Why a Liberal Arts Education Is Still Worth It For Your Kid, Even With AI
Last month, I sat across from Lisa and her 17-year-old son Sam at my kitchen table, half-empty oat milk lattes sweating on the chipped vinyl tablecloth, Sam twisting a brochure for the state university’s computer science program between his fingers. Lisa, an ER nurse I’d worked with years before I switched to college counseling, leaned forward and said what just about every parent says to me these days: “Everyone tells me if he doesn’t go into something tech or AI-related, he’ll be unemployable in 10 years.”
Sam didn’t say anything for a minute. He just pulled out his phone and pulled up a website he’d built, full of audio clips and write-ups of interviews he’d done with long-time residents of our town about the 1960s school integration. For almost a year, he’d spent every weekend driving to the senior center, sitting with people who’d been teenagers here back then, asking them what they remembered. The local history museum had asked him to build a walking tour around the stories.
“That’s all great,” Lisa said, and I heard the tightness in her voice. “But can’t ChatGPT do that now? Why pay for a history degree when a bot can write a walking tour in five minutes?”
It’s the question I get asked three or four times a week these days. When my own daughter Mia told me she wanted to major in anthropology four years ago, I asked the same thing to myself in the middle of a 2 a.m. worry session. I’d pushed her to think about nursing, like me—stable, always in demand. I thought a liberal arts degree was a luxury we couldn’t afford. What I didn’t expect was that six months after she graduated, she’d get a job offer from one of the biggest AI companies in the country, working on content moderation policy.
Her job is to sort through the edge cases AI can’t figure out. Last month, she told me about a post AI flagged as harmful content: it was written by a Somali refugee, talking about watching his little sister die crossing the Mediterranean. AI picked up on keywords associated with people smuggling and automatically took it down. Mia put it back up. She knew how to read the context, how to understand the difference between a harmful post and a painful, important personal narrative. That’s not something she learned from a coding bootcamp. That’s something she learned from four years of reading ethnographies, talking about human bias, learning how to spot what the data misses. Her starting salary is higher than the average first-year software engineer I work with.
The mistake most of us make when we talk about liberal arts and AI is that we frame liberal arts as a bunch of useless facts about dead people or old books, and AI as something that can replace all that. But liberal arts isn’t about memorizing dates or sonnet structures. It’s about learning how to ask questions that don’t have easy answers. It’s about learning how to get a stranger to trust you enough to tell you a hard story, like Sam does. It’s about learning how to spot when something is missing from an argument, like Mia does at her job. None of that can be automated.
The practical part I always tell parents is this: you don’t have to choose between your kid following what they care about and setting them up for a stable future. The first thing I tell people to do is when you’re talking about college majors, start with “What problem do you like solving?” instead of “What job do you want?” Sam likes solving the problem of local stories getting lost. That’s a problem AI can’t solve, because AI doesn’t care that Mrs. Henderson’s brother got arrested at the segregated movie theater down the street. It doesn’t know that stopping at his old house on the tour matters more than checking off a list of historic landmarks.
Second, if your kid really wants a liberal arts major, don’t make them switch. Just encourage them to add one small, low-effort practical skill to their degree that ties to what they care about. For Sam, that’s a minor in digital media—he already builds websites, he knows how to edit audio, that’s enough to make him hireable for museums, nonprofits, even marketing teams that need people who can connect with local audiences. For Mia, that was one free 10-week online course in Python for social scientists she did the summer before her senior year. That one course was enough to get her foot in the door at the tech company, because it showed she could work with the tools AI teams use, even if her degree wasn’t in computer science.
Third, when you’re worrying about job security, ask one question: What does this work require that AI can’t do? If it requires reading human emotion, building trust, spotting bias, connecting disparate ideas to fit a specific context, there will always be jobs for that. Every company I talk to right now is scrambling to find people who can do those things, because AI can’t do them, and AI makes those skills more important, not less.
I don’t have a crystal ball. No one knows what the job market will look like when today’s 17-year-olds are mid-career. Lisa still worries sometimes, I know. Last week, she sent me a photo of Sam leading his first walking tour, 42 people gathered around him listening, the woman he’d interviewed about her brother standing off to the side wiping her eyes. All she wrote in the text was “He’s good at this.”
That’s enough for right now. The future is uncertain, but the things that make us human—the things liberal arts teaches us how to use—are the one thing AI can never copy.
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