Is a Liberal Arts Degree Worth It? What Parents Should Know in the Age of A.I.
The crumpled state university acceptance letter sat next to my 18-year-old son Luka’s half-eaten peanut butter toast last month, a coffee ring blurring the corner of the campus map printed on the back. My husband had just gotten off a Zoom call with his manager, who’d been bragging that their new AI tool writes 80% of the team’s project reports now. He pushed the laptop across the kitchen table, where a headline glowed: “AI Could Replace 80 Million U.S. Jobs By 2030.” “You want to major in history,” he said, not angry, just tired. “What’s that going to get you when AI can write a senior thesis in 10 minutes?”
Luka just shrugged, wiped toast crumbs off his hoodie, and said, “I don’t want to write senior theses forever. I want to figure out why our town still has segregated neighborhoods, when people marched for fair housing 60 years ago.” I didn’t say anything right then, but I thought of my college roommate Mia, who I saw at our 10-year reunion last fall. Back when we were seniors, everyone told Mia she was crazy to major in classics. All her parents’ friends asked when she’d switch to pre-med or business. She just liked reading old Greek plays, she said, wanted to learn how people talked about power and regret.
Today, Mia works in product development at a med tech company that makes glucose monitoring devices for people with diabetes. Over a glass of reunion wine, she told me what she actually does every day. Her team uses AI to sort through thousands of patient surveys and doctor feedback forms. AI tags all the common complaints: battery life too short, app hard to use. But AI doesn’t catch the pauses, she said. It doesn’t notice when a 62-year-old doctor laughs off the screen size and says “it’s fine for the kids” but his hand shakes a little when he holds the device. AI can’t read that he doesn’t want to admit his vision is fading, so he won’t use the device the way it’s meant to be used. That’s the part Mia does. She sorts through the notes, finds the stories no algorithm flags, and tells the engineering team what they actually need to change. No one else on her team can do that, she said. They’re all great coders, but they don’t know how to read between the lines of what people don’t say. That’s what classics taught her—reading old texts where half the words are missing, figuring out what the writer actually meant, beyond the words that survived.
I thought of what Luka does on weekends at the coffee shop where he works part time. He started these 20-minute “local history talks” after closing once a month, for anyone who wants to stay. Last month he talked about the 1934 mill strike that happened right on our town’s river. An older woman named Mrs. Henderson came, brought a tattered photo of her grandpa standing on the picket line. She told Luka the official town history books never mention that he was one of the organizers, because he was Black. Luka’s been working on a small zine of these unrecorded stories ever since, scanning photos, interviewing family members, selling them for $5 a pop to raise money for the local historical society’s new exhibit. AI could pull up all the facts about the strike in two seconds. It could even write a polished summary of the strike for the zine. But it couldn’t sit with Mrs. Henderson for an hour while she cried talking about how her grandpa got blacklisted after the strike, how he still kept organizing out of his garage. It couldn’t decide that her grandpa’s story matters more than the mayor’s generic speech printed in every old history book. That’s the part only a person who cares about the question can do.
I know the fear, because I have it too. We saved for 18 years for Luka’s college, we want him to be able to pay his rent, buy a car someday, not be stuck stuck in low-paying work forever. It’s easy to look at AI and think the only safe majors are the ones that teach a hard skill AI can’t do. But the truth is, AI is getting better at coding every day. It’s getting better at basic accounting, entry level legal work, and even graphic design. The skills that stick, the ones AI can’t replicate, are the ones people have taught in liberal arts programs for hundreds of years.
What I’ve started telling other parents who ask me about this, when their kid says they want to major in English or anthropology or history, is three small, low-friction things that don’t require turning your kid’s whole plan upside down. First, instead of opening with “what job will you get with that?” ask “what question do you want to spend four years answering?” People who care deeply about a question almost always find a way to make a living from it. Second, encourage them to pair their major with one small, concrete skill that makes them more marketable. It doesn’t have to be a whole second major. Luka’s minoring in digital media, so he knows how to build websites, edit video, and digitize old photos. That’s four extra classes, no extra time in college, and it gives him a tangible skill he can use to freelance or get an entry job right out of school. Third, look for internships that connect their skills to real work, not just academic work. Luka’s interning this summer with our city’s planning department, doing community outreach for their new affordable housing project. He gets paid $15 an hour, he’s using his history knowledge to explain to long-time neighborhoods why the changes are being made, and he’s got work experience on his resume before he even starts his second year.
Last week, Luka hit submit on his major declaration form: history, digital media minor. My husband still brings up once a week that he should add that intro comp sci class “just in case.” Luka already signed up for it. He says he wants to learn how to use AI to sort through all the old photos people are giving him for the zine, so he can spend more time talking to people and less time organizing files.
We don’t know what the world will look like when Luka graduates in four years. No one does. AI will probably be doing more things we can’t even imagine right now. But I’m not worried about the degree. The things he’s learning aren’t just facts that a computer can spit back out. They’re how to see people, how to ask the right questions, how to care about the stories that no algorithm would ever think to prioritize. That’s something AI can’t take away, no matter how much it improves.
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