By Douglas Noonan
An individual’s preferences can affect their earnings. Shocker.
Some people are willing to forgo extra wages in order to get better work conditions. “Better” is in the eye of the beholder. Some people will take hazard pay to work roadside construction, overtime pay to work extra hours, higher wages for less pleasant work, etc. Conversely, some people prioritize things like flexibility, autonomy, personal fulfillment, or other aspects of their work – and they accept lower wages for jobs that offer other perks.
My job comes with a complex bundle of amenities and disamenities. I get coworkers I love, flexibility to work remotely, lots of freedom over what I research … but I also get unpleasant administrative meetings, endless bureaucratic webforms, and walks on eggshells to avoid blowback from whatever political winds blow in my state or organization. On net? I gladly accept lower pay because it’s a great bundle – for me.
Liberal arts educations are under attack – I’d say for good reasons – but the claim that they don’t yield a good ROI in terms of impact on earnings isn’t one of those good reasons. It’s not just ironic (or worse) that some folks are pushing loudly and effectively to reduce the set of choices our students have. College has enough nannies; we don’t need more outsiders telling people what they can’t study.
But let’s be smarter about this earnings topic. We can think of the “returns” to work as cash earnings + formal benefits + job amenities. Some of those benefits are formal parts of compensation (e.g., health insurance, retirement contributions). And some are personal and go untracked: flexible hours, job security, autonomy, making a difference, etc. These are real benefits – but the IRS never sees them. (ROI metrics ignore them.)
These invisible wages truly matter – some of them are, in fact, the fundamental justification for a liberal arts education. After all, we tell students, knowing the ‘classics’ might not land you a six-figure salary, but it will give your life more meaning.
Fixating on an earnings-ROI metric to judge the merits of degrees or jobs is obviously and knowingly shortsighted. But this isn’t about winning an argument: it’s about understanding and improving the world. So why are we fixating on an earnings ROI?
First, looking back over decades of shifting priorities toward STEM fields and occupations, we might see growing interest in high-earning jobs. Even if that trend isn’t driven by changing tastes among students or families (haven’t high-paying jobs always held appeal?), there has long been a public-policy push for graduates with greater taxable earnings. This is part of the bargain for public support of universities: taxpayers help fund them, and graduates expand the tax base in return. Plus, universities can better sell expensive tuition bills if they can promise higher wages for grads. It’s hard to pay for tuition with “the freedom to work from home.”
Second, the recent push for the earnings ROI metric is explicitly tied to student loans. Some of it might be a paternalistic concern about sparing students future blushes at their unwise investments. Some of it is an argument that good policy ought not to subsidize bad investments. (Hear the critic railing that fools and trust-funders can study art history, but taxpayers won’t be complicit.) This is particularly important at a federal level, where much of the subsidy for higher ed comes via student aid and loans. And it’s worth considering on its merits. It’s also hard to pay back student loans using “other benefits” if that’s what some low-earning degrees best offer.
The push for ROI “accountability” has put arts programs in the crosshairs. If you’ve followed along so far, I wonder about the appetite to entertain a provocative possibility: artists aren’t so underpaid as an earnings gap (relative to similar workers) might suggest, because that’s willfully ignoring the (often) great amenities that come with their jobs.
To be clear: this isn’t a defense of low pay. If cash pay is structurally suppressed, that’s a separate problem – and a reason to ask whether subsidizing more entrants makes sense until it’s fixed. Also note: the federal accountability test mostly counts IRS-reported wages/tips/self-employment – not benefits, and never job amenities.
The “net-positive other benefits” possibility is a big deal that I think deserves a lot more study and attention. Many arts jobs are risky and unstable. Even if we’d expect paid earnings to be higher to compensate for the hazard of precarity, how much is offset by other work amenities? And how does the variety of preferences among (potential) artists affect who selects into and who survives in the artistic workforce, and who opts out? Those who most prize the other benefits may claim much of the artistic work. At the same time, some of those “other benefits” can be more or less costly to offer to workers in the first place. (E.g., artistic autonomy might come with much greater cost to commercial-art organizations than those in the nonprofit sector.)
It’s vital that we do more to answer these questions. Understanding this complexity, especially in a rapidly changing labor market, requires effort. And nuance. And bravery / honesty. If artists’ wages are inflated due to the “hazard pay” of their harsh work conditions, then failing the ROI threshold is even more damning. If so many would-be artists clamber at the gates, suffering low or no wages to buy that lottery ticket to a successful career, someday, then … these ROI metrics aren’t misleading. They’re spot on.
But if artists’ earnings are pitiful because artists’ rewards tend to manifest in many ways that ROI can’t capture, then let’s embrace it, own it, celebrate it. “Become an artist and get paid some coin and enjoy a wealth of other benefits!”
The ROI debate is a chance to sharpen our focus on the non-monetary benefits of the arts – for students, artists, audiences, and the taxpaying public.