Why a Liberal Arts Education Still Matters For Kids in the Age of AI
Last Tuesday night, I sat across from my 17-year-old daughter Lila at our kitchen table, surrounded by half-eaten peanut butter toast, crumpled college viewbooks, and a laptop open to the Common App. My husband, an electrical engineer, leaned forward and pulled up a TikTok he’d saved. The 20-something creator on the screen leaned into the camera and said any kid who picks a liberal arts major these days is throwing tuition down the drain. AI will write all the words, curate all the art, analyze all the history before a human can open a textbook. Lila pushed her hair behind her ear and said, “I still want to major in English.”
As a high school counselor, I’ve heard this exact worry a dozen times in the last year. Three weeks ago, a mom pulled me aside after parent night to say she’d made her sophomore drop out of art history club to fit in a second AP Computer Science class. “Why waste time on dead artists when AI can do anything creative in five years?” she asked. I get the worry. I pay the same tuition bills, read the same headlines about AI replacing entry-level roles in writing, editing, design, even research. It’s reasonable to want your kid to pick a path that lets them pay rent and keep a job in 10 years.
Last fall, I went to a college career fair with a group of our seniors, and I ended up talking to a recruiter from one of the biggest AI companies in the country. I expected him to say he only hires computer science and engineering majors. Instead, he told me his team hires twice as many liberal arts grads as STEM grads for their product and ethics teams. He told me about one of their new hires, a 24-year-old history major who’d graduated two years prior. Her job is to read through every response the company’s chatbot generates about historical events before it gets rolled out to the public. AI can pull facts from textbooks, but it can’t tell when it’s erasing the trauma of enslaved people, or flattening the complexity of a war that still affects living communities. That’s the work she does, and no one on the engineering team wanted to do it, or was trained to do it well.
I think people get this backwards when they talk about AI. They ask “What job can AI do that my kid’s major does?” instead of asking “What work do we need humans to do now that AI exists?” Because the more AI does the routine work – writing the first draft, pulling the facts, sorting the data – the more we need humans who can do the work AI can’t: read the room, read between the lines, understand why a message lands wrong for a certain group of people, connect an idea to what people actually care about. That’s the stuff liberal arts education trains you to do. When you write a paper on why Emily Dickinson wrote her poems in secret, you’re not just studying poetry – you’re learning to spot what people don’t say out loud. When you debate the legacy of the New Deal, you’re learning to see how the same policy looks completely different to a farmer in Oklahoma and a factory worker in New York. Those aren’t useless skills. Those are the skills every company building or using AI needs right now.
I don’t tell parents they should force their kid to major in philosophy if they’d rather code. But I do give them three small, concrete things to try when the conversation about majors and future work comes up. First, instead of opening with “What job will that get you?” open with “Tell me what you find interesting about that.” It keeps the conversation from turning into a fight before it starts, and it lets you see what skill your kid is already drawn to practicing. Second, if you’re still worried about employability, sit down and Google 10 recent job openings that tie to that major. I did this with the mom who pulled her kid out of art history – when we looked together, we found three open curator roles at local museums, two marketing roles at design firms that ask for art history minors, and a content role at a big art AI startup that specifically asks for candidates who can tell original art from AI-generated fakes. Third, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. My neighbor’s kid is majoring in sociology with a minor in data analysis. A former student of mine is majoring in English with a certificate in digital content strategy. You get the human skills from the liberal arts, and a little technical know-how to open more doors, no compromise required.
Last weekend, Lila’s 18-year-old cousin came over, panicking about his college essay. He’d used AI to write a draft about his love of soccer, and it sounded fine on paper – it hit all the right beats about leadership and grit. But it didn’t sound like him. Lila sat with him for an hour, asked him questions about what it felt like when he tore his ACL junior year and had to sit the bench for the whole state tournament, what he actually loved about the game that wasn’t just winning. She helped him rewrite the draft to center that quiet, boring, hard time he’d had, instead of the generic win narrative AI pulled together. He got an interview at his top choice school a week later.
We still don’t know if Lila will get into her first choice, we still don’t know what job she’ll have 10 years from now. AI might end up changing more about work than any of us expect right now. But I’m not worried about the skills she’s building, learning how to see people, learning how to tell their stories right. That’s work that will always need a human.
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