Question
I need you to settle an argument. Overall, what’s going to serve a person better: a career-focused professional degree, or a liberal arts education? My buddy the software engineer says the former. I say the latter. What got us going is an article in The Washington Post about this question. The author is a liberal-arts type. Here’s his bottom line:
“Artificial intelligence makes purely technical skills less valuable and human judgment more essential. There has never been a more powerful case for the liberal arts, a kind of education that cultivates human discernment.”
What kind of degree would you get if you were going to college today?
Nick’s Reply
Well, because my degrees (B.A., Psychology and M.A., Cognitive Psychology) are technically in the liberal arts, I know not to touch this question with a ten-foot pole!
Professional and/or liberal arts education?
A person that wants to do software development should get a degree in Computer Science, Engineering and/or Information Technology, or a technical certification (or five) in relevant technologies. If the person is working on a liberal arts degree and then wants to do software development, they should finish their degree and then get skills in designing software and writing code (or in learning to use A.I. to write code).
Which person will have a better career and life? Now I’ll dive in. I think that would be the person that learns it all.
Literal or liberal education?
I encourage everyone, no matter your career bent or your philosophical leanings, to read the excellent article by Greg Weiner that you refer to, The best education for future success might surprise you. (The WaPo will let you read it free in exchange for your e-mail address.)
I think that Weiner, while he leans toward a liberal arts education, actually makes a good case for hybrid studies by distinguishing between literal education and liberal education. He turns his case on the example of A.I. and by emphasizing the importance of being able to apply human judgment and discernment — which have long-term value — to the more immediate utility of A.I. and other technical skills.
There’s enough said and written about the career value of degrees in engineering, science, medicine, law and accounting. Evidence of this value is found in salary studies that favor professional degrees. That’s why my own writing looks at how people with liberal arts degrees can spin the skills they’ve acquired to succeed in business, management, and even in “professional” careers where they don’t have, say, a technical degree. For example, Liberal arts degree: Asset or albatross?
Well, which is it?
You’re asking an important question in a time when the definition of “intelligence” (whether acquired from education or from machine learning) is being hotly debated. My only contribution to the controversies will be a very loaded question: Why do you think they call it “Artificial?” Meantime, I like Weiner’s distinctions between literal and liberal education, and between the more immediate versus longer term value of each.
A debate about your question will be more valuable than my opinion. I don’t expect we’ll reach a consensus — but I’d love to know how everyone interprets Weiner’s argument, and what your views are about a liberal arts versus a career-focused education. Why do companies — tech companies especially — hire people with a liberal education and pay them well? Where are these jobs?
: :
I have two master’s degrees – one in music (organ & sacred music), and one in electrical engineering, but little good that did me – the day my diploma got printed and sent to me was also my last day at my full-time job since I got laid off. I’m 60 years old with two master’s degrees. My friends tell me I’ll find something very soon. Youtube videos tell me I’ll never work again – forget it! It has been less than a week, and I found that my network is quite strong – I am getting interviews. I found along the way I enjoy management, and few engineers do. The funny thing is I was hiring like crazy the week before. They told me I had the wrong skill set for their needs (that’s funny because the people I was hiring had a similar skill set). Liberal arts or engineering? Having both doesn’t help – but it’s a matter of who you know – not what you know. Sorry to be so direct.
I have a relative who obtained a Sociology degree because it was easy to get and he didn’t have to take math classes. After graduation, he found that he had only low-paying job prospects. (I’ve heard that to do well in Sociology requires at least a Master’s degree.) After seeing his friends in Computer Science and Engineering get great jobs with much higher pay, he returned to college and obtained a second bachelor’s degree in a field his friends recommended, Computer Security. Upon that graduation, he was recruited and in demand at a much higher salary than before. He also found that he loved math in college and wished he had not avoided it earlier in his education.
He was laid off after Trump’s election when a number of contracts considered non-essential were cut. (He worked for a government contractor.) But he found another position almost immediately through his network and continues to excel professionally.
