money, and then they end up in a career where they’re miserable and switch it up anyway. I don’t want to end up like that.”
With so many students pulled between these poles of wanting meaning and needing money, it’s no wonder there’s a mental-health crisis on college campuses. A Harvard University study of teenagers and young adults nationwide, released last fall, confirmed what many administrators had been picking up from casual conversations with students and in reports from their overtaxed counseling centers: Half or more of the respondents said they were dogged by financial worries and the pressure to achieve, and yet also felt a lack of direction. Nearly half noted that their mental health suffered from a general “sense that things are falling apart” in society and politics. And a stunning 58 percent of the respondents reported feeling little to no purpose or meaning.
“Work and school were almost entirely absent as sources of purpose and meaning,” said the report, from Making Caring Common, a project from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. The report noted that a lack of meaning or purpose tends to amplify the effects of depression and anxiety, and that much of the current work of therapists with young adults focuses on getting them to stop achieving simply to achieve.
“Disconnected from meaning, achievement is a particularly frantic, hellish hamster wheel,” the report says. And many of those students base their sense of “achievement” on narrow goals defined by their parents, their communities, and social media, where feelings of success or failure ride on an edge.
Disconnected from meaning, achievement is a particularly frantic, hellish hamster wheel.
“That’s a very dangerous way to live,” says Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a co-author of the report.
For many families, status achievements — like getting into Princeton or scoring that job at Goldman Sachs — are less important than simply making money. Brent Orrell, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on the work force, says that the road to something meaningful starts to divide even before a student enrolls at college, when expressing an interest in the humanities, social sciences, or fine arts. At a holiday dinner, they get the “drunk-uncle question”: What are you going to do with that?
“It’s not intended to be a helpful question,” Orrell says. “It’s intended to be a knockdown question, to put kids on the defensive about what their core interests are.”
Orrell is the author of a recent AEI report that looks at the priorities and attitudes of workers age 22 to 29, which concludes that workers want security but they are also deeply motivated to find work that is personally meaningful. We are storytelling primates, Orrell says, and we need an outlet for self-reflection that helps us make sense of our own journey. But that primate brain is also constantly seeking status in the tribe and is wired to look for dangers in the wilderness. The Great Recession generated much of the current anxiety about jobs and outcomes, he says.
So, Orrell says, the pressure students feel from their parents and others around them plays a refrain: “If life is a game of musical chairs, don’t be the one that’s left without a place to sit down.”
The lists of high-paying majors and top industry “pathways” give students a false sense of security that the name of the major on the degree paves the way. Average salaries are a pretty poor predictor of individual potential, and if you don’t have the disposition for engineering, computer science, data analytics — or any of the other majors that sound like the ticket to a high-paying job — you’re likely to struggle through the program, if you finish at all.
Orrell suggests that students need to deeply consider questions of meaning early in college, because they start making commitments that have short- and long-term impacts on their lives — impacts that can strengthen their motivation and help them carve out a niche, much as Garcia-Nieto did. The humanities majors, now shuttering across the country on the notion that they don’t lead to the promised land of high-paying careers, actually catch up with STEM majors over time, he points out. The student who senses what to do with an English or anthropology major has started to solve the puzzle of meaning versus money.
I’ll tell you what really takes a long time, and that’s studying something that you have no interest in because you think it’s going to get you a job.
“It may take you a little bit longer, but I’ll tell you what really takes a long time, and that’s studying something that you have no interest in because you think it’s going to get you a job,” Orrell says. Take for example, becoming a lawyer — a goal students commonly believe will lead to status and a great salary. In law school, students have to devour civil procedures, criminal law, government regulations, legal precedents, and more. “As a friend of mine said, law school is a pie-eating contest — and if you win, you get to eat pie every single day for the rest of your life. You better make sure that you like pie before you make the decision to commit to a career like that, because you will wind up very stressed out, burned out, and unhappy unless you are completely motivated by money.”
