Why a Liberal Arts Education Is Still Worth It For Kids In the Age of AI
Last week, I cleared the kitchen table of my kid’s soccer cleats and half-finished art projects to make space for Lila, my 17-year-old niece, and her stack of college acceptance letters. The leftover pepperoni pizza had gone cold, my coffee mug had left a ring through a financial aid brochure, and the tension was thick enough to cut with a butter knife. Lila twisted the elastic on her hair tie over and over, while my brother, her dad, leaned back in his chair tapping his work phone. He works as a systems engineer at a tech company, and he’d already said what he needed to say: Lila should pick the public university with the top computer science program. AI is changing everything, he told her. No one’s hiring history majors right now. What are you gonna do when AI can do whatever job a liberal arts degree gets you?
Lila wants to study how medieval communities documented and adapted to long-term climate shifts. She’s spent a year volunteering at the local historical society transcribing 14th-century farm records, and already has a draft of a small research paper she did for her AP history class. My brother just shook his head. That’s a nice hobby, he said, but it’s not a future.
As a high school English teacher, I’ve watched this dynamic play out with my own students for the past three years, ever since AI tools became standard in classrooms and workplaces. I told them about the project I assigned last fall: my seniors had to identify an unaddressed problem in our town and propose a solution. Three of the groups turned to the most popular AI tool for their outlines. AI told all three that the biggest problem with our local food bank was not enough public donations, full stop. But the group that actually got in their cars and drove out to the food bank to talk to the director learned something different. The director told them most of their regular clients don’t have cars, and the food bank is only open 9 to 5 on weekdays, when people working minimum-wage jobs can’t get time off to go. AI had pulled data from national studies, but it couldn’t pick up on the quiet frustration in the director’s voice, or the handwritten notes taped to the front door asking for different hours that you only see if you show up in person. That group ended up proposing a network of volunteer delivery drivers for people who can’t make the hours, and the food bank launched the program this spring. AI would never have gotten that problem right.
It’s not that STEM isn’t useful, I told my brother. We’ve just got this backwards right now. AI is really good at the things we used to think only trained college grads could do: crank out a first draft of code, write a research summary, analyze a mountain of data. What it can’t do is figure out what problem to solve in the first place. It can’t listen to a person talk about what they actually need, separate noise from meaningful context, or connect ideas from different fields to answer new questions. That’s exactly what a liberal arts education trains you to do.
When I talk to other parents who are panicking about their kid picking a liberal arts major, I tell them three small things they can do instead of fighting it. First, ask your kid to map out three different possible paths their major can lead to, not just one. Lila already did this: she’s looking at climate policy work for nonprofits, museum education, or graduate research. It’s not a dead end, it’s a starting point with multiple doors. Second, encourage them to do one small hands-on experience every year, whether it’s a volunteer gig, a part-time internship, or a research project with a professor. It doesn’t have to be paid, it just has to get them working with real people on real problems. That’s how they build the judgment and connection skills that no AI can replicate, and it’s the thing that will make them stand out to employers when they graduate. Third, remember that a major isn’t a 40-year career lock anymore. Most people will change jobs half a dozen times over their working life, and half of those jobs don’t even exist right now. Liberal arts teaches you how to learn new things, how to adjust to new contexts, how to communicate with people who think differently than you. That’s the skill that will never go out of demand, no matter how much AI changes the job market.
Right after I finished saying that, my brother got a push notification on his phone. It was an email from his company’s HR department: they were laying off 40 entry-level software developers that week, because most of their routine coding work could now be done by AI. He went quiet for a minute, scrolling through the email. He’d spent the whole hour arguing that comp sci was the only safe bet, and even that wasn’t as stable as it used to be.
A few days later, Lila put down her deposit at the small liberal arts college that offered her a scholarship for climate and history research. We don’t know what she’ll end up doing five years from now, or ten. She might decide to go back to school for a master’s in public health, or get a job in tech working on user experience, or end up teaching high school history. None of us can predict what the job market will look like that far out, especially with how fast things are changing. But I know that whatever she ends up doing, she’ll have the skills to figure it out. She’ll know how to look for the problems no one else has noticed, how to listen to the people no one else is asking, and how to put the pieces together in a way that no algorithm can. That’s worth more than any degree that only teaches you how to do a task AI can do cheaper and faster.
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