My first degree was in Science Education. I taught high school Chemistry & Physics one year, then moved to a different city and worked two years as a clinical chemist. Both were great life experiences! Then I returned to college and obtained an electrical engineering degree, which was a much better fit for me. Became a professional engineer, which benefited me for the rest of my engineering career. Added an MBA from a respected school and eventually became a manager. Attended accounting school in my 60’s and became a certified public accountant (CPA) without a degree. Every new position required adding specific skills and competencies. I think the ability to learn and willingness to take on more responsibility were both key to my career success. At 76, I’m happily retired & do a few tax returns for family members.
It’s my opinion that a technical degree with an MBA is a great combination. I recommend it & favor technical education over liberal.
Perhaps I am not navigating correctly, but the WaPo requires paid subscription to access the referenced article. I provided email but it just takes me in an endless loop to the subscription sign-up page.
I pay for a subscription so I feel free to share this in context… from Washington Post (c) 2026
The best education for future success might surprise you
Career-focused programs mistakenly assume that what seems useful today will be useful tomorrow.
March 2, 2026 at 6:15 a.m. EST
By Greg Weiner
Greg Weiner, a professor of political science, is the president of Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Judging by the proliferation of programs of study in artificial intelligence, higher education is learning exactly the wrong lesson from that technology’s transformation of the workplace. Artificial intelligence makes purely technical skills less valuable and human judgment more essential. There has never been a more powerful case for the liberal arts, a kind of education that cultivates human discernment.
But making the case requires a fundamental shift in how those who provide, regulate and enroll in higher education think about its purpose. That shift is from literal education to liberal education.
At its best, liberal education is an integrated whole that pursues truth wherever it is found, emphasizing both a range of disciplines and the connections between them. It helps form human judgment by exposing students to complexity and nuance while encouraging curiosity. Literal education fragments that experience into individual units of utility — falsely assuming that what seems useful today will be useful tomorrow.
In higher education, this literalism plays out across a variety of fields. Students need to understand artificial intelligence, so we create majors or minors specifically in artificial intelligence. Literal education also encourages correspondingly narrow questions: Why take courses in literature unless a student intends to be a novelist? Why study psychology except to become a clinician or major in political science except to run for office?
But the best writers are not simply taught to write — they learn their craft by reading a range of great writing. The most successful innovators absorb and develop that ability through exposure to creativity as it is expressed in science, art, business and other fields.
The irony is that one power of artificial intelligence is its ability to overcome precisely this fragmentation of knowledge and to identify connections that might not otherwise be evident. A large language model that confined its learning on a topic only to literally and narrowly conceived disciplines would be neither large nor useful. But studying AI won’t teach students how to make those connections — that is what liberal education can do.
Literal education is an understandable response to a policy environment that almost exclusively emphasizes outcomes that are not only quantifiable but also immediately so. For several years, federal regulations have relentlessly emphasized return on investment. It is a worthy measure that addresses an important concern. But they have largely limited these metrics to the near term, such as income four years after graduation.
Especially when combined with professional preparation, the returns on liberal education are immense, but they take longer to accrue. As AI amplifies the value of human judgment, those returns are likely to grow. Literal education captures near-term returns, but only deceptively: Measuring only the immediate obscures the danger of obsolescence.
Literal instruction has its place. A good nurse must know anatomy, just as someone whose career requires the use of AI should learn how to use its technical tools. But none of these parts is as effective as the whole.
The workers who use AI best will deploy human judgment to analyze and evaluate information. To succeed in a workplace, not simply at a desk, they will be able to listen as well as to communicate. Their relentless curiosity will be grounded in intellectual humility, while their ethical behavior will require moral courage.
The worst way to cultivate these qualities is literally to teach them. There is no syllabus for Curiosity 101, no major in human discernment. In reading history or sharing residence halls, they learn by encountering nuanced situations and ideas.
To turn out inquisitive professionals who can evaluate and ask hard questions of what generative AI tells them, we should challenge students to evaluate and ask hard questions of what they study, whether it is a poem, a behavioral study or lab results. Socrates, after all, was the original prompt engineer. It is reasonable to bet that, by the time today’s college students are entering the primes of their careers, today’s AI tools will be obsolete while Platonic dialogues will still be taught.
We should not expect ethical behavior from professionals whose understanding of it derives simply from a course in business ethics. A literalist approach to education encourages colleges and universities to check that box without developing deeply rooted ethical dispositions that permeate how future citizens and professionals approach their lives.