But the picture is complicated, because there are so many reasons students pursue law — and the pay is not necessarily the key reward. A recent study of legal careers, published by the University of Chicago Press, examines the lives of people in “high hemisphere” and “low hemisphere” positions, designations in the field of law based on prestige and pay. In the “high hemisphere” careers, students from elite law schools went on to top corporate firms and high salaries, while those following “low hemisphere” paths got less pay working in government, at small firms, or in public-interest law. But lawyers in the low-hemisphere jobs scored demonstrably higher in work satisfaction and the perceived value of how their work made a difference in the lives of people.
“Money is super important,” says Orrell, “but it can’t sustain you at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy itself.”
Weissbourd, from Harvard, says he even sees in his own neighborhood and family the “degree to which achievement pressure has squeezed out attention to anything else.” Parents in a town like Cambridge might tell their kids to be happy, to go to any college they want — as Weissbourd told his own son when he was applying to college.
“Dad, that’s such bullshit — you teach at Harvard, and everybody in this community is sending their kids to these selective colleges,” Weissbourd recalls his son’s reply. “He was sort of saying, You can take the high road and say the right thing because there are all these forces that are doing the muscling for you.”
Much of that “muscling” is about social norming — how where you come from and what you experience continuously shape your expectations in life, either reinforcing a sense of meaning and purpose or casting doubt on it.
In the summer of 2015, before Garcia-Nieto started medical school in the fall, she had an experience that solidified her resolve. Her great-grandfather became sick and was likely to die soon. Because Garcia-Nieto had DACA status, she was one of the only family members who could cross the border, with some assurance that she could return, to set up coordinated care for her grandfather.
She flew to Acapulco and took a taxi to the base of a mountain, where a family friend picked her up on a horse to take her the rest of the way to the village where her mother had once lived. “I mean, there’s no internet, there’s no Wi-Fi. People are just literally living life,” she says. Barefoot children kicked around a deflated soccer ball, and she met a number of “aunts,” by blood or not, who had once changed her diapers or carted her around the village in a red wagon. “The people there genuinely seemed very happy and content, and I thought, Oh my God, it’s that sense of community.”
The village’s desperate poverty wasn’t lost on Garcia-Nieto. Most of the people made money on a small plot of vegetables or by raising a few animals, and the children were elated to receive the cookies Garcia-Nieto brought from the city — a rare treat. She felt gratitude for how her parents had left this place to work multiple jobs in America, just trying to provide their children a better life. “One thing my family always taught me is, you can’t ever forget where you came from — and I got to see that,” she says. “That was very humbling.”
When Garcia-Nieto arrived at Emory University for her interviews, she told Alejandro Torres about some of these experiences. Both of them were first-generation students, the children of Mexican immigrants, and both were pursuing pediatrics.
But Torres’s experience with social norming was very different from Garcia-Nieto’s. As a U.S.-born citizen, he experienced more of the prestige muscling that Weissbourd referred to. After attending a private high school on scholarship, Torres was a pre-med student at Yale University, where the pervasive expectations held that Torres and his peers would one day lead hospitals or companies, or maybe even become the nation’s surgeon general. When Torres later went on to New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and declared his intention to go into pediatrics, people around him were puzzled.
“Like, you could go into adult medicine and go be a leader somewhere — I had mentors tell me that,” Torres says.
After all, in medicine, pediatrics is on the lower end of the status and pay ladder. Torres chose the field because of the experiences he and his family had with a Mexican American pediatrician at a clinic for low-income Hispanic people in Dallas. The waiting room was always packed with Hispanic patients, where Torres and his parents would sit for two hours.
“When we would finally go see the doctor, my parents would hang on every word — I just remember the respect that they had,” Torres says. If the doctor said to cut down on white rice in family meals, Torres’s mother would start changing the meals at home. “And then she would tell my eight aunts and uncles in Dallas. Before you know it, these pediatricians had such an immense sway in dictating good health” for the community, he says.
Torres’s mother had studied to be a doctor in Mexico, but when she emigrated to the United States, she couldn’t surmount the language barrier and wound up as a housecleaner. Torres’s father, who dropped out of school in second grade to herd sheep, picked up a construction job in Dallas.
