Catholic Higher Education & Integral Human Flourishing
Higher education in the United States is under pressure to justify itself in economic terms. From federal insistence on demonstrating ROI to parental concerns about employability, colleges and universities must prove that a degree pays off. This pressure reorganizes schools’ internal operations, resulting in cuts to core requirements, reductions in tenure lines, and neglect of programs without clear paths to jobs. Catholic colleges and universities differ in that they feel this pressure more intensely. Partly, this is because so many of them have already closed.
But partly it is because the economic framing threatens the very essence of Catholic higher education. These colleges and universities have long been attentive to the economic concerns of students as so many of them were founded based on the financial and cultural needs of immigrants. They just never stopped there. They situated these material concerns within a larger view of truth, the common good, and God.
Having worked for almost thirty years in Catholic colleges, I’ve been worried about their survival, not just keeping the doors open but about preserving their very soul. This is what drove me to conduct the Holistic Impact Report (HIR), first in 2024 and again in 2025. Each iteration surveyed 2,000 college graduates, comparing 1,000 alumni of Catholic institutions with 1,000 alumni of non-religiously affiliated institutions. (See here for more methodological details.) The findings across both years point to what I call “integral human flourishing,” a term I derive from Paul VI’s “integral human development” in Populorum Progressio. The substitution of “flourishing” for “development” marks a shift from international politics to the education of students, but the underlying logic is the same. Authentic human progress cannot be measured by economic growth alone and must attend to the whole person across spiritual, social, and cultural dimensions.
Meaningful Lives, Community Engagement, Ethical Decision Making
The orientation of Catholic higher education toward integral human flourishing can be seen in the primary results of the HIR study, findings consistent across both years. Graduates of Catholic colleges and universities report higher outcomes than secular college graduates across three domains: meaningful lives, community engagement, and ethical decision making.
On meaningful lives, graduates of Catholic colleges were more likely to describe their lives as close to their ideal and to report that their lives have a clear sense of direction. In 2025, 60 percent of Catholic college graduates reported that their life is close to their ideal, compared to 53 percent of secular college graduates, and 72 percent reported a clear sense of direction, compared to 67 percent of secular peers.
Community engagement followed the same pattern. In 2025, 48.6 percent of Catholic college graduates reported volunteering in the prior six months, compared to 40.8 percent of secular colleges graduates. This gap appeared across activities like serving on school or community boards, volunteering at local food banks, and tutoring youth.
For ethical decision making, the study looked at five moral concepts: loyalty, authority, purity, suffering, and fairness (utilizing the Moral Foundations Questionnaire). Graduates of Catholic colleges consistently ranked more of them as highly relevant for making ethical decisions. In particular, concerns about others’ suffering and conforming to authority were the two most salient ones.
Work as Vocation
These three outcomes, meaningful lives, community engagement, and ethical decision making, frame how Catholic college graduates understood their professional lives. Graduates of Catholic colleges were 8.4 percentage points more likely to report that their college helped them understand how their work can serve others, and 6.8 percentage points more likely to view their career as a meaningful calling. Similar results held when they were asked if their work aligned with their values and if their education enabled them to make an impact in the world.
Reflecting the founding mission of Catholic colleges to attend to the material and spiritual needs of students, this understanding of work was built upon solid economic outcomes. Catholic college graduates reported full-time employment at a rate 7.3 percentage points higher than secular college graduates, and 52.5 percent reported household incomes of $100,000 or above, compared to 43.5 percent of secular college graduates.
AI and Work
Perhaps, integral human flourishing was seen more clearly when looking at the HIR data on AI in the workplace. The survey asked graduates about their current AI use at work, perceived preparedness for AI integration, support for AI adoption in the workplace, and views on AI’s societal impact. Across all four measures, graduates of Catholic colleges reported higher engagement and more positive orientations than secular graduates. They were more likely to use AI frequently or very frequently at work, and they were more than twice as likely to report feeling extremely prepared for AI integration.
When asked what prepared them for AI, graduates of Catholic colleges noted ethics, philosophy, critical thinking, and the liberal arts. They wrote, “I learned about ethics in philosophy and religion courses that I think correspond to thinking about AI in the workplace.” And, “I learned about thinking critically and being curious, which I think are important elements when determining how to use AI.” In other words, what they indicated was essential for addressing new and disruptive technology in the workplace was a solid core curriculum rooted in the liberal arts.
Conclusion
The pressure on higher education to justify itself in economic terms is real. The HIR provides a response for those in Catholic higher education by focusing on integral human flourishing. It is an approach that does not dismiss financial concerns, especially because Catholic colleges so often serve lower income and first-generation students. But Catholic colleges go beyond this to focus on meaning and purpose, even in work, responsibility to the community, and choosing what is good and right. What Catholic higher education offers is a vision for life, one that is rooted in a theological vision of the world, where life is about loving God and loving neighbor, where humanity flourishes not by bread alone but by the words of life that come from God.