Peter Huidekoper’s recent piece in Boardhawk asks an important question: Have we squeezed all the wonder out of the freshman year of college?
His nostalgia for a time when students could arrive on campus uncertain, perplexed, and open to possibility resonates with anyone who found themselves during college rather than before it. Candidly, I count myself among them.
But his argument sets up a false choice — one that pits exploration against accountability and self-discovery against outcomes. And in doing so, it misses a harder truth: Higher education’s credibility problem is real, and dismissing families’ concerns about cost and outcomes won’t make it go away.
As a trustee at Colorado Mesa University, I’ve watched President John Marshall make the case that rebuilding trust between higher education and the families it serves isn’t optional, it’s existential. In a recent Colorado Sun essay, Marshall wrote about the broken “social contract” that once promised grit and resilience could propel anyone toward a better life.
Gallup data confirms the damage: public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade. The answer isn’t to wave away these concerns as philistine. It’s to earn back that confidence, and that requires honesty about what students can expect.
This is where Huidekoper and I part ways. He characterizes Colorado’s Minimum Value Threshold as reducing education to a “business transaction.” But the MVT framework isn’t designed to tell students what to study or force them to declare a major before orientation. It’s designed to tell them the truth about what happens after graduation – something institutions have been remarkably reluctant to share.
Transparency isn’t the problem. Opacity and confusion are.
There’s something else Huidekoper’s essay doesn’t reckon with. His eight-year wandering required a financial cushion to wander. It required family and friends who “did not give up on him.” Not everyone has that. For first-generation students, working adults returning to complete a credential, and families stretching to afford tuition, honest information about outcomes isn’t a constraint on exploration. It’s a prerequisite for making informed choices in the first place.
Colorado is actually building the infrastructure to make this kind of honesty possible. The Colorado Equitable Economic Mobility Initiative (CEEMI) has been at the forefront, supporting the very legislation Huidekoper criticizes, and partnering with the Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab at the University of Denver to launch Colorado WORC, an initiative that unlocks earnings outcome data previously unavailable about training providers.
As CEEMI’s Roger Low and Colorado Community College System board chair Landon Mascareñaz recently wrote, making “comprehensive, apples-to-apples outcome data ubiquitous” isn’t about scapegoating colleges or clinging to the status quo, it’s about expanding opportunity by giving college freshmen and learners at every stage of their learning journey more options, and the tools to understand where those options lead.
Low and Mascareñaz call it “postsecondary abundance.” I’d call it common sense.
This is also the work that FutureRise is now undertaking. As a collaborative hub connecting philanthropists, employers, and government leaders, FutureRise is building infrastructure to align funders around shared metrics, invest in what works, and scale what shows promise. The strategic framework makes explicit what should be obvious: Every investment can deliver direct impact for learners while generating proof points that drive system-wide change.
You don’t have to choose between human flourishing and economic mobility. The best programs pursue both.
CU-Boulder Chancellor Schwartz’s comments, which Huidekoper approvingly cites, actually reinforce this point. Preparing students to be “intellectually nimble and agile” isn’t opposed to workforce preparation, it is workforce preparation for a changing economy. The dichotomy between learning for its own sake and learning for a career has always been a false one.
Here’s the counterintuitive insight Huidekoper misses: Transparency about outcomes may actually expand students’ sense of freedom, not constrain it. Colorado’s own ROI report shows that multiple pathways lead to economic stability, and not just the obvious ones. Yes, STEM bachelor’s degree holders earn median wages of nearly $77,000 five years after graduation, but arts and humanities graduates earn $53,000, and trades certificates lead to $62,000.
The data doesn’t say “only study engineering.” It says many paths may work. When students can see that clearly, they may feel more permission to explore, not less. It’s uncertainty about whether any path leads anywhere that breeds anxiety.
The students Huidekoper describes, the ones who arrived at college already certain about business, chemistry, or criminal law, weren’t constrained by an ROI framework. They’re responding to a world that feels less stable, more uncertain, than the one earlier generations entered. If we want to give students permission to explore, we need to make the economics of exploration viable, not pretend those economics don’t exist.
The real work isn’t choosing between accountability and wonder. It’s building an education system capable of delivering both.