If pediatrics is on the “low end” of the pay ladder, that’s all still relative. Both Torres and his wife, whom he met at Yale, are physicians and have a very good family income. The first year Torres could earn a bonus, an additional $30,000 landed in his bank account.
“I just remember thinking to myself, for my parents growing up, that was a full year’s salary,” Torres says. “Here I am making that at the end of the year, just because I worked.” Even now, Torres still gets choked up just thinking about the moment he called his parents to say, “You don’t have to worry about things anymore. I’ll take care of y’all.”
Now and then, Torres feels that pressure from his old college friends and mentors, a nagging sense that he could be “doing more,” that he should shoot for some position of status. When he runs into his old college peers at social events, he knows he will get asked skeptical questions about the path he chose in pediatrics. One of his close friends from Yale, who dropped out of the pre-med program to go into finance, went on to work for a major investment firm, where he works long hours, says Torres — and makes millions of dollars a year.
“You know, he’s made it,” Torres says. “But there are times when we’ll talk and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know, maybe I just want to retire and go play guitar and start my own music company.’ Whereas for me, right now, I could do medicine until I retire.”
Then he adds, perhaps feeling that muscling: “I mean, I would like to do more with medicine.”
If Torres has any self-doubts, they seem to fade away the moment he is asked about his work and his young patients. Sometimes, they come out to him, or discuss their suicidal thoughts. Recently, a 16-year-old revealed to Torres — and to her mother, sitting in the room — that she had unprotected sex and needed an STD check. Torres takes these moments as a sign of the trust he’s built with his patients and their families — something he’s come to see as more precious than money.
“These kids are just starting to realize what the world is about and their role in the world — and a lot of times, in that realization, I’m one of the first people that they talk to,” he says. “It’s incredibly humbling to be a part of that.”
Organizational psychology has studied the role of meaning and purpose in work for some time, but the topic has only just started to gain traction in labor economics, the discipline that guides much of the policymaking around work and employment. Many economists are still trained in classical or neoclassical models of economics, which defines work as a “disutility” — a disagreeable task performed only to make income for consumption.
“The dominant view is that people don’t like working, and work cannot be a source of meaning,” says Milena Nikolova, a professor of economics at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, who studies the connection between work, well-being, and happiness. Nikolova and her colleagues struggled for years to publish a study of the benefits that come from finding meaning and purpose in the workplace, with data gathered from workers in 30 European countries in 2005, 2010, and 2015. After the study was published in Labour Economics, it started to generate attention and was cited in the 2023 economic report of the president of the United States.
“It seems to have made an impact, but to be honest with you, people were laughing about it for a long time,” Nikolova says.
Her research shows that “three innate psychological needs” associated with motivation and well-being are far more important to workers than pay, benefits, work hours, or career advancement: autonomy in the work, competence in the skills required to complete the tasks, and relatedness, or whether one finds connection and kinship with fellow workers and superiors.
These factors drive a range of positive outcomes for both employees and employers. Among employees, meaning and purpose can enable motivation and perseverance at work, leading to greater employee retention. Workers with a sense of meaning — who understand the why behind the job — are more likely to be productive, increase their skills and yield higher-quality work, endure tough working conditions, and take fewer sick days.
Nikolova says that even people who hold low-status jobs — like a janitor at a hospital, a common example — can engage in “job crafting” to find the meaning and purpose that propels them. That janitor can envision herself as a critical part of the health-care team, making sure that operating rooms, recovery rooms, and even the hallways are cleared of the bacteria that leads to infection.
Take away that meaning and purpose, and the engagement and commitment declines. Consider the current crisis in finding and retaining good teachers. Teaching has always been a hard job, but in recent years, school systems have taken away the autonomy of teachers, forcing them to follow test-heavy curricula or read lesson plans from scripts. Factors like these have led many teachers to give up on the profession.
Financial factors matter to intrinsic motivation, and money tends to matter more to people who have less of it.
