Reviving Personal Enrichment at Harvard

There’s no denying that a Harvard degree holds significant value in the job market. This much is evident from the impressive starting salaries and high immediate post-graduation employment rates of Harvard graduates.

If a college is to derive its value from the financial success of its graduates, then Harvard is doing a stellar job. But most of us probably agree that a college education should encompass far more than that. If we factor out career outcomes, how much are students getting out of their Harvard education? Are our four years here really the “transformative experience” that the College so proudly advertises?

Harvard’s strong culture of careerism is well documented, but that has not always been the case. Throughout its early history, Harvard placed a significant emphasis on providing a classical education, emphasizing liberal arts disciplines like Ethics and Politics, Metaphysics and Theology, and Rhetoric and Logic as a core part of the curriculum. Why, hundreds of years later, does this feel missing from our education at the very same institution?

It’s not that one can’t find personal fulfillment in the subjects Harvard offers today. Still, it’s impossible not to notice that the College’s early focus seemed clearly centered around intellectual enrichment rather than career development, as we see now.

This careerist bent has real consequences for students.

Whether we like it or not, we live, breathe, and eat in an environment where professional and financial success is equated to life success or ‘living well.’ For many undergraduates, the pressure of scoring a high-paying job immediately out of graduation reduces classes and extracurriculars to nothing more than strategic and competitive resume building.

Rather than spending their college years discovering themselves, students become trapped in a relentless pursuit for professional success, oftentimes seeming to forget about the very real passions and interests that brought them to Harvard in the first place. People easily abandon their genuine interests, forfeiting some of their identity in the process.

As I reflect on the evolution of Harvard’s educational character, I find myself yearning for a return to the University’s classical roots. While the demands of the modern age necessitate some degree of professional development opportunities, we have allowed careerism to overshadow our commitment to encouraging intellectual curiosity and instilling a sense of social and ethical responsibility.

Harvard should be a place where students inspire and learn from each other — not seek to outperform one another. Integrity, creativity, and commitment to the greater good should be the qualities we look for in ourselves and each other, not our capacity to earn money and our desirability as labor inputs.

What can Harvard do to turn the tide, not just for its own students but also as a leading institution in higher education?

One important move would be to bring back elements of Harvard’s past curriculum. Required philosophy, ethics, and humanities courses, beyond the current sparse General Education and distributional requirements, could help nurture personal enrichment in students alongside professional development. These classes would collectively offer a partial version of the classical education that was once standard at Harvard.

To be clear, this does not mean adding significant academic burdens to students. These classes do not have to be difficult to be useful. Courses like the popular General Education 1025: “Happiness” show the way forward on this front.

Harvard should also expand its curricular breadth by offering more interdisciplinary concentrations, like Social Studies and History & Literature, that allow students to explore different fields. These kinds of concentrations seem most likely to open novel intellectual pathways for students rather than confining them within narrow disciplines, helping to foster intellectual curiosity more generally.

Harvard has the opportunity to redefine what a high-quality college education looks like in this country — to become a pioneer and inspiration for its peers across higher education. It should renew its commitment to a truly liberal arts education, and that starts by gearing our academics toward personal enrichment.

Lauren H. Kim ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Eliot House.