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College wasn’t always seen as a pipeline to a paycheck. For most of its history, a college education represented the pursuit of knowledge.

Students studied philosophy, literature, history and rhetoric — not because these subjects led directly to a profession, but because they cultivated judgment, curiosity and the ability to engage with complex ideas and social realities. The goal was intellectual growth: to produce people capable of reasoning, questioning and participating thoughtfully in our world.

That vision hasn’t disappeared, but it has been overshadowed.

Students are now told, explicitly and implicitly, that the purpose of a degree is employability. Majors are evaluated by salary outcomes. Departments are justified through job placement statistics. Syracuse University recently announced plans to close nine humanities-based majors, and it’s not alone.

In today’s environment, colleges resemble white-collar trade schools — where students acquire specialized skills designed to translate as directly as possible into a career.

This shift is understandable. When the average private college tuition is $45,000 per year, it’s hard to justify studying something without a guaranteed return on investment. For many students, studying philosophy or literature feels indulgent — if not irresponsible — when weighed against degrees in business, marketing or accounting that often promise more direct career outcomes.

Artificial intelligence may disrupt that logic.

Many fields that now define the “useful” side of college — marketing, accounting, business analytics and coding — are increasingly automatable. AI tools can generate marketing campaigns, draft reports, analyze data and complete routine financial tasks with remarkable speed. If that trend continues, it could expose a fundamental flaw in how we’ve come to think about higher education: as preparation for a specific, stable career path.

This doesn’t mean these professions will disappear, but it could mean that the path from degree to career becomes less predictable. Opportunities in these roles that colleges have implicitly trained students for are changing, and in many cases, shrinking.

In a world where specific technical tasks can be automated, the most valuable form of knowledge is how to adapt. The ability to interpret information, understand context and nuance, form arguments and make ethical judgments becomes more important than mastering any single tool or workflow.

These are the abilities a liberal arts education is designed to cultivate. Reading difficult texts trains students to engage with ambiguity and think critically. Studying philosophy develops the ability to reason through competing ideas and ethical dilemmas. History shows students how societies change and patterns repeat in unexpected ways.

AI can generate a passable essay or report in seconds, but producing text is not the same as understanding it. The ability to assess an argument’s strength, recognize bias and situate ideas within broader intellectual contexts requires a different kind of training — one grounded in analysis, not just output.

In this sense, AI doesn’t make the liberal arts obsolete. It clarifies their purpose. Ironically, the disciplines long dismissed as impractical may be the most “future-proof.” Literature, history, philosophy, anthropology — these subjects don’t train students for a single job. They train them to think across jobs and industries.

This was the original purpose of a college education. Historically, universities were designed to produce citizens — individuals capable of reasoned judgment, intellectual independence and meaningful participation in public life. The liberal arts were the foundation, not an add-on.

It was only as higher education became expensive that its mission narrowed. Faced with rising costs, students understandably demanded a worthy profit, and universities responded by aligning themselves more closely with the labor market. If AI destabilizes that market, the bargain collapses.

Colleges won’t — and shouldn’t — abandon STEM or professional training. Nor should students stop thinking realistically about their careers. But instead of viewing the liberal arts as supplemental, they should again see them as foundational — essential to career preparation in a rapidly changing world.

There might be a silver lining in the AI takeover after all.

If AI reduces the reliability of job-specific pathways, it may also reduce our need to treat college purely as a means to an end. It could create space — both intellectually and culturally — for a renewed emphasis on education as something more than job training. A return to the idea that college is meant to broaden the mind, not just spruce up the resume.

It won’t be easy. A return to emphasizing the liberal arts would require reevaluating how we talk about higher education, structure curricula and evaluate success. It would also require addressing the underlying issue of cost that’s majorly shaped the current system.

But the possibility is there. The liberal arts have fallen out of grace — seen as valuable in theory, but out of step with the demands of the modern economy. AI may complicate that narrative. By reshaping what work looks like, it forces us to reconsider what kinds of knowledge are truly invaluable.

Ella DeCamp is a junior majoring in English and textual studies. She can be reached at emdecamp@syr.edu.

Published on April 22, 2026 at 8:48 pm