By Derek Bok

Students come to universities with a remarkably materialistic view of what a college education can provide. It was not always thus. In the 1960s, entering freshmen were chiefly interested in developing values and a meaningful phi­losophy of life. Only 40 percent felt that making "a lot of money" was a "very important" goal. By the mid-70s, their priorities were reversed. Making "a lot of money" was now "very important" to 75 percent of entering students.

Since then, making money has continued to be the pre-­eminent reason for attending college. But much research has shown that people who set great store by becoming rich tend to be less happy than those who have other goals. If that is the case, most college freshmen are already on the wrong path to a full and satisfying life.

The widespread pre­occupation with making money has clearly left its mark on the undergraduate curriculum. To compete for applicants, col­leges have felt impelled to offer more vocational majors, and students have responded by gravitating increasingly to pro­grams that prepare them for higher-paid jobs. Three-fifths of all undergraduates in four-year colleges are pursuing vocational majors. Even liberal-arts concentrators may seek majors that look suspiciously like preprofes­sional programs for Ph.D.'s and academic careers.

Fortunately, colleges have long insisted that even students who choose vocational majors must normally complete at least one year of general-education courses designed to encourage a variety of interests by exposing them to the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Outside class, colleges maintain a large number of extra­curricular programs—orchestras, athletics teams, newspapers, drama groups—to help students explore new interests, acquire lifelong avocations, and learn to live and work more easily and harmoniously with others.

For all the breadth of extracurricular activity, however, many colleges develop such programs simply in response to student desires. Most of the funds that colleges spend on such activities go to support half a dozen high-profile sports that few students will play after they graduate. Little money and administrative effort are devoted to trying to give as many undergraduates as possible opportunities to gain competence in areas like the arts, which will enable them to continue either as amateur painters or musicians or at least as knowledgeable consumers. Moreover, most students today are older, study part-time, and commute rather than live in dorms. So although extracurricular programs can kindle lifelong interests, they are likely to have such effects less frequently among the growing numbers of older undergraduates.

What more can colleges do to help undergraduates acquire the knowledge and interests to enrich their later lives?

One obvious step would be to offer courses based on what researchers have discovered about well-being. A number of colleges are doing just that. Although such courses vary in content and approach, most of them follow one of two models.

The first model is simply to study what is known about happiness—the methods by which it can be measured, the accu­racy of the results, and the wealth of experimental findings about the sources of well-being and distress. The makeup of those courses is similar to that of most college classes in the behavioral sciences, but the relevance of the material to the lives of students often makes such courses more popular. At Harvard University, for example, a recent course on hap­piness attracted more than 800 undergraduates, making it capable of reaching half the student body over a four-year period.

Such courses, like Great Books courses, cannot tell any given student how to lead a satisfying life. The research yields re­sults that, at best, simply express probabilities that certain activi­ties and conditions will bring satisfaction, lead to unhappiness, or have no lasting effect one way or the other. Yet courses of this kind, like many of the findings that one reads about medicine or diet, are still worth knowing in thinking about how to live one's life.

The second approach is similar but includes practical exercises of expressing gratitude, analyzing unpleasant events to cast them in a better light, or performing acts of kindness, among others. Some of the instructors who teach such classes describe their effects in terms normally found in advertisements for a New Age spa. According to one syllabus, the course in question will "develop a zest for living a virtuous, satisfying, and meaningful life." Another makes an even bolder claim that "as a result of at­tending this class, you will also experience a personal transforma­tion in which you become a more positive person." Most instructors, it should be added, make no such claims.

Some people will question whether colleges should offer practical exercises to help students increase their well-being. Syllabi for such courses that claim to bring about "a personal transformation" not only seem pretentious but may strike some as uncomfortably close to indoctrination. Still, as long as the courses are optional, clearly described, and taught by professors properly trained for the task, it is hard to see why they should be discouraged. After all, many college courses are offered with a view toward influencing students in one way or another.

In addition to courses, colleges have other ways to help their stu­dents live more-satisfying lives. One of the decisions undergradu­ates make that is likely to have long-lasting effects is the choice of what occupation to enter. By now researchers have compiled an impressive quantity of pertinent facts about the common satisfac­tions and frustrations of careers in prominent profes­sions. It would be more than a little odd for a college to provide its students with detailed information about the various professional schools to which they might apply without giving them the best available evidence about the kind of lives they may lead once they finish their training. As Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton point out in When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today's College Student (Jossey-Bass, 1998), most students want to do well financially and do good in the world but have very little idea about how to combine the two. Colleges should draw upon the extensive literature on vocations to help students answer such questions.

