Why Liberal Arts Education Still Matters For Kids Growing Up In The Age of AI
Last month, I found my 17-year-old son Javi slouched in our kitchen chair at 8:30 pm, half a bowl of soggy Cheerios in front of him, his laptop open to a ChatGPT prompt: “Is a history degree useless in 2024?” His guidance counselor had just sent an email after their college planning meeting, gently nudging him to reconsider: AI is already automating entry-level research, writing, and administrative roles. Why waste four years and tuition on a degree that won’t exist in a decade?
A scuffed soccer cleat propped against the table leg, Javi pushed his coffee-stained hoodie sleeve up and glared at the screen. “I just like figuring out why people did the things they did. Why is that a waste?” I stirred my cold tea and didn’t answer right away. I remembered being 17, sitting at this same table, telling my dad I wanted to major in English. He said almost the exact same thing the counselor said to Javi: What are you going to do with that? That’s not a safe bet.
As a high school English teacher, I see this panic every application season. Every parent I talk to is fixated on AI, and every kid is being pushed toward computer science or engineering or any major that feels “future-proof.” No one talks about the skills AI can’t replicate, the ones liberal arts education has always centered.
Last semester, a senior top of her comp sci class came to my room after school, red-eyed and frustrated. She’d used ChatGPT to write the code for her capstone project, an app for local food banks to track donations. When she presented to a panel of local business owners, one of the judges asked her why she’d designed the check-in screen the way she did, why she’d prioritized that feature over a search function for donated items. She couldn’t answer. AI had cranked out working code in 10 minutes, but she’d never stopped to talk to the food bank volunteers who’d actually use the app. She knew how to get answers from AI, but no one had taught her how to ask the right questions first. That’s what liberal arts teaches.
Last year, Javi did his AP Research project on the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. He didn’t just copy a summary from JSTOR or ask AI to draft his paper. He drove out to the city archive three Saturdays in a row, scrolling through microfilm of local black newspapers that most high school students never touch. He tracked down a 72-year-old retired union organizer who was 10 years old when his dad walked the picket lines, and sat with him for an hour over lemonade listening to his stories. He ended up connecting the strike’s core demand for worker dignity to the Starbucks union drives happening 10 minutes from our house. ChatGPT can give you a 500-word summary of the strike in 10 seconds. It can’t sit through an old man’s tangent about hiding picket signs in his backyard, can’t feel the weight of that story when you connect it to something happening right in front of you. That’s what liberal arts teaches.
When parents ask me what they should do if their kid says they want to study something non-STEM, I don’t tell them to just support their dreams. I give them three small, concrete things to do first. First, instead of leading with “how will you get a job?” ask three simple questions: What’s one project you did in this subject that you lost track of time working on? What’s one thing you learned from that project that you use outside of class? Can you name three different ways you could get paid to do that thing? I did this with Javi, and he answered without hesitating: the strike project, I learned how to listen to people who grew up very differently than me and get them to tell the truth, I could work at a museum, I could do oral history for nonprofits, I could write policy briefs for labor groups. That’s a way clearer picture of his future than any generic job stats report.
Second, if they’re set on a liberal arts major, encourage them to pair it with one small, marketable technical skill that takes minimal extra time: basic data analysis, basic web design, social media content strategy. Javi’s looking at a minor in digital public history that teaches him how to build online exhibits and work with archival datasets. It doesn’t water down his history degree, it just gives him a concrete tool to show employers what he can do.
My older daughter Lila is a mechanical engineer who minored in creative writing. She got promoted last year at her renewable energy firm, and her boss told her she got the job over three other equally qualified engineers because she can explain complex turbine specs to a 70-year-old landowner who’s never taken a physics class. She can write a contract addendum that doesn’t read like it was generated by a robot, and she can listen to a landowner’s worry about property values and address it like a person, not a checklist. She learned that from her creative writing workshops, not her engineering labs.
Javi still hasn’t submitted his final major preference. He’s still debating adding that minor, still talking to alumni of the programs he’s looking at, and we still don’t know if he’ll change his mind before May. No one can say for sure what the job market will look like in 10 years, or how much AI will change the work we do. But I know this: the things that make us useful to other people aren’t the ability to spit out facts or write a first draft. It’s the ability to ask why, to connect stories, to understand what another person actually needs. That’s the one education you can’t get from a chatbot.
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