The Future-Proof Value of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of AI

When young people think about university today, most are focused on a single question: What job will this get me? This wasn’t the case when I went to college. My friends and I had no clue what we wanted to do for a career, and college was a place to figure that out. I chose Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school in rural Ohio. Kenyon taught me how to think and how to write. The many parties I attended taught me how to meet new and interesting people and how to carry a conversation. These are skills that allowed me to forge my own career path and are skills I still use today. A liberal arts degree isn’t about preparing for a job, it’s about preparing for life. These days, however, parents and students alike want reassurance that a degree will translate into a paycheck. That’s why over the past few decades, the most popular choices have been majors like computer science, engineering, and finance. The logic seemed sound: technology was booming, Wall Street was hiring, and coding skills or financial modeling expertise seemed to guarantee a solid career path. Artificial intelligence is automating much of the entry-level work in those very fields. Software development is increasingly being handled by AI coding assistants. Banks are cutting analyst positions as algorithms handle more of the heavy lifting. The “safe bet” majors of the last ten years don’t look quite as safe anymore. An article today in Axios Gen Z is facing a job market double-whammy says: “13.4% of unemployed Americans in July were "new labor force entrants," those looking for jobs with no prior work experience, including new high school and college graduates.” Gen Z is entering the workforce at a time where unemployment is the highest number since 1988, yet unlike then we are in a booming economy today. Learning how to think A liberal arts education has never looked more valuable than it does right now. Rather than teaching a specific set of technical skills that could become obsolete tomorrow, a liberal arts program teaches you how to think. Students learn how to ask the right questions. They learn how to synthesize information, spot patterns, and make connections across disciplines. Liberal arts teaches how to write clearly, speak persuasively, and understand human behavior. Those aren’t “soft skills.” They’re essential skills. And they are becoming more valuable as AI transforms the workplace. AI can summarize data, but it can’t yet decide which problems are worth solving. It can write code, but it can’t imagine entirely new categories of products and services. It can analyze financial markets, but it doesn’t understand the human motivations behind economic decisions. That’s the domain of people who know how to think critically, creatively, and contextually. The first step, not the final destination A liberal arts degree isn’t a narrow credential. It’s a launch pad. Graduates can go into business, technology, government, media, healthcare, or the nonprofit world. They can become entrepreneurs, consultants, teachers, or leaders in emerging fields that don’t even exist yet. The degree itself isn’t the goal. The point is that it prepares you to adapt, pivot, and grow across a lifetime of opportunities. In my case, I started on a Wall Street bond trading desk. I hated it and was kinda terrible at it, so in less than two years I moved to “the other side of the screens” and worked in the real-time financial information business, initially in sales and then marketing. When an opportunity to move to Tokyo came my way I eagerly said: “yes please”! I eventually spent a decade in Asia, living in both Japan and Hong Kong. When I was ready to move on from the corporate world in 2002, I started my own business advising companies on modern marketing and eventually wrote a dozen books and delivered some 500 talks in over 40 counties. There’s no college program on how to do that. Heck, I never took a marketing class in my life, yet my books are used as textbooks in the marketing and MBA programs in hundreds of universities. All I have is a liberal arts degree, yet I guest lecture at top schools where "PhD. required" is the norm for professors. My career path is the result of a liberal arts education. I studied English, philosophy, history, literature, and the arts. I built a foundation for lifelong curiosity and flexible thinking—and that prepared me to thrive in unpredictable times. Why the liberal arts matters today We’re entering an era where adaptability is the most important career skill of all.In the industrial age, careers were linear. You trained for a job and then you did that job, often for decades. But in today’s world—and especially in the booming AI-driven world—career paths are nonlinear. Entire industries are being disrupted every few years. New opportunities are emerging just as quickly. In this environment, being narrowly trained for a single task is a liability. Being broadly trained to think, learn, and adapt is an advantage. That’s what a liberal arts education delivers. My challenge to students and parents If you’re a student considering university, don’t just ask: "What job will this major get me when I graduate?" Instead ask: "How will this education prepare me to thrive for the next 40 years?" If you’re a parent, don’t push your child toward what seems like the "safe" major of the moment. The world your child graduates into will likely be very different just four years from now. The safest bet is to prepare them for flexibility. AI isn’t replacing human curiosity, creativity, or judgment anytime soon. The people who thrive will be the ones who know how to think independently and connect ideas across fields. That’s exactly what a liberal arts education provides. It’s the best investment you can make in long-term adaptability. I’m sure glad that I made that choice! Images: via Kenyon College

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