Why a Liberal Arts Education Still Matters For Kids In the Age of A.I.
Last month, we had leftover fried rice for dinner and my 17-year-old son Jax spread college brochures across the soy sauce-stained placemat at our kitchen table. My brother-in-law Dave, a software engineer who’d stopped by to borrow a ladder, leaned over his shoulder and tapped the page for the state university’s history department. “History?” he said, shaking his head. “Why waste money on that when AI can write a whole history paper in 10 seconds? All the stable jobs are in tech right now. You should be looking at comp sci.”
Jax just pushed a broccoli floret around his plate and didn’t say anything. After Dave left with the ladder, we cleaned up the kitchen, and as Jax wiped crumbs off the table, he mumbled, “You think he’s right? I don’t even like coding that much. But what if I can’t get a job?”
I get the question. I was an English major, and back when I graduated in 2006, people were saying the same thing about my degree: What will you ever do with that? Everyone was switching to business, everyone told me I was throwing my tuition away. I got my first job in marketing at a small publishing house, and when the company laid off half the staff in 2010, I picked up freelance content work to pay the rent. Every job I’ve had since then, I got it because I could do something many people with tech or business degrees often couldn’t: I could figure out what the other person actually needed, not just what they asked for.
Last quarter, for example, I did a project for a startup that built an AI grading tool for high school teachers. Their in-house team ran the whole first draft of the launch blog post through AI, and it was fine grammatically, hit all the product checkmarks. But it read like every other tech launch post: it talked about streamlining workflow and increasing instructional time, and didn’t mention that teachers are already overwhelmed, that they’re sick of being told to adopt new tools that add more work to their already full plates. I rewrote it, opened with a line about staying after school to grade 120 essays when you’d rather be at your kid’s soccer game, and framed the tool as something that takes the grunt work off your plate, not something that’s going to overhaul your entire teaching practice. That post got three times more clicks and shares than their average launch post. I learned that skill in my 200-level lit class, where we spent three weeks talking about what the author didn’t say out loud, what the subtext was. AI can’t pick up on that subtext, not yet, and maybe not ever. Because it doesn’t live that life.
That’s the thing no one talks about when they say AI makes liberal arts useless. Last year, Jax did a project on the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. He asked ChatGPT for a quick outline first, just to get his bearings. The outline led with Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit and assassination, and mentioned the strike in passing as a backdrop. Jax thought that felt off, because he’d seen a documentary that centered the workers, not just King. So he spent a Saturday digging through digital archives of the local Black newspaper, read oral histories from strikers’ family members, and wrote his paper about how the strike was led by regular working people, not just national civil rights leaders. His teacher said it was the best project she’d seen that year.
AI can pull together the most common narrative that’s already out there. It can’t question why that common narrative got written that way in the first place, or go looking for the voices that got left out. That’s core liberal arts training, and it’s something AI can’t replicate.
I get why parents worry. I worry too. College is expensive, we all want our kids to be stable. But I’ve started sharing three small, concrete things I think any parent can try when they’re panicking about their kid’s choice of major, instead of immediately pushing them to switch to a tech-focused degree.
First, ask your kid what they do when they lose track of time. Jax spends three hours most weekends writing and posting short essays for his small Tumblr about medieval battle strategy. That’s not just a hobby—that’s him practicing the core skills of a historian: research, analysis, storytelling. It doesn’t matter if it feels “unproductive” at first; the skills add up.
Second, instead of asking “what job will you get with that?”, ask “what can you do with this that AI can’t do well?” For history, that’s understanding context, spotting bias, connecting past mistakes to current problems. Right now, every big tech company is hiring people to work on AI ethics, and a lot of those jobs go to people with history or sociology degrees, because they understand how bias shows up in human systems over time. That’s not a stretch—it’s a direct fit.
Third, don’t treat it like an either/or. Jax takes a basic coding class at his high school for fun, and he uses those skills to make interactive maps for his history projects. He doesn’t have to be a professional coder to use those skills to make his liberal arts degree more marketable. Most jobs these days need a mix of soft and hard skills, and you don’t have to major in tech to be fluent enough in it to get by.
Last week, Jax went to an online info session for that history program he’s looking at. The department head said half of their graduates end up working in tech within five years of graduating, doing user experience research, content strategy, ethics work. That surprised Jax, but it didn’t surprise me. I still don’t know exactly what Jax will do after college. He might change his major twice. He might end up teaching, or working at a museum, or doing something I can’t even name yet. The job market will keep changing, faster than ever, as AI gets better. The thing that doesn’t change is the need for people who can think for themselves, understand other people, and ask the right questions. That’s what liberal arts gives you. It’s not a useless degree. It’s maybe the most useful degree you can get, right now.
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