Every time I mention that I studied music and mathematics at Rollins College, someone eventually asks the question they’re too polite to say out loud: What did a liberal arts school give you that somewhere else couldn’t?

After forty years — running a business, serving on a board of trustees, advocating for arts funding at the state level, testifying in Tallahassee — I have a very clear answer. Everything.

But I understand the skepticism. The sticker price on higher education has become genuinely alarming, and families doing the math (liberal arts irony aside) want to know what they’re buying. The concern isn’t unreasonable. What’s unreasonable is the assumption that a liberal arts degree is a financial gamble.

The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce ran those numbers. Forty-year ROI for liberal arts colleges: $918,000. That’s 25 percent more than the median across all colleges and universities ($723,000), and roughly comparable to institutions focused on business or engineering. The short-term picture looks different — ten years out, liberal arts graduates often earn less. But careers are long, and the compounding value of what a liberal arts education builds — adaptability, communication, the ability to think across disciplines — shows up exactly when it matters most.

Here’s what the employer data tells us: more than 80 percent of hiring managers say the skills they value most in new employees are critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving. Ninety-three percent rank those skills above an applicant’s undergraduate major. What that means in practice is that employers don’t actually care whether you studied philosophy or finance. They care whether you can think, write, listen, and lead.

That is what a liberal arts education trains you to do.

I majored in mathematics at Rollins — not the obvious liberal arts choice, but it is the environment shaped how I used it. My coursework sat inside a broader framework: writing, rhetoric, the arts, ethics, the hard work of sitting in conversation with people who thought differently than I did. The math got me to the numbers; Rollins taught me what to do with them in a room full of people who weren’t mathematicians.

I’ve been on the Rollins Board of Trustees since 2015, and I’ve served on two presidential search committees — the process that brought President Grant Cornwell to Rollins and, most recently, the search that concluded with President Brooke Barnett. I now chair the Presidential Transition Committee. In that work, I’ve seen Rollins from the inside at the highest level of institutional decision-making, and what I’ve watched consistently is this: the alumni who lead, who build, who give back, who show up in rooms where things get decided — they are not defined by their major. They are defined by the way they learned to think.

There’s one more argument for the liberal arts that wasn’t on the table forty years ago: artificial intelligence. The jobs most at risk from automation are those built around routine, predictable technical tasks. The jobs most protected are those requiring judgment, ethical reasoning, narrative, persuasion, nuance — the things that a machine can mimic but cannot originate. Washington Monthly recently put it plainly: what AI can’t do is exactly what liberal arts teaches. The human capacity to scrutinize, to question assumptions, to communicate meaning across difference — that is not a soft skill. It is increasingly a strategic one.

None of this means the liberal arts are beyond scrutiny. Cost is real. Debt is real. The variation in outcomes across institutions is significant — selectivity, major choice, career services, alumni networks all shape where a graduate lands. Families should ask hard questions before committing. But the question Is it worth it? deserves a more honest answer than the one it typically gets in the headlines.

Forty years out from Rollins, I run a company, chair a state arts commission, serve on a college board, and advocate for policies I care about in Tallahassee and Washington. I don’t trace any of that to a single course or credential. I trace it to an education that taught me to read a room, make an argument, and understand that the best decisions come from people who think across disciplines, not just within them.

That’s the ROI no spreadsheet fully captures.