The AI Revolution Is Reigniting a Demand for Humanities Graduates

It turns out that us English teachers were right all along to say that majoring in the humanities might be better for employability than majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math). According to a recent report, college graduates who majored in art history and nutrition apparently had a lower rate of unemployment than students with degrees in computer science and physics.

Of course, a more cynical person would look at this data and conclude that humanities majors only find work more easily because they will settle for low-wage jobs brewing coffee, operating cash registers, and wearing oppressive uniforms. Meanwhile, students with STEM degrees simply have to wait a little longer for a job that adequately compensates them for their superior intellects and abundant hard skills.

However, there is more reason to think that employers are increasingly favoring workers with the skills typically associated with a humanities degree. While popular entertainment valorizes scientists in lab coats crunching numbers, making life-saving discoveries, and designing space lasers, the real thrivers in society are the ones who are flexible, prioritize relationships, and make effective arguments.

Blame It on Sputnik

This is especially the case as the economy has grown bigger and more sophisticated. Today, so much of what has come to constitute a person’s job involves far more management, communication, and analysis than computation, operation, and problem-solving. The typical worker spends most of his days planning out procedures, talking to customers and colleagues, researching various topics, reviewing different kinds of data, and rationalizing decisions. Rarely will he need to pull out a graphing calculator to solve an equation, conduct a science experiment, or write so many lines of computer code.

This is why teaching students to read complex texts, write essays, and think abstractly through the humanities proves to be invaluable preparation for a future career. As I like to remind my students, the great civilizations, including our own, dominated the world with humanities-based education systems.

However, Western leaders and the intellectual class forgot this truth almost 70 years ago when they saw the Soviet satellite Sputnik. They foolishly concluded that all educational institutions needed to pivot to exclusively teaching STEM to contend with the Soviet Union (and now China). Consequently, humanities majors were regularly ridiculed and passed over for employment since it would be the scientists who would heal the world and make it a better place.

As I argue here, this was never a good argument. While some scientists and engineers are certainly necessary, most workers would profit more from basic skills that allow them to adapt to their circumstances or form new businesses and industries of their own. By contrast, the specificity of the sciences tends to limit what people can do or imagine for themselves—qualities that work better in authoritarian regimes like China than free-market democracies like the U.S.

More Valuable Than Ever

Ironically, the current proliferation of artificial intelligence makes the humanities all the more valuable. When so much STEM work can be done through AI, companies have a greater demand for the people with soft skills (i.e. people who can read, write, and think).

After all, employees with such skills can build up the culture of an organization, learn their jobs quickly, identify and fill in any needs that arise, train others and offer helpful feedback, and properly define potential problems. This happens less often with employees equipped with a narrower skill set, an aversion to disorder and changing circumstances, and poor judgment of people and situations.

Furthermore, for all the talk about AI eliminating humanities programs in college, this is an even greater threat to the sciences. Not only is there the same potential for academic dishonesty (e.g., ChatGPT produces a fake research report or writes the computer code for a programmer’s project), but the skills and content learned in STEM classes can now be outsourced to AI.

This means that memorization, solving problems, recording information, and interpreting data will soon have the same utility as doing computation on an abacus, knowing shorthand, or writing in cursive. Unless advanced instruction helps students become more creative, personable, reflective, and original, it serves little purpose to the worker who will interface more with people than objects. Indeed, this is the core lesson of George Anders’s book You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education, which he illustrates with innumerable examples of successful workers who were able to roll with the rapid changes and often invent their own jobs by putting people first.

So yes, there is hope for those majoring in the humanities. They can find remunerative work and actually use the skills they were taught in college. However, this is only true when the humanities professors actually teach these skills to students who actually learn those skills. As for the lazy students who blow off the minimal work assigned in unserious, gimmick-ridden humanities courses, they will need to brush up on their customer service skills if they hope to be employed. The competition for even these low-wage jobs will be stiff as more STEM graduates learn the hard way that those classes making them read and write were not so pointless after all.

Auguste Meyrat is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.