For higher education and its regulators, there is an accompanying challenge. We are equipped to measure the impact of fragments, especially literal ones. A student who completes a course did or did not master its content; a graduate in this field earns an income of this much by this date. It takes both more time and more complex judgment to assess the impact of a whole education — that kind of education is both more economically and more academically valuable.
That does not mean liberal arts education is flawless. Colleges and universities must show a better capacity for self-regulation in the face of legitimate public concerns about political bias, affordability and professional relevance. And an institution whose graduates are unable to use artificial intelligence effectively and ethically has failed them.
But relevance and literalism are different things. Liberal education trusts students to absorb the habits of innovation, entrepreneurship and professionalism from the totality of an education. In that sense, realizing the full value of the liberal arts requires taking education less literally and students more seriously.
Clearly both technical skills and liberal arts skills can complement each other on the job. In my personal experience as a software developer (retired), I observed that learning how to organize my ideas for writing term papers in my liberal arts classes greatly impacted my ability to organize software projects in a well-structured way that made them more robust and easier to maintain. In addition my hobby of public speaking (Toastmasters clubs) was a great benefit when I had to describe what I was doing to my managers. I may have been hired based on my computer science degree, but it was the so-called “soft skills” that added value to my work.
Another retired software developer here.
My computer science degree gave me the basis to get better and better at communicating my ideas into computer code.
Funny thing though – my ability to communicate my ideas to people ended up being the limiting factor in my ability to get things done.
While both a liberal arts and a technical degree can be beneficial, it is really the quality of the degree that drives the value. If you have a good liberal arts degree or a good technical degree, you have learned a great deal and are in a good position. If you have a bad liberal arts degree and a bad technical degree, it is a different situation. With a bad liberal arts degree you have nothing. With a bad technical degree you have some skills and a rubber stamp.
The real question is how good is the education at where you are getting it and how much are you going to put into it.
Here’s something to think about. As we’re getting used to seeing AI slop, the best degree (I will add Liberal Arts to the list) to counter this? Journalism degrees (that’s why tech companies are hiring them. Because they’re the ones that can humanize their company’s story. Oh, the irony): https://www.businessinsider.com/hottest-job-in-tech-writing-words-ai-hiring-2026-2
@Thonas: Another pay wall part of the way through the column. Do ya think maybe non-slop is worth actually PAYING for? Is that what’s going on here?
Here’s the whole article everyone! Copyright Business Insider 2026 (I’m not a subscriber but I can read it on my iPad Air when I press the read option using Apple Safari. Yep to non-slop that’s worth paying for)
The hottest job in tech: Writing words
?
The rise of slopaganda is fueling a surprising tech hiring boom.
Amanda Hoover
Money coming out of a typewriter
Getty Images; Rebecca Zisser/BI
In the generative AI boom, vibe coding and AI expertise have become in-demand résumé skills. But tech companies are also looking to pay a premium for expertise in people who have a skill that predates AI: the art of communication.
Andreessen Horowitz launched its New Media team last year to help founders learn what they “need to win the narrative battle online.” Adobe is looking for an “AI evangelist” to lead the company’s “artificial intelligence storytelling.” Netflix, a company that sells stories to your living room, recently posted a director of product and technology communications role with a salary range of up to $775,000. Microsoft began publishing a print magazine, Signal, last year, calling it an “antidote to the ephemeral nature of digital.” Anthropic tripled the size of its communications team last year, growing to about 80 people and is still hiring five more, each offering salaries of around $200,000 or higher. OpenAI has several open communications jobs boasting salary listings of more than $400,000. The average director of communications in the US makes $106,000, according to Indeed.
Three years after the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT, results have been mixed: Within tech firms, vibe coding is nixing the need for entry-level software developers, while some workers across industries are foisting rapidly generated, verbose, and sloppy AI nonsense onto their colleagues, leading to wasted time and a breakdown of trust. Even Sam Altman said last year that people have started to affect a sort of AI accent when speaking, and now some social platform discourse “feels very fake.”
Amid all chatter about gen AI taking jobs, the ease with which gen AI spits out content has ironically revved the demand for human communicators.
