Building the Future of Education: Jennifer Jensen and the Vision for John Adams College

Higher education is in a strange moment.

On one hand, students are constantly told to specialize early, pick a marketable major, and train for a specific role as fast as possible. On the other hand, the economy is changing so quickly that many of those narrowly defined jobs are already shifting, shrinking, or being redefined by technology and artificial intelligence.

That tension raises an uncomfortable question. If the future is uncertain, what kind of education actually prepares someone for it?

One answer is the kind of education that was designed not merely to train people for a task, but to form people who can think, judge, communicate, and lead. That is the case for a liberal arts education, and it is the idea behind John Adams College in Provo, Utah.

The school was created around a simple but demanding conviction: students should wrestle directly with the thinkers, statesmen, philosophers, and writers who shaped civilization. Not through watered-down summaries. Not through a stack of textbooks. Through the original works themselves.

That approach may sound old-fashioned at first. In reality, it may be one of the most practical responses to a rapidly changing world.

What John Adams College Is Trying to Do Differently

John Adams College was founded as a small liberal arts college with a model that looks much more like a Great Books seminar than a conventional university lecture hall.

Students read original sources. They come to class prepared. Then they sit down in small groups and work through ideas together in discussion-based classes. The method is Socratic rather than lecture-driven.

That matters because it changes the role of the student. Instead of passively receiving conclusions, students are asked to pursue truth for themselves. They have to ask what an author meant, where the author was right, where the author fell short, and how the ideas connect to history, politics, human nature, and present-day problems.

This is not education as information transfer. It is education as intellectual formation.

In that kind of setting, students are expected to do several things at once:

• Read carefully
• Think critically
• Speak clearly
• Listen seriously
• Disagree respectfully
• Recognize truth from error
• Apply ideas to real life

That combination is harder to automate, harder to fake, and much more durable than simple technical training.

The Case for Reading Great Books Instead of Textbooks

One of the clearest distinctions at John Adams College is the choice to build learning around the great books and original sources rather than textbooks.

That is not just a stylistic preference. It reflects a very different belief about what education should be.

Textbooks usually present a processed version of ideas. They summarize, simplify, organize, and often flatten disagreement. Original works do the opposite. They expose students to the actual language, assumptions, arguments, tensions, and ambitions of the author.

When students read thinkers directly, they are not just learning what someone else said Plato believed, or what someone else thinks Adam Smith meant. They are meeting those thinkers on the page and doing the work of interpretation themselves.

That kind of education has several advantages.

It develops intellectual independence

Students learn not to accept secondhand opinions too quickly. They practice examining the source and arriving at their own judgments.

It trains comparison and synthesis

Ideas do not exist in isolation. A student who reads across centuries begins to notice how later writers respond to earlier ones, how assumptions evolve, and how recurring human problems keep reappearing in new forms.

It teaches humility

Reading serious thinkers from very different eras reminds students that the current moment is not the only moment, and current assumptions are not automatically the final word on anything.

It creates depth

Strong writing comes from strong thinking. Strong thinking usually comes from wrestling with serious ideas, not from skimming summaries.

That last point becomes especially important when students move into careers that depend on writing, analysis, persuasion, and judgment.

What a Liberal Arts Education Actually Means

The phrase liberal arts is often misunderstood.

Some people hear it and think it means a vague, impractical degree. Others assume it is merely a collection of humanities courses with no connection to real work.

That is a narrow reading of a broad tradition.

The liberal arts grew out of an older educational model stretching back to Greece and Rome. The basic idea was to educate a free person, someone capable of reasoning well, speaking well, judging wisely, and participating meaningfully in civic and social life.

Rather than training a student for one narrow task, liberal arts education aims to give a broad foundation that can support many kinds of work and responsibility.

That foundation includes exposure to:

• Philosophy
• History
• Politics
• Literature
• Economics
• Logic
• Human nature
• Moral reasoning

At John Adams College, that broad education is not treated as an optional supplement to career preparation. It is the central thing.

The point is not to avoid practical life. The point is to prepare students for practical life in a way that remains useful even when the world changes.

