I Dropped $40k On a History Degree 10 Years Ago. Was It A Waste Now That AI Knows Everything?
Last Tuesday, I was wiping burnt coffee grounds off my kitchen counter when my 17-year-old cousin leaned over my shoulder, eyeing the old textbook I was flipping through for a small museum project I’m working on. He was wearing that oversized Minecraft Creeper hoodie he refuses to throw out, had Cheeto crumbs down the front, and said exactly what I’ve been seeing all over my feed lately: “Why do you even need that book? Just ask AI. It’ll tell you any fact you want faster. Is that old school stuff even worth it anymore?”
I didn’t have a snappy answer for him right then, which got me thinking. I use AI every day, for God’s sake. I use it to sort my receipts for taxes, to draft awkward follow-up emails to clients, I even asked it last week how to get red wine out of a cotton tablecloth (it worked, for the record). I don’t hate AI. I don’t think it’s coming for my job, not really. But that question got under my skin, because I’ve asked it myself, after paying off the last of my student loans two years ago. Forty thousand dollars, for a BA in history. What if that was just a giant waste of money I could have put into a down payment on a house instead?
Last month I went to a small networking meetup for archival and museum work here in Portland. There was a 19-year-old kid there, Zane, who’d taught himself everything he knows about archival digitization from YouTube and AI tutorials. He was already contracting with two small museums, made more in six months than I made my first year out of college. We got to talking by the beer cooler, and he asked me straight out: what did your degree give you that I couldn’t get for basically free? I stood there holding a warm IPA, my brain going completely blank, and just mumbled “uh, connections?” and escaped to talk to someone I knew. It was so awkward. I’ve been replaying it ever since.
I remember that 200-level history class on post-9/11 America, junior year. Dr. Hale was this soft-spoken guy who’d been a 20-something grad student at Georgetown when the attacks happened. We were reading through the Senate resolution that authorized the Iraq War, and the syllabus just said “discuss the lead-up to invasion.” AI would just spit out a clean timeline: vote date, who voted which way, what the faulty intelligence said. But Dr. Hale stopped talking in the middle of lecture, pulled out this old crumpled ID that he’d kept from his time interning at the Pentagon, and told us about his friend who worked the front desk that day, who didn’t come out. He said how everyone who was there, even the people who thought the war was a bad idea, couldn’t say it out loud back then, because everyone was still so raw. That didn’t make it into any of the textbooks AI pulls from, not really. It’s not a fact. It’s the context that makes the fact matter. I still think about that when I read the news now.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend traditional education is all good. I had that macroeconomics prof my sophomore year who only showed up to lecture once every two weeks, assigned a 20-page paper that nobody ever got comments back on, charged $180 for his custom published textbook that was just scanned versions of old journal articles. I wasted $1800 on that class, learned nothing, and I still just ask AI to explain any econ concept I need to know. It’s broken. It’s absurdly expensive. It excludes so many people who can’t drop four years of income and tens of thousands of dollars on a degree. I get why people think it’s not worth it. A lot of the time, it isn’t.
I remember staying up until 3 a.m. my sophomore year, sitting on the floor of our dorm common room with my roommate Lila, eating cold pepperoni pizza that had been sitting out since the party the night before, arguing about MLK’s later anti-capitalist speeches. We’d both read them for class, and Lila thought the media had completely erased that part of his legacy, and I thought she was overstating how radical he actually was towards the end. We yelled, I threw a pillow at her, we didn’t speak for 12 hours. AI can summarize every speech MLK ever gave in 10 seconds. It can even give you both sides of that argument. But it can’t make you care enough to yell about it. It can’t make you sit with someone you love and work through what you actually believe, instead of just regurgitating takes you’ve seen online that align with what you already thought.
I still don’t have a neat, one-size-fits-all answer to the question. Zane doesn’t need a degree. He’s doing fine, he’s good at what he does, he learns faster on his own than I ever did in a classroom. My cousin doesn’t need a degree if he doesn’t want one. If you can’t afford it, or it doesn’t fit your life, it’s absolutely not worth going into crippling debt for it.
But for me? It wasn’t ever about the facts. It was about all those messy, ungoogleable moments that stuck with me, that changed how I see the world. If I had that conversation with Zane again today, I guess that’s what I’d say. AI can give you any answer you ask for. But it can’t teach you what question you should be asking. And that’s the part I got from sitting in those lecture halls, arguing with my friends, failing tests, writing bad papers, all that stupid messy stuff that traditional education forces you to go through. It’s not for everyone. It’s overpriced and broken in a hundred ways. But it wasn’t a waste for me. I don’t regret the $40k. Even if I do still use AI to double-check my dates. (Word count: ~1120)
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