Because AI generates so much content, “you would think that actually the job of the comms person or the storyteller would be fewer and farther between,” says Gab Ferree, founder of Off the Record, a community for communications professionals, and former vice president of global communications at Bumble. But that’s not what’s happening. Tech companies are hiring writers, editors, chief communications officers who work closely with CEOs, and so-called “storytellers.” The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the percentage of job postings on LinkedIn mentioning “storyteller” doubled between 2024 to 2025.
In a competitive industry where startups fight to survive and Big Tech rivals campaign for market dominance, a good story is a selling point. One theory behind the push, Ferree says, is “there’s just so much garbage out there that people want to pay a premium for someone who can claim that they can cut through the noise.”
The trend of storytelling and lucrative comms jobs has been “percolating for a while,” says Jenna Birch, founder of SISU, a communications consultancy for startups and VCs. As Silicon Valley’s influence ballooned over the past two decades, tech companies could offer staggering salaries just as more newspapers were bleeding more and more writers. Content marketing became popular, and building a company’s brand on social media and surfacing blog posts in Google search results became essential.
More recently, the role of the comms pro has continued to expand, as they have to understand large language models, company blogs, how to craft a larger narrative to set a company apart from competitors, and how to write in a CEO’s voice on LinkedIn and Substack. The number of chief communication officer roles that encompass not just traditional comms duties but also take on another responsibility, like marketing or or human resources, at Fortune 1000 companies grew from 90 in 2019 to 169 in 2024, according to a report from the Observatory on Corporate Reputation. The median pay for a CCO at a Fortune 500 company is now between $400,000 and $450,000, a $50,000 jump from 2023, according to a survey from consultant firm Korn Ferry.
If everyone’s a writer, then nobody’s a writer, and I think it’s very evident right now.Cristin Culver, founder of Common Thread Communications
As the job changes and demand for narrative communications and storytellers rises, the number of communications experts able to work under rapidly evolving conditions and with a wide remit may be small, comms experts tell me, leading companies to offer hefty compensation packages in war for the best talent. A similar trend is unfolding among the few people who are AI experts, driving tech companies to offer astounding salaries to poach top talent from rival firms. While not of the same nine-figure caliber, in their own right, creatives are becoming “the high value person in tech now,” Birch says.
For much of the tech boom, that high-value person was a software developer. Universities and coding bootcamps rushed to fill employment gaps and train up the next generation of tech workers. Young people were told coding would be a path to a lucrative, stable career. As of 2023, the most recent year the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released data for, computer science recent graduates faced an unemployment rate of 6.1%, while communications majors’ unemployment rate sat at 4.5%. The number of open job posts for software engineers dropped by more than 60,000 between 2023 and late 2025, according to data from CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the US IT industry. The best defense against automation, some argue, will be a liberal arts degree.
Words might be easy to generate with AI, but good writing isn’t ready for automation.
“If everyone’s a writer, then nobody’s a writer, and I think it’s very evident right now,” says Cristin Culver, founder of communications firm Common Thread Communications. LinkedIn is full of posts written by AI in a similar style that makes eyes glaze over as they scroll. “I think AI is both aiding and making storytelling much harder,” Culver says. “Ironically in this era of AI, some of the most poignant storytelling belongs to the people who’ve realized that everything is sloppified and they’ve pivoted to very tactical storytelling.”
Anthropic has been leaning heavily into that tactical, and tactile, storytelling. In the fall, the company created a pop-up Claude Cafe in New York to position the chatbot as a thinking and problem solving partner, marketing the space as one for showing up in person, connecting, and being surrounded by books and magazines over screens (although the company has also destroyed and scanned millions of books to train Claude, which a judge ruled last year was not a copyright violation).
“Claude is definitely a prominent team member for everyone, but comms people are sort of like BS detectors,” Sasha de Marigny previously told Axios last May, months before she was promoted from head of communications to become the company’s first CCO. “Critical thinking is still a huge comparative advantage for humans. I’m looking for excellent strategists — people who understand the new world order and know how to develop holistic plans to cut through to the audiences we care about.” Anthropic declined to speak more about its comms strategy for this story.
“It’s a golden age for people who really enjoy the craft of communications,” says Steve Clayton, CCO of Cisco, who formerly worked at Microsoft and launched the company’s print publication. When he first tried ChatGPT, Clayton says he worried his career was done. He’s since become an AI optimist, seeing gen AI as a tool and opportunity for communicators and so-called storytellers to stand out with content that feels authentic content projects that strike people. “In an environment where nobody’s sat at their desk today saying: God, I wish I had more email, or I wish I had more websites I could visit, or I wish I had more podcasts — the challenge is, how do you create something that is worthy of people’s time and worthy of their attention?”