Why Breadth Matters More in an AI Economy

One of the most compelling parts of the case for liberal arts today has to do with AI.

Technology can increasingly retrieve information, generate text, summarize research, and even mimic certain kinds of analytical output. That means education built only around information delivery is in trouble. If the main thing a student gains is access to facts, then machines are already doing that faster.

But information is not the same thing as wisdom.

A machine can help describe what can be built. It can suggest why someone might build it. It can outline how to build it. What it cannot do in the human sense is determine whether it ought to be built, whether it serves justice, whether it strengthens a community, or whether it reflects a sound understanding of human good.

That kind of judgment requires more than data. It requires wisdom.

And wisdom grows from broad exposure to history, philosophy, moral conflict, political argument, and the enduring questions of human life.

This is where a liberal arts education becomes not less relevant, but more relevant.

Students who have learned how to think across disciplines can adapt when industries change. Students trained only for a narrow function may be stranded when that function is automated or reorganized.

The issue is not whether specialized knowledge matters. Of course it does. The issue is whether specialized knowledge alone is enough.

Increasingly, it is not.

What Employers Say They Actually Want

The argument for liberal arts is not just philosophical. It also lines up with what employers repeatedly say they need.

Jennifer Jensen pointed to research from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which has spent years identifying the skills employers value most in new hires. Only one of the top categories is directly tied to technical or IT training. The rest are the kinds of capacities liberal arts programs are designed to cultivate.

Those include:

• Critical thinking
• Problem solving
• Communication
• Writing
• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Creativity and flexible thinking

Those skills are not decorative. They are often what separates a person who can follow instructions from a person who can lead a project, solve an unexpected problem, or help an organization navigate uncertainty.

It is telling that even large companies known for technical excellence still value people who bring range, perspective, and judgment.

Organizations need specialists. They also need people who can connect the specialists, frame the problem correctly, see what others are missing, and make decisions in situations where there is no obvious script.

The Difference Between Having Skills and Having Something to Say

One of the strongest illustrations of this educational model comes from the experience of John Adams College students after graduation.

The college is still small, which means the number of graduates is modest. But the stories that have emerged are revealing.

One graduate wanted to enter publishing, not as a novelist, but on the editorial and publishing side of the book world. She applied to multiple graduate programs and was accepted to all of them, including prestigious options. She eventually chose a master’s program at Ralston and later went to work in New York for a small publishing company.

The advantage of working in a smaller firm was that she could see the whole publishing ecosystem rather than being confined to one tiny slice of it. That wide-angle exposure mirrors the educational philosophy she came from.

Another student pursued journalism and landed a summer internship with the National Journalism Center in Washington, DC. The program was highly competitive, with thousands of applicants and only a small group admitted.

What set her apart was not just that she could write well. Many applicants could write well. What distinguished her was that she had read deeply enough to bring substance to her writing. She referenced thinkers and authors that many applicants had never encountered. She had historical grounding, intellectual range, and enough familiarity with major ideas to compare and contrast them intelligently.

That made a huge difference.

By the end of the summer, she was not only gaining experience. She was being asked to continue writing part-time during her senior year. Before graduation, she was offered a job in Washington through related organizations that had heard about her performance.

The lesson is simple. Writing skill matters, but content matters too. Clear prose is powerful only when there is real thought behind it.

A liberal arts education helps produce people who do not merely know how to write. They know what to write about.

Why Broad Education Produces Adaptable Graduates

Another student, still in school, spent a summer working part-time for a company in the Salt Lake Valley. As she proved herself, the company kept expanding her responsibilities. By the end of the summer, they offered her a full-time salary significant enough that she described it as almost unbelievable, hoping she would leave school and come work for them immediately.

She turned it down to finish her degree.

That story illustrates something important. Liberal arts students are often underestimated because people assume broad education means vague preparation. In practice, a strong liberal arts student often brings exactly the qualities many organizations need most.

They can:

• Learn quickly
• Communicate clearly
• Work across different types of tasks
• Understand context
• Ask useful questions
• Connect ideas others keep separated

That kind of person becomes valuable fast.

