It is both useful and necessary to understand how I am defining the term happiness. Happiness refers to the pursuit of meaning through a life of purpose, leadership, and service to others. Undergraduates can best achieve this pursuit through a gradual increase in their self-awareness fostered by adventures in disequilibrium that destabilize their level of comfort, challenge their assumptions about life, and allow them an opportunity to accommodate new information. Perhaps now more than ever, the world needs college students on campuses large and small around the globe to declare a major in happiness. We are both witnesses and participants in a global epidemic of unhappiness, disengagement, and negativity. According to Gallup’s 142-country study on the State of the Global Workplace, only 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged at work. “In other words, about one in eight workers—roughly 180 million employees in the countries studied—are psychologically committed to their jobs and likely to be making positive contributions to their organizations.”2 Statistics for the United States echo global attitudes. Less than one-third (31.5 percent) of U.S. workers were engaged in their jobs in 2014 and just 33 percent of Americans said that they were very happy, remaining consistent with happiness levels in 2011 but dropping from the 35 percent who reported being very happy in 2008 and 2009.3 Unfortunately, the happiness factor for undergraduates mimics the statistics on both the global and U.S. levels. This has to stop.
If today’s undergraduates are going to help solve tomorrow’s problems, they need to understand that the pursuit of a college degree has to be more than a collection of résumé building experiences designed to attract employers and land a high-paying job after graduation. Getting a good paying job is important, but it is also relative. Achieving financial independence for young professionals should indeed be a priority. After all, graduates have loans to repay, health insurance costs to satisfy, and living expenses to cover. However, if we teach undergraduates, the only thing that matters, the only thing that will make them happy, is a high starting salary, we are providing a tremendous disservice. The research is overwhelmingly clear: “the pressure to be happy makes people less happy. Organizing your life around trying to become happier, making happiness the primary objective of life gets in the way of actually becoming happy.”4 Research within the field of positive psychology continues to illustrate that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, ameliorates self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression.5 “Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed, or even selfish life. What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans.”6 To major in happiness is to pursue a life of purpose, leadership, and service to others. In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous global marketplace, the world needs individuals to pursue a life of meaning more than ever.