To be sure, there is a dark side to this quest for meaning. It may fuel drive and commitment, but it can also lead to overwork — even exploitation. David Graeber, the late anthropologist from the London School of Economics, wrote a treatise about the psychological harm of meaningless and pointless “bullshit jobs.” But he distinguished them from plain old “shit jobs,” occupations that are difficult but useful, yet peculiarly undervalued, with relatively low salaries — among them, teachers, sanitation workers, frontline health-care providers, and so on. Nikolova’s research indicates that finding meaning in work requires some baseline level of income and job security. Studies show that financial factors matter to intrinsic motivation, and money tends to matter more to people who have less of it.
All of this plays against an underlying economy that, for decades now, has seemed hostile to the nation’s younger generations. Scott Galloway’s viral TED Talk on “America’s war on the young” ticks off how stagnant wages, out-of-control housing prices, and the financialization of the economy, which rewards the richest Americans, has put the American Dream out of reach for many. College — historically the great equalizer — is increasingly about anointing the children of the wealthy, says Galloway, a New York University professor of marketing. “Our job in higher ed isn’t to identify a top 1 percent of people who are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents, and turn them into a super class of billionaires,” he tells the crowd. “It’s to give the bottom 90 a chance to be in the top 10.”
In his books and on podcasts, Galloway’s advice for students has been to forget about “passion” (which he defines as becoming a movie or sports star) and “follow a talent” that’s suited for a career with a high-median salary, like becoming a tax attorney. The money and other external rewards that tax attorneys earn, he argues, will make them passionate about their careers.
For many students now, it’s not even about landing in the top 10 percent, but it’s still about money and security. “The No. 1 factor that they’re looking for as they think about what jobs they will apply to and accept is stability,” says Christine Cruzvergara, chief education-strategy officer at Handshake, the student job board. “That is a shift from previous generations.”
According to a recent Handshake survey of students in the Class of 2024, 77 percent said stability was the top priority. In a different Handshake survey released in February, 65 percent of students said they would not accept a job that does not come with retirement benefits. Applications to government jobs, which provide steady employment and pensions, outpace applications to private industry, Handshake’s surveys indicate.
In these surveys, around three-quarters of the respondents said that career success would include working for a company that aligns with their values and offers work that they are passionate about. But student anxieties also came out in the numbers: Eighty percent of the respondents said that they had felt burned out during their college career, and the same share worried about burning out in the career that they had chosen. Around 65 percent said they wanted guidance on finding work-life balance, mental-health days, and flexibility to deal with personal issues. Only about 50 percent showed a concern for earning a high salary, and only 40 percent wanted to advance to a senior-level role.
Cruzvergara interprets all of this to mean that today’s students and recent graduates, steeped in the vocabulary of well-being and mental health, are making demands of employers in trying to find that balance between meaning and money. She notes that this year, Generation Z will overtake baby boomers in the work force. “They’re going to help redefine, as every generation does, what is expected in the workplace,” she says.
The students she encounters today often reveal a life plan: Take a high-paying job for a decade or so to pay off college debt and establish a financial foundation, then go do something meaningful. “They don’t want to wait until they’re in their 40s, 50s, or 60s to start living the life that they want,” says Cruzvergara.
But Weissbourd, from Harvard, has his doubts that one can chase money for a while, then later quit to find a meaningful life or career. “These incentives become so addictive that I don’t think they can turn it off and learn how to find meaning in other things.”
Orrell, from AEI, believes that the simple patterns of life negate those plans. Ten years after college — after a graduate has gotten married, had children, taken out a mortgage — it might be too difficult to shift. “We know that burnout — or midlife crisis, or whatever you want to call it — doesn’t really happen when you’re 50. It’s something that creeps up on people in their early to mid-30s,” he says. At that point, “they’re just a lot less free to make changes, and at the same time, they’ve never really seriously been asked to think about the idea of vocation or calling.”
Asking the hard questions early in life and in college, Orrell says, will insulate against that burnout later: How am I built? What am I interested in? What’s intrinsically motivating to me? “And then to think about how that thing, or the skills that make up that thing, can be aligned to tasks in the market that you can get paid for,” says Orrell — it’s an approach that flips the usual career-development scenario, which often starts with the industry demands and top job slots, and then tries to figure out how students can fit themselves into those demands.
