Inc. Magazine
As AI reshapes jobs and automates technical tasks, the skills rooted in liberal arts—like empathy, creativity, and critical thinking—are becoming essential again. Once overlooked, these human-centered abilities are now seen as vital for navigating complexity, adapting quickly, and leading with emotional intelligence in an increasingly AI-driven world.
The Rise of AI Will Make Liberal Arts Degrees Popular Again. Here’s Why
Author: Jessica Stillman
Back in 2023 the New Yorker declared “the end of the English Major.” It was a bold claim, but there was plenty of data to back it up.
From 2012 to 2020, the number of students majoring in subjects like English and history declined 46 percent at Ohio State. At Tufts, Vassar, and Notre Dame, enrollment in liberal arts majors was down by half. Boston University saw a 42 percent decline. At SUNY Albany the situation was more dire—interest in these degrees fell by three-quarters.
From small liberal arts colleges to public university flagships, the story was the same. Barely anyone wants to major in English anymore.
If the decline is clear, so are the reasons for the fall. Given the huge financial cost of most college degrees, many students want theirs to lead directly to gainful employment. Many struggle to see how studying philosophy or comparative literature will get them a job. STEM and business degrees seem a much safer bet.
This was old news two years ago, so why am I recounting it here? Because a lot has changed in two years, including the stratospheric rise of AI. Now a few lonely but intriguing voices are arguing this is one trend line that’s about to reverse. The AI revolution will bring liberal arts majors back from the verge of death, they say.
A banker calls his liberal arts degree more valuable than his MBA
Recent remarks by Bill Winters, the CEO of banking giant Standard Chartered, are emblematic of this trend. Winters has an MBA from the prestigious Wharton School, but he told a Bloomberg interviewer that his fancy business degree was “a waste of time.”
What part of his education did he rate more highly? His undergrad degree in international relations from Colgate University. “I learned how to think at university, and for the 40 years since I left university, those skills have been degraded, degraded, degraded. They’re coming back now,” Winters continued.
What’s driving the revival of his long dormant liberal arts-honed critical thinking skills? AI, he explained:
“The technical skills are being provided by the machine, or by very competent people in other parts of the world who have really nailed the technical skills at a relatively low cost. I’m going to go back to curiosity and empathy. Really, really understand the audience that you’re dealing with and anticipate those needs beforehand.”
“Safe” degrees aren’t so safe anymore
He’s not the only one making the argument that with AI handling more technical tasks and data analysis, humans will add the most value with the type of creative, empathetic, and holistic thinking that a liberal arts degree trains you for.
Marketer and tech founder Lindsey McInerney made the same case in greater depth in a recent TEDx talk.
“The humanities are not disposable, and the technical degrees are no longer safe choices…. In maybe one of the greatest comeback stories ever told, the crazy little twist of fate, we’re entering a world where the skills acquired in the pursuit of the humanities are not only going to be the most indispensable, but some of the most highly sought-after soon,” she predicts.
She’s certainly right that AI is going to affect the job market for coders and biz school grads. Some experts claim it already is. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told an audience at SXSW recently that soon, “20-30 percent of the code could get written by AI.”
“More than a quarter of all computer programming jobs have vanished in the past two years,” according to a Washington Post analysis of BLS data. Most of those missing jobs seem to be routine programming roles—which are also the jobs AI is the most able to handle.
I could go on linking to scare headline after scare headline about the likely impact of AI, especially on more junior business and tech roles, but I’m sure you get the point. AI is making once “safe” degrees feel a lot less safe.
Does the rise of AI spell the return of the liberal arts?
So what about the other half of this argument? That the humanities, in McInerney’s words, nurture “the creativity, inspiration, imagination, and dreaming” that make us “the most human that we can be” and that they “are going to start popping up on every job description”?
Ask experts like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang what skills will be most valuable in the AI-filled future and they’ll tell you things like making connections and fast, flexible learning. Dave and Helen Edwards, co-founders of AI research firm Intelligenstia.ai, claim the ability to deal with the messiness and unpredictability of people is the most AI-proof skill.
In a recent piece on The Conversation, Sandra Sjoberg, dean of Western Governors University School of Business, argued that in a tech-dominated world traditional “soft skills” like empathy and inclusivity are becoming even more valuable to employers, 65 percent of whom “cite soft skills as the top gap among new graduates, according to Coursera’s 2025 Micro-Credentials Impact Report,” she writes.
You know where you can learn to empathize across difference, probe the deep weirdness of people, and get comfortable with change, uncertainty, and difficult trade-offs? By wrestling with the long, messy, beautiful history of human art and thought—a.k.a. studying the humanities.
A reminder of the value of the humanities
English major nerds like myself have been arguing that liberal arts’ popularity is about to turn around for many years. I have to concede that many of these predictions jumped the gun. But perhaps this time predicting the revival of the humanities is less an exercise in bucking ourselves up and more an objective observation of reality.
Artificial intelligence really is changing the world, making all that machines can do more widely and cheaply available. That should make the things only humans can do—empathy, creativity, ethics—more valuable.
To get all liberal arts-y about it, as Tom Waits once sang, “I never heard the melody until I needed the song.” We’re about to learn, through its absence, just how much we value humanity. Maybe the liberal arts really are coming back this time.
Credits: TCA, LLC.