It's one of my goal with Impractically Happy to explore the messages that our society sends us about what should make us happy, and that generally fly under the radar. Often, those subtle messages get in the way of feeling good – as is the case with some of the institutional messages that come out of higher education.

Recently, I heard a report on the radio announcing that someone had donated thirty million dollars to UC San Diego. For the general fund? To improve education there for everyone? Nope. I knew where it was going before the news-reader read it. It seems like all the really big donations go to the engineering school. Qualcomm, which is heavily involved with the innards of cell phones, has a long and close relationship with UCSD, and the founders of the company have poured enormous sums into developing an engineering school there.

The donation is another major victory for STEM in San Diego. That acronym, which has come up more and more frequently over the past few years, is a label put on programs with an emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. When they add Art in there, it becomes STEAM. It's hard to call this an "emphasis," though, as it seems to embrace more than it leaves out, basically excluding anything built around reading: history, languages, social sciences and humanities.

How Does This Relate to Happiness?

There is a theory of happiness and the good society hidden in STEM funding. One reason for the new focus on STEM is economic. As countries like China and India develop their own versions of Silicone Valley, for example, some fear the US will fall behind. STEM about preparing kids for the high-tech jobs that people hope will be coming down the line. More STEM degrees means more start-ups like Uber and Twitter, more people to engineer self-driving cars and self-stocking fridges, and more people to design smooth interfaces and attractive web-sites. All of this, in turn, is supposed to spur the economy, leading to more money floating around, making us all richer, and, of course, more comfortable with our new gadgets.

And this is where the STEM theory of happiness comes in. In political circles, there is a strong tendency to try and quantify happiness in terms of cash: what people want, many government policies say implicitly, is the ability buy and save. (In The Happiness Industry, William Davies has written extensively on the quantification of happiness in politics and industry. Worth a look, if you have the time.) It's as though income were the way to measure happiness.

Here's the part I find interesting about this approach: it only goes half way. if you give people money, the theory suggests, they'll know how to use it. Happiness will follow naturally.

This is interesting, because the getting of money doesn't seem to make people very happy by itself. In 2013, Gallup found that only 29% of Americans felt invested in their jobs.

And it's not like we're taking long weekends. Over the years the 40-hour work week became more like the baker's-dozen donuts – and then kept on growing. By 2016, Americans were putting an average of almost 47 hours into their jobs each week. And more than half of salaried full-timers put in more than 50 hours. Add in commuting and household chores and sleep, and there's not a whole lot of time leftover in the week to spend that cash. (I've written about this elsewhere.)

So the question is: will this emphasis on strengthening the economy make Americans happier?

The Bigger Picture

STEM programs - and, basically, all institutionalized education programs - imply a hierarchy of skills. Some skills, they suggest, are just more valuable than others. (Even the most lackluster degree from Harvard University would garner more respect from most folks than graduating summa cum laude from the country's best clown college, I'd imagine - and this state of affairs will probably continue until Harvard opens its clown-studies department.) Academic subjects are often considered more worth studying than others, and these days STEM subjects get an extra jolt of prestige with their well-endowed programs.

But being well-educated in this formal sense (and, ideally, being subsequently well-employed) aren't enough to make us happy by themselves. There are other skills that we need to get there - the skill to know who to trust and how to do it, the ability to appreciate what you have - don't get taught at school these days. (Whether this is a good thing or not is a question for another time.) The problem isn't so much that they don't get taught; it's that the intensity of focus on professional skills often get in the way of learning these others.

We need money to survive, of course. And up to a certain point, more money does make people fell better. And some tech – biologic medicines come to mind – promise to alleviate a whole lot of suffering.

So I'm not saying we shouldn't focus on work, and I'm not saying we shouldn't invest in technology. But the decisions we have made about educational policy as a society, unconsciously, come with an implicit idea: the subtle message we're sending one another is that the skills that bring money and things will happiness carry happiness with themd. We don't have to worry about the rest.

It's a rare week that goes by when I don't find some journalist pointing out the well-known, intuitively clear fact that happiness also comes through our relationships, and that many Americans – even wealthy ones – are lonely. Success at work doesn't have to lead to anemic relationships – but it often does.

At some point, we all have to choose where to set the balance between money and other sources of the good life, like human connections. Should we invest more time and energy at work, and in developing the skills that land promotions and increase productivity, or should we be investing in finding a happy medium between the quantity of money we produce, and other skills that increase the quality of life over all? The messages that come out of UCSD seem to suggest the former.

A few years ago, UCSD hung up banners on the light posts along the main campus walkway leading up to its great spaceship-shaped library. They touted the successes of some of its more prominent graduates: CEO's, MD's, authors. All valuable members of the community. But it got me to thinking about my students who wanted to be teachers, aid workers, physical therapists, and more than a few who expressed an interest in being good parents along with whatever else they ended up doing. These goals didn't really fit in with the message that the school was conveying. Banners on lamp posts don't have a lot of space for nuanced expression. They were representing a clear, easy-to-grasp message about the good life – and the good lives they were celebrating were good professional lives.

If your life has been like mine, you've experienced a subtle message built in to the way our educational system is structured: it takes hard work and guidance to be a good scientist or engineer or journalist. It takes a while to develop engineering and math skills, and cooking and policing and all the other professions as well.

What people often overlook is that fact that being comfortable in your own skin, knowing how to express yourself effectively, being a good friend, and understanding how to develop and manage relationships, are skills too.

Sure, you might reply, but economic development is why we have education.

Well, no. The purpose of education changes over time and from place to place. Many of the big public universities – including the early schools in the University of California system - UCSD's home – were founded because, if democracy was going to succeed, the country needed to have an educated and informed populace. Only later did that mandate expand and shift toward economics.

In Thailand (where I do my research) the first schools were in temples; they taught the kids of rice farmers how to be good Buddhists. An education is what we, as a society, decide to make of it.

There's that implicit message that elite schools like UCSD send when they focus on the connection between economics and education. It's no wonder that so many people feel like they need to have material success to be happy.

What we're investing in, educationally, isn't bad – but it is a little off kilter, and that imbalance isn't helping us with our happiness problems. The idea that if we have professional success, happiness will follow comes through by many paths. This is only one of them.

There's one point that I make over and over on this site: understanding yourself and your society are essential to finding lasting, meaningful happiness. There are plenty of subjects you can study that can help people think about who they are, how they fit into their worlds, and how they can make it – and themselves – better.

And these skills go well beyond a STEM education.

Anybody have thirty million dollars for a good cause?