Why a Liberal Arts Education Still Matters for Kids in the Age of AI
The crumbs of last night’s pepperoni pizza were still stuck to the kitchen table when my 17-year-old son leaned back from his laptop and said he wanted to apply to colleges as an English major. My phone buzzed a second later, a text from my husband: AI just cut 30 entry-level marketing jobs at his company. I stared at the open application page, the blank spot where it says Intended Major, and almost said the thing every parent says these days: Are you sure?
I’ve spent the last 10 years working as an elementary school admin, and I hear the same panic from other parents every time college talk comes up. Why would anyone study history, or English, or sociology when AI can write, research, and analyze faster than any human? Everyone says the future is STEM, that anything else is a waste of tuition money. I felt that panic, too. I’d seen the stats, the starting salary comparisons, the think pieces saying liberal arts degrees are dead.
Last Fourth of July, we were sitting with my nephew Sam, who graduated four years ago with a computer science degree and makes a good salary at an AI startup. He was complaining about his team, saying half the new hires can’t do the one thing that actually matters right now. “They can build anything the AI spits out,” he said, flipping his hot dog on the grill. “But they can’t tell you if the AI is answering the right question. Last week we had a tool built to summarize thousands of customer reviews, it got all the facts right, but it missed that half the customers are mad about the same hidden shipping fee no one thought to mention in the prompt. None of the CS kids caught it. The intern who did? She’s a sociology major.”
That conversation stuck with me. I majored in history myself, and a couple months ago I used ChatGPT to draft a presentation for the school board about our new counseling program. It was fine, grammatically correct, hit all the policy points. But it was boring. No one would have cared. I threw out 90% of it and rewrote it around the story of a third grader I worked with last year who stopped talking after his dad moved out. We used journals and picture books to get him to open up, and by the end of the year he was reading out loud to his class. The board approved our full budget request two days later. AI can write a policy presentation, but it doesn’t know that specific group of school board members, it doesn’t know that story, it can’t feel what matters to the people in the room. That’s what liberal arts teaches you: how to make meaning out of messy, human stuff.
I didn’t say any of that to my son right away at the kitchen table. I just pushed the pizza crumbs to the side and asked him one question, a different one than I usually ask: What kinds of problems do you like solving? He said he likes when people write things that don’t make sense, or they say one thing but mean another, and he gets to untangle it. He likes figuring out what a person is actually trying to say, even when the words are messy. That’s exactly the skill that’s hard to automate, I thought.
We didn’t just stop at “follow your passion.” We did three small, concrete things that any parent can do with a kid set on a liberal arts major. First, we mapped three clear career paths that use that major, instead of just assuming he’d end up unemployed. We found that tech companies hire English majors all the time to write user-facing content, edit AI output to make it sound human, and do user research that helps teams build products people actually want to use. He also likes the idea of content strategy for education nonprofits, and is open to law school down the line. Second, we agreed he’ll do one small hands-on project or internship starting sophomore year, to connect his skills to the working world. He’s already talking to a local tutoring startup about a part-time internship editing their blog and writing customer FAQs. Third, I made a rule for myself: I don’t lead with “is this going to get you a job” when we talk about his major. I lead with “what are you learning that you didn’t know before.” That small shift keeps the panic down for both of us.
I still worry, of course. I still scroll past headlines about AI replacing more white-collar jobs and get a tight feeling in my chest. I know starting salaries for liberal arts majors are lower right out of college than STEM majors, on average. We’re lucky we can absorb that gap; I know not every family has that luxury. But even for families working with tighter budgets, pairing a liberal arts major with one small practical connection to work—like a part-time internship, a side project running social media for a local small business, learning to use common digital tools to present your work—goes a long way with employers.
Last weekend, I found him sitting on the front porch, our old hound dog at his feet, reading a collection of poetry by a writer his grandma liked. She died last winter, and after he finished a poem about grieving a grandparent, he texted her best friend just to say it made him think of her. That’s the thing no AI can do. It can write a poem about grief, but it can’t read that poem and think of your grandma, and reach out to someone who misses her too. That’s the skill that matters, in work and in life.
We don’t know what’s going to happen with his applications, or what the job market will look like in four years. There are no guarantees, no matter what major you pick. But right now, this feels like the right choice. We’re taking it one semester at a time.
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