The Problem With Hyper-Specialization

Modern higher education often pushes students toward narrower and narrower expertise. The assumption is that efficiency and employability require early specialization.

But that model has weaknesses.

For one thing, many people do not end up working in the specific field they studied. Jensen pointed to a striking statistic: roughly 70 percent of people do not work in the area their degree originally prepared them for.

If that is even close to right, then we should stop pretending the main value of college lies in matching a major to a job title.

The more important question is this: what kind of person does the education produce?

If someone studies a narrow discipline and later leaves that field, what remains? If the answer is not much beyond technical training, that is a fragile investment.

By contrast, a broad education teaches students how to learn, how to analyze unfamiliar situations, and how to keep growing. It equips them not only for a first job, but for a changing life.

That is why shrinking general education requirements in many colleges is a troubling trend. General education is often the closest thing conventional universities have to a liberal arts core. When those courses are reduced or treated as disposable hurdles, students lose much of the breadth they need to think across boundaries.

Why Human Judgment Still Matters

One of the most useful distinctions in this conversation is the difference between expertise and judgment.

Specialists matter. Accountants matter. Engineers matter. Technologists matter. But every healthy institution also needs people who can understand enough about multiple fields to recognize when those specialists need to work together.

That connector role is easy to overlook and hard to replace.

Jensen shared an example from a book about a man working in a university library who noticed a disconnect between people studying headaches in medicine and others studying a vitamin that appeared to help. Both groups had deep knowledge, but they were not communicating. What was missing was a person with enough breadth to see the connection and help bring the knowledge together in a usable way.

That is a liberal arts strength.

Broad education does not mean shallow education. It means developing enough reach to recognize patterns, make connections, and translate across domains.

In a fragmented culture, that is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

How Students Learn to Think, Not Just Repeat

There is also a deeper educational point here. A good education is not a process where a teacher fills an empty mind with information.

Students have to participate in their own learning. They have to do the reading, wrestle with the questions, and practice expressing what they think.

That is one reason discussion-based classes are so effective. They make students responsible. You cannot hide in a Socratic classroom the way you can in a giant lecture hall.

You have to show up ready. You have to engage. You have to defend your ideas. You have to hear objections. And sometimes you have to change your mind.

That process is demanding, but it is also energizing. Once students realize they can actually enter the great conversation of history, something changes. The names that once seemed distant and abstract become real conversation partners.

Jensen described teaching political philosophy and reaching later thinkers such as John Stuart Mill. By that point in the year, students had already read earlier figures like Plato, Aristotle, and Montesquieu. So when Mill referred to those thinkers, the students were not lost. They knew the background. They could follow the argument, question Mill’s interpretation, and take part in the debate at a much higher level.

That is when education becomes exciting. Students are no longer memorizing isolated material for a test. They are joining an ongoing argument about liberty, justice, society, and the good life.

Why Civic Education and Constitutional Thinking Still Matter

There is also a public dimension to all of this.

The liberal arts are not only about personal advancement. They are about preparing people for citizenship, leadership, and community life.

That fits closely with the broader concerns raised in the conversation around civic education, constitutional principles, and public service. A society cannot remain healthy if its citizens have technical capacity but little understanding of history, institutions, or human nature.

The American founders are an obvious example. They were not merely technicians of government. They were widely educated men who had read history, philosophy, law, and political theory. Their breadth gave them the intellectual resources to design institutions capable of balancing power, protecting liberty, and restraining human ambition.

Whatever one thinks of the founders in every respect, it is hard to deny that their education mattered.

Jensen’s point was that we may be entering another kind of historical moment when broad, serious education is badly needed. When institutions are strained and the future feels unstable, society needs people who can think at a constitutional level, not merely react to headlines.

It needs people who understand human nature, know history well enough to spot recurring dangers, and have the moral and intellectual depth to build rather than merely criticize.

The Internal Drive to Keep Learning

Of course, no educational model works unless students themselves want to learn.

Jensen made a point that is easy to miss in policy debates. At some level, the desire to grow has to come from within. A person has to care enough to do the work.