Such assistance seems all the more useful since the satisfaction derived from different occupations is far from obvious. Jobs with higher prestige and income tend to yield higher-than-average levels of satisfaction, as one would expect. But the 10 occupations that rank the highest in satisfaction, according to the National Opinion Research Center, are full of surprises. In order of their level of satisfaction, they are: clergy, physical therapists, firefighters, education administrators, painters and sculptors, teachers, au­thors, psychologists, special-education teachers, and operating engineers.

Abundant information is available for many professions on the common satisfactions and discontents that those choices entail. In law, to take but one profession, essays have been written based on nu­merous interviews with lawyers that identify the key ingredients in a satisfying legal career and the aspects of legal practice that often cause anxiety and dissatisfaction. Such information is all the more useful since several professions have undergone major changes in recent decades that have sig­nificantly affected the quality of life for many of their members. Interesting new settings have emerged in which to work: charter schools, start-up businesses in exciting fields, specialized publishing houses, health-maintenance organizations, online magazines, and nonprofit groups of all kinds. At the same time, many professions have gradually become less of a calling and more like a business. Public-school teachers seem to have lost some of their autonomy in the classroom as districts struggle to raise standardized-test scores and meet stricter standards of accountability. Corporate owners of newspapers and television networks have tended to become more bottom-line-oriented, cutting news staffs and pressuring journal­ists to feature more human-interest and sensational stories that will appeal to wider audiences. In every profession, one hears stories of increased stress, longer hours, and greater difficulty in maintaining a healthy balance between work and family.

Law offers a good example of the kind of sweeping changes that have altered the nature of professions and the satis­factions they afford. New opportunities to practice have emerged with the establishment of legal staffs at universities and other large nonprofit organizations, bigger in-house law offices in major corporations that assign their members a wide variety of problems, and public-interest law firms that fight for any of a number of causes. Meanwhile traditional firms are hiring more young law­yers, intensifying the competition for partner status. Associates are judged in part by the number of hours they bill, creating incentives to work longer. Instead of enjoying virtual tenure, as they once did, partners are now evaluated increasingly on the amount of new business they bring in and may be asked to leave the firm if they are not "adding sufficient value." In return for greater stress and longer hours, such changes have led to starting salaries that often reach six figures for especially outstanding recent graduates, along with annual incomes in the millions of dollars for senior partners in leading firms.

Those new conditions may seem attractive to some students and dismaying to others. In either case, it is important to know the facts before one chooses where to practice law. At present, at least half of the beginning lawyers in large firms leave voluntarily within three years. Such a heavy turnover is wasteful for the firms as well as for the people who depart. Some of the exodus, at least, might be prevented if every law school exposed its students to what is now known about the benefits and disadvantages of large-firm practice and the pros and cons of working in other legal settings.

Most students should also learn more about their profession—its history, current problems, and future possibilities. They should have an opportunity not merely to acquire technical proficiency but also to reflect on how they can find mean­ing and fulfillment in their careers beyond financial success.

Discussion courses on common ethical di­lemmas confronting practitioners can be useful in helping students understand how they can work in a manner compatible with their values. Some students may benefit from studying biographies of well-known practitioners. Others may need a more imaginative ap­proach. For example, the psychiatrist and author Robert Coles used to teach courses in professional schools using novels and short stories that raised moral issues and other dilemmas common to the calling in question. Students who might be reluctant to disclose their inner doubts and fears about trying to live a fulfilling professional life would enter into intense debates about the questions facing fictional characters. Many participants were passionately engaged by those discussions and continued to correspond with Coles for years afterward.

Courses of the kind just described can often be found in professional schools. What is much less common is a conscious effort to consider how best to provide each student with opportunities for serious thought about what it might mean to "live greatly" in their professions. Schools of law, business, and medicine have all been criticized repeatedly for failing to convey the values and ideals that should animate their respective professions and practitioners. However difficult the task, any faculty concerned about the well-being of its graduates ought to provide students with some vision of this kind, so that they can ponder it and think how it could help to guide their own careers.

To be sure, universities are not im­mune to the economic forces and priorities of the larger society—nor need they avoid offering vocationally oriented courses to attract students. Nevertheless, educa­tors and policy makers must recognize that there is much more to education than becoming a productive member of the work­ force—and more to universities than producing "human capital." Happiness remains the ultimate end to which other goals are only the means. Education cannot tell students what will make them happy. But universities can do their best to supply them with the knowledge, skills, and interests that will aid them in their search.

Derek Bok is the 300th Anniversary Research Professor at Harvard University and served as president of the university from 1971 to 1991 and as interim president from 2006 to 2007. This essay is adapted from The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn From the New Research on Well-Being, to be published next month by Princeton University Press.