Jobs where brands build out their own newsrooms are “going to be one of the last places where AI is replacing writers,” says Noah Greenberg, CEO of Stacker, a content distribution company. Unlike traditional media, which relies on clicks, advertising, and subscription to make money off a constant stream of content, “when brands are investing in the strategy, they’re not thinking about: ‘Do I break even on an individual piece of content?’ They’re thinking about: ‘How do I create five or 10 really incredible stories every month that get our story out there, that prove and turn us into the authority as a respected party in this space?””
As with coding and image generation, LLMs are likely to keep getting better. LLMs may write with more voice or sound more human eventually. But the chatbots and agents don’t think. They generate creative content without cycling through a creative process. A 2025 Columbia Business School study found LLMs have a bias for “Option A,” preferring the first choice when given a list and asked to pick. For people working in comms, AI might be more friend than initially imagined foe — at least because it makes their work stand out.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
Business Insider’s Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day’s most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
Check my comment to Joe for full text from WaPo
Step 1 – Stop reading WaPo.
Best are probably apprenticeships as Electrician, Plumber, Heavy Construction Equipment Operator.
it is interesting that Dr. Weiner is president of a liberal arts college that added two skill-based programs in the last few years to its curricula: a MS in Physician Assistant studies in 2024 and had their first class of graduating nursing students in 2023. So having or adding degrees with a defined skill set is needed for colleges to survive nowadays. I have worked in a Fortune 500 company and also served as an adjunct professor in academia. I have talked to engineering professors about the need for giving their students some awareness of business acumen so they understand the cost implications of what there are designing, for example. It is often the stove-pipe narrow mentality in each school of a university that causes the problem of having “narrowly conceived disciplines” Weiner talks about. Professors in one school or major department often never talk to professors in other schools to inquire what is going on with their field. No matter what subject, the professors need to make assignments that cause students to broaden the scope of their subject matter so they see the connections and linkages that are normally part of real life. It is not a given that a general liberal arts education will provide students with the curiosity and judgment their need.
I have found that students who work part-time jobs all through high school and college in a variety of settings themselves have a better understanding of what might interest them in college and what people skills they need in the workplace, as well as get feedback on their strengths and areas to work on. I am not sure we can expect today’s college curricula to provide that to students when often times the professors haven’t worked as an employee day in, day out in the field they are instructing. Their consulting jobs aren’t enough to provide them with the in-depth experience that translates to the classroom well for us to see the non-fragmentation of their discipline.
Years ago when I asked a hiring person from a Fortune 500 company what might be some majors for a family member to consider if they wanted to apply to their company, he said something like this, “they need to have a defined area or skill set that gives us options for where to place them within the company such as a function or department. Having a general business degree, such as business administration, or a degree in international studies isn’t enough. They will have a better chance of getting hired with an accounting degree, even if that isn’t what they want to do long term.” I have had too many relatives who had undergraduate degrees in philosophy, English literature or political science who couldn’t find a decent job after graduation and had to do a “retread” with another degree or certificate to make their career workable after a number of years of hitting and missing.
After reading this week’s question, looks like the upcoming generations are going to be professional students.
I have a liberal arts degree (majored in history). One of my college classmates was pre-med, majored in biology, but she minored in sociology because she believed it would help her be a better doctor once she finished medical school and her residency. She’d be a better practitioner if she understood people besides their cells, tendons, organs, etc.
But back then, when I graduated, employers generally didn’t require you to know how to do the job from day one. They expected to have to train you, and that it would take time for you to learn how to do the job. Most didn’t care what you majored in, and being able to read, write clearly, communicate, and to be able to learn was more important.
Today, I’d say that both are important–to have technical skills (if you’re going into tech) as well as being able to write, to communicate, to think critically, etc. These skills complement eachother.
I wish more people took philosophy and/or ethics courses–just because AI is here doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t truly think about the pros and cons of it, as well as how we’re using it.
I wish there was more emphasis on reading in college, but I suppose for that to happen, we have to emphasize reading in secondary school. There was an