Why a Liberal Arts Education Still Matters for Kids in the Age of AI
The guidance counselor’s office smelled like lemon Pledge and stacked old yearbooks last October, when we sat down to go over my oldest daughter’s college major plans. My daughter, who’s been translating Sappho fragments for fun in her spare time since 10th grade, twisted her silver hoop earring and said she was leaning toward classics. The counselor nodded, tapped his husky-logoed laptop, and said what every guidance counselor says these days: “With AI coming for so many white-collar jobs, why would you invest in a liberal arts degree? Computer science or data analytics is the safe bet.”
I didn’t argue with him right then. I work in education technology, building AI tools for K-12 schools, so I know where he’s coming from. Every parent I know panics about this. College costs more than most of us can save for, and no one wants their kid to graduate with a pile of debt and a degree that feels obsolete. If I didn’t see what I see every day at work, I’d probably panic too.
A week before that counselor meeting, I’d sat in a conference room with my company’s AI engineering team, watching them demo a new grading tool they’d built for high school English teachers. The tool worked flawlessly on paper: it graded 200 essays in 8 minutes, spotted thesis weaknesses, and gave detailed feedback on grammar. But when we showed it to a group of teacher beta testers, almost all of them pushed back. One teacher pulled up an essay that the AI had marked a C-minus, because it was disjointed, off-topic in places, and had multiple grammar errors. The essay was written by a 16-year-old whose mom was in active chemo that semester. It was about how she’d started sitting in on her mom’s infusions and reading poetry to her to pass the time. The messy structure wasn’t a mistake—it was how she processed what she was going through.
None of the engineers caught that. The AI certainly didn’t. I did. Because I spent four years studying 20th century fiction, learning how to read what’s between the lines, how to connect form to feeling, how to see the human behind the text. That’s the core of a liberal arts education, and it’s exactly what AI can’t do.
AI can write a marketing email. It can analyze a dataset. It can summarize 100 years of historical events. What it can’t do is figure out what a specific group of people actually need to hear, or spot the harmful cultural bias hidden in a training dataset, or comfort a team when they’ve missed a deadline and need to adjust, or know when a rule needs to be broken for the sake of a person. At my company, we’ve hired three new team members in the last year, and two of them are liberal arts majors who know basic AI tooling. The computer science graduates build incredible models, but the liberal arts graduates are the ones who talk to customers, refine our products to meet actual human needs, and write the language that makes our tools accessible to teachers who aren’t tech experts. They’re the most sought-after people on the team.
This doesn’t just apply to college majors, either. Even if your kid is set on a STEM career, there are small, concrete things you can do now to nurture those liberal arts skills that will set them apart. I started doing these with my younger son, who wants to study mechanical engineering, a couple years ago.
First, instead of asking “what did you get on your test?” when he gets in the car after school, I ask “what made you mad in what you read or learned this week?” That gets him talking about interpretation, not just memorization. He’ll rant about how his textbook framed westward expansion only as a victory, not a genocide of Indigenous people, and that practice of questioning, of looking for what’s missing, is exactly what will make him a better engineer.
Second, when he shares a hot take he saw on TikTok about politics or sports, I ask him to explain the opposing argument to me like he actually believes it. No snarking, no half-truths. That trains him to hold more than one perspective at once, something AI can’t actually do—it just regurgitates existing perspectives it’s scraped, it doesn’t understand why people believe what they do. That skill of perspective-taking is what helps teams build AI tools that work for everyone, not just the narrow group that built them.
Third, I let him lead messy, open-ended projects that don’t have a right answer. Last summer, he wanted to plan a camping trip for his friend group, and he had to work within a $500 budget, figure out how to accommodate three different dietary restrictions, and book sites that had cell service for one kid’s work-study job. I didn’t step in to fix it when he messed up the first reservation. That’s the kind of problem solving you don’t get from multiple choice tests, and it’s exactly what every industry needs right now.
We left the guidance counselor’s office that day and got vanilla ice cream at the shop down the street, the one with the sticky wooden tables. My daughter asked me if I thought she was making a mistake. I told her I didn’t know what would happen. I don’t know if she’ll get into her top program, I don’t know if she’ll end up going to law school or become a teacher or write books or do something none of us can predict right now. AI is changing everything, and no one has a crystal ball for what the job market will look like in 10 years. But I told her what I’ve seen: the people who get asked to lead projects, the people who keep their jobs when companies cut roles, the people who build things that actually matter to other humans, are the ones who know how to see us. AI is a tool. It’s a very good tool for a lot of things. But it’s not human. And the world will always need more humans.
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