The Well-Being of Liberal Arts Alumni: The Importance of Faculty Relationships and Transferable Skills

Although some commentators encourage students to be narrowly career-focused in their undergraduate studies, we suggest that a college education cultivates more than high salaries and that the success of graduates should be conceptualized broadly. Using 2024 survey data from liberal arts graduates of a public university, we examined well-being as a measure of graduates’ success. We found that many employed liberal arts alumni reported high levels of well-being and that well-being encompasses more than financial return-on-investment. These alumni reported both high levels of faculty support while undergraduates and that the broad transferable skills learned in their liberal arts programs were helpful in their post-graduate jobs. Further, alumni who established strong relationships with faculty and who viewed their broad skills learned in their liberal arts majors as helpful on the job reported the highest levels of well-being. On the other hand, alumni’s experiences with high-impact practices as undergraduates were not related to well-being in the multivariate context. These findings have important implications for decisions about the future of liberal arts programs and the ways we encourage and evaluate faculty-student interactions. They also suggest the need to reevaluate the ways we conceptualize return-on investment when university administrators make personnel and marketing decisions.