Why a Liberal Arts Education Still Matters For Kids Growing Up With AI
The taco casserole was dry around the edges, and Lila was picking at the melted cheese while she scanned college admission updates on her phone. When I mentioned the comparative literature offer she’d gotten that morning, she looked up and shrugged. “My guidance counselor said liberal arts is stupid right now. AI does all that writing and analysis stuff now. Why would I pay $40k a year for it?”
I’m a former high school English teacher, so I’ve gotten this question a lot lately. Last year, half the kids in the department’s creative writing elective dropped out mid-semester to take an extra coding section. Parents pull me aside at back-to-school night to ask if it’s really okay to let their kid study art history, or join the debate team, when every news story says AI will replace all those jobs soon.
I thought about Lila’s AP Lit paper last year, when I didn’t answer her right away at the dinner table. She’d procrastinated on her assignment on The Yellow Wallpaper, complained for an hour that she didn’t have time to pull it together, so she plugged the prompt into ChatGPT just to get something on the page. The AI spit out a solid, B-plus paper about how Charlotte Perkins Gilman critiques 19th century mental health care. It checked all the boxes, cited all the right sources. But Lila read it, set her laptop down, and said it was wrong.
She remembered driving to the nursing home to visit my mom a couple years before she died, when Grandma pulled out an old leather journal she’d hidden under her bed for 50 years. In it, she wrote about how after she had my little brother, no one asked her how she felt. They just told her she was overreacting, sent her to the guest room to rest, and carried on with family dinners like nothing was wrong. Lila threw out the AI draft and wrote her own, connecting that quiet family secret to Gilman’s story. She argued the story isn’t just about bad doctors—it’s about how everyone around you colludes to silence what you feel to keep things looking normal. She got an A, but what she talked about for weeks after was how writing the paper helped her finally understand why Grandma was so quiet and sharp around the edges for most of her life. AI couldn’t write that paper. AI doesn’t have a grandma. It doesn’t carry that messy, one-of-a-kind experience only Lila has.
I called her guidance counselor a couple days after that dinner to talk it through, and he didn’t push back on me. He said he’s just repeating what parents tell him. Every parent is scared right now. They see AI taking entry-level writing jobs, editing jobs, even basic design work, so they want their kid to do something that feels “safe.” I get that fear. I feel it too, some nights when I stay up scrolling thinkpieces about what jobs will be left in 10 years. But I think we’re mixing up what AI can do with what people actually need from other people.
Over the past year of talking to other parents about this, I’ve fallen into a few small, concrete habits that seem to help reframe the conversation, no matter what your kid is interested in. First, I stopped opening any talk about college majors with “What job will you get with that?” I replaced it with, “What problem do you want to spend time figuring out?” That one small shift moves the conversation away from what AI can replace, and toward what your kid actually cares about. If your kid wants to untangle how communities remember the past, or figure out how to help people talk about hard things, or understand why stories make people feel less alone, that need isn’t going away, no matter how good AI gets.
Second, if your kid wants to study a liberal art, don’t force them to tack on a computer science minor just to “be marketable” if they hate coding. Instead, encourage them to pick one low-stakes tech class a semester that ties directly to what they already love. A history major can take digital archiving. A literature major can take digital content strategy. A philosophy major can take AI ethics. It gives them a marketable skill that complements what they’re already learning, instead of forcing them to squeeze in something that feels like a waste of their time.
Third, the next time your kid uses AI to help with a school assignment, don’t panic or ban it. Just ask them one question: “What does this get wrong, or leave out that matters to you?” That’s it. It trains them to do the core work of any liberal arts class: bring your own perspective to the work, instead of relying on someone or something else to do it for you.
I know a hiring manager at a tech company here in Austin, and she told me last month she hired three English majors for her product team last year, and zero new computer science graduates. She said the comp sci grads could code anything she asked for, but the English majors could tell her why a user would hate the new feature, what about the wording felt off, what people actually need when they open the app. That’s the skill AI can’t replicate, not yet, maybe not ever. It comes from understanding people, not just processing data.
Lila still hasn’t made up her mind where she’s going, or what she’ll major in. She’s leaning toward a double major in comparative lit and digital media, which works for me, but she could also pivot to engineering next month, and that’s fine too. I don’t think liberal arts is the right choice for every kid, and I don’t think every kid who studies philosophy will end up with a six-figure job. That’s okay. The point isn’t that it’s a guaranteed path to wealth. It’s that it teaches kids how to use their own unique experience to make sense of the world, something we’re going to need a lot more of, not less, as AI becomes more common. Right now, that feels like the most practical thing I can think of.
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