Most middle- to lower-income students are seldom guided through these hard questions. Even in Europe, students set their sights on brand-name corporations and prestige. “They cannot even begin to imagine what is possible for them beyond a job at McKinsey,” Nikolova says. Increasingly, the University of Groningen tries to give students a sense of how to navigate college to get to something more meaningful and interdisciplinary — but those programs are mainly focused on a subset of honors students and first-generation students who show potential.
It’s largely the same situation in the United States. Mainly elite institutions have rolled out programs intended to get students to pause and reflect on what’s important, what they want in life, and what drives them — programs that become part of the institutions’ branding to attract applicants. Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Tulane, and other major universities offer Life Design, a program that encourages reflection and prototyping to build a career plan, with techniques borrowed from a self-help book by two faculty members in Stanford’s design program. The University of Denver has the “4D Experience,” which promises students opportunities to ponder their purpose and values, with retreats in the Colorado Rockies.
In 2012, using research from the polling company Gallup, Bates College held extensive discussions on campus about how meaning and purpose can connect to an undergraduate’s college experience. Students who had a sense of purpose, Bates administrators discovered from Gallup polling, were more likely to have a sense of well-being in their communities, their finances, and their individual outlook. Those discussions led to the formation of the Bates Center for Purposeful Work, where Bates staff talk to students as early as orientation about how to connect the college experience not just to a career, but also to the rest of their lives.
“We talk to incoming students and first-year students about the importance of exploration,” says Marianne Nolan Cowan, the center’s senior associate director of exploration and curriculum design. Key questions — Who am I? What’s important to me? What are my values? What are my interests? What am I good at? — form the foundation of the center’s work. “That exploration process is really fundamental.”
From the outside, however, it’s difficult to tell what difference these conversations make in how Bates students navigate the curriculum. In the Bates Class of 2023, nearly 60 percent were clumped into majors commonly associated with high-status jobs: biology and biomedical sciences (for medical school and careers in health sciences), econometrics and quantitative economics (a liberal-arts college’s version of business and finance), and political science (as an entree to law school or politics), along with environmental studies and psychology, which are popular at many institutions. Relatively few Bates students major in anthropology, history, the languages, philosophy, or the visual and performing arts — disciplines that may be personally rewarding but are more difficult to connect to high-paying careers.
In any case, many students at Bates have access to another critical element to support the search for meaning and purpose: money. Bates and other well-endowed institutions have engaged wealthy donors to subsidize students pursuing unpaid internships and career treks in their purposeful exploration.
Students at mainstream colleges need these opportunities, too. Higher education’s vision of “student success” — which largely focuses on getting bodies to graduation or lining up workers for industry needs — is missing something. Meaning and purpose should be a central concept in how students plan their undergraduate education, and colleges should understand how they can harness those aspirations to drive student persistence. Educational meaningfulness — when students know why they are chasing a degree — can spur students to find a well of motivation to dig deeper when they face barriers, to engage the course materials more thoroughly, and to draw more skills and knowledge from the curriculum. Discovering meaning and purpose is not some fluffy add-on but a bedrock realization that drives students to their personal version of success, self-actualization, and appreciation for the intrinsic rewards of a vocation.
And there are rewards to society, too, when students realize how college can help them try to solve the challenges that shaped them and their neighborhoods. For instance, many communities — particularly underserved populations — face a shortage of primary-care physicians, in part because of the lure of the money and status in specialties. Emelin Garcia-Nieto realized she could find that balance between meaning and money to sustain herself in a field that needs her. In a little over a year at her clinic, her patient panel has grown through word of mouth, with many refugees from Venezuela and Columbia seeking her out.
“Primary care is hard,” says Garcia-Nieto, who will never become wealthy as a pediatrician — but money is not what keeps her in the job. It’s offering health care to people who can’t otherwise get it.
Recently, Garcia-Nieto caught one of her patients, a young girl, staring intently at her during an appointment, and Garcia-Nieto asked the girl’s mother why.
“She’s fan-girling,” her mother said. “We have never seen a Hispanic doctor, ever, here in Georgia.”