Still, there is a feedback loop built into real learning. Once students begin discovering ideas that stretch them, challenge them, and connect with other things they have read, learning stops feeling like a chore and starts feeling rewarding.

That is especially true when education is not reduced to passive consumption. Discussion, comparison, argument, and discovery create momentum. Students begin to enjoy the feeling of understanding references, seeing intellectual connections, and recognizing how one author responds to another.

The point is not simply to cover material. It is to awaken a durable appetite for learning.

That kind of appetite may be one of the most valuable things a college can cultivate, because it keeps paying off long after graduation.

Why Utah Needed a College Like This

John Adams College was created in part because there were students in Utah who wanted this kind of education but faced major obstacles in getting it.

Schools like Hillsdale are well known among families looking for a classical liberal arts approach, but distance and cost can put them out of reach. The founders of John Adams College believed Utah had enough students, enough interest, and enough need to justify building something similar closer to home and at a lower cost.

That practical regional mission matters.

Higher education is often discussed in national terms, but place still matters. States and communities need institutions that are close enough to shape local culture, form future leaders, and offer serious alternatives to one-size-fits-all models.

For Utah families looking for a Great Books college, discussion-based learning, civic formation, and broad intellectual development, that local presence changes the equation.

Preparing for Jobs That Do Not Exist Yet

One of the most persuasive arguments for this model is also one of the simplest: nobody really knows what the future job market will look like.

That uncertainty can feel scary, especially compared with earlier generations who often had a much clearer path from degree to career.

But uncertainty does not automatically mean collapse. History gives reasons for caution and reasons for confidence.

Jensen compared the current AI anxiety to the industrial revolution. At the time, many people feared machines would eliminate work altogether. What actually happened was more complicated. Old jobs changed, but new jobs emerged, and entire industries developed that people had not anticipated.

The same pattern could happen again.

That does not mean every disruption is painless. It does mean that adaptability, creativity, entrepreneurship, and judgment become even more important.

A student with a broad education is better positioned to:

• Move between industries
• Learn unfamiliar systems
• Spot unmet needs
• Start new ventures
• Build roles that did not previously exist

That is why John Adams College includes entrepreneurial thinking as part of its educational vision. The goal is not only to prepare students to fill existing roles, but to create value where they see problems that need solving.

The Best Pitch for a Liberal Arts Education

If you had to condense the case for John Adams College into one clear pitch, it would be something like this:

Give students an education broad enough to prepare them for almost anything, including things nobody can predict yet.

That means more than employability. It means preparing students for meaningful work, civic responsibility, leadership, wise judgment, and lives capable of ongoing growth.

It means helping students understand human nature, recognize recurring social problems, and bring both creativity and discipline to the challenges ahead.

It means not panicking in the face of technological change, because you have formed people who can adapt, think, and build.

That is a much bigger ambition than career training alone. But it may also be a more realistic one.

What This Says About the Future of Higher Education

Higher education is being forced to answer some overdue questions.

What is college for?

Is it mainly credentialing? Is it job training? Is it personal enrichment? Is it civic formation? Is it intellectual development?

The strongest institutions will probably be the ones that stop pretending these questions can be avoided.

John Adams College offers one clear answer. College should teach students how to seek truth, think seriously, communicate persuasively, and act wisely in the world. Vocational outcomes matter, but they are downstream from formation.

That answer will not appeal to everyone. It asks a lot of students. It demands reading, discussion, discipline, and humility. It rejects the idea that education can be reduced to shortcuts and summaries.

But for exactly that reason, it may offer something many students are not getting elsewhere.

At a time when information is cheap and abundant, formation is rare. At a time when specialization is everywhere, breadth is a competitive advantage. At a time when technology can imitate intelligence, wisdom becomes more precious.

That is why the liberal arts still matter.

And that is why a small college in Provo built around great books, Socratic discussion, leadership, civic education, and broad human understanding may be pointing toward something larger than itself.

The future of education may not belong to institutions that merely deliver content faster. It may belong to institutions that form people who can actually use knowledge well.

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