For many college students, the pull toward artificial intelligence is irresistible
I've decided to go in a different direction
The Important Work is a space for instructors (and occasionally students) at all levels—high school, college, and beyond—to share reflections about teaching writing in the era of generative AI.
This week’s post is by Gabriel Wu, who is a first-year student at Harvard studying applied math and film and visual studies. This piece originally appeared in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe.
If you’re interested in sharing a reflection for The Important Work, you can find information here.—Jane Rosenzweig
For many college students, the pull toward artificial intelligence is irresistible. I regularly hear stories of my peers who once planned to go into academia or to medical school but have now decided to pursue AI startups. It’s hard not to be drawn into the idea that we must study AI or get left behind. I’ve even considered reworking my entire course schedule just to fit in the prerequisites for an AI course I wanted to take by my junior year. When anything involving those two letters seems revolutionary, specializing in AI feels like the next wave to ride.
But I’ve decided to go in another direction. I am not restructuring my entire schedule around a single AI course. Instead, this spring I’m taking classes in math, economics, and film, and even one on sleep.
The reason: I don’t want to lose sight of what makes a liberal arts education valuable.
AI fervor is swelling on campuses. In only three years, a new major at MIT — “artificial intelligence and decision making” — has become the school’s second-most popular field of study. In 2024, the University of Pennsylvania established the first AI engineering degree in the Ivy League. This past August, the University of South Florida introduced a new college dedicated to AI and cybersecurity, which has already enrolled about 3,000 students.
This is no surprise when you consider that for many students, college is a path to well-paid employment, and when automation is reshaping the labor market, majoring in AI may appear to offer a competitive advantage. However, a recent Stanford study found that recent graduates saw a 6 percent decline in employment in the careers most exposed to AI from October 2022 to September 2025. In that same time frame, older workers in those same roles saw employment increases of 6 to 9 percent.
The authors of the study attribute this disparity to the nature of undergraduate education. They argue that the explicit knowledge gained in college, such as textbook information and lectures, is exactly what AI systems are trained to reproduce with superior speed and accuracy. What shields older workers from automation is the one thing that AI cannot replicate: their unique lived experiences — and their ability to interpret problems through cultural, ethical, and social contexts accumulated over time.
That’s why I’m committing to a liberal arts education. Its interdisciplinary rigor pushes students to think critically across a vast spectrum of human knowledge, synthesizing perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to approach problems that no single discipline can fully grasp.
Admittedly, it can be hard to see the value of the liberal arts when AI can already write, code, and think for us. In 2024, 15-year-old Nick Dobroshinsky used large language models like Claude and ChatGPT to develop BeyondSPX, a financial research platform that now has more than 50,000 monthly users. Yet if a high schooler can now use AI to perform the tasks of a software engineer, any technical fields that I study in college might be obsolete by the time I graduate.
A decade ago, a computer science degree would have opened the door to lucrative careers. Today, graduates with that degree face a 6.1 percent unemployment rate — one of the highest among all majors. Similarly, the way we currently approach AI may not be especially relevant in 10 years. Students who train exclusively for today’s AI-oriented jobs may find themselves holding degrees tailored to a bygone moment.
This is precisely why studying a wide range of topics matters: The foundational skills developed in the liberal arts endure consistently even as professional trends shift. In research published in 2020, the economists David Deming and Kadeem Noray showed that technological progress leads to higher rates of turnover in STEM careers as technical skills become obsolete. A liberal arts education, however, fosters skills that don’t have a shelf life and thus have much lower rates of skill-related turnover. Though initially outpaced in salary, humanities graduates often catch up by their 40s because their expertise remains versatile even as the economy evolves. AI is already reshaping industries and the specialized skills tied to it. The liberal arts, however, hold their value because while technologies evolve, the need for judgment does not.
AI can help us build the future, but the liberal arts help us decide what kind of future is worth building.
As I log into my student portal to look at courses for my sophomore year, I plan to enroll in another technical course. Still, I’m drawn to the classes that are “useless” in a vocational sense — these are the ones that will best teach me to think, to doubt, and to judge.
 |
|
Good piece! Though having grown up feeling the "pull toward" the encyclopedias on my parents' shelves, I've felt the same "pull toward" AI and the same experience of encountering the strange, the beautiful, the horrible, the banal, the unexpected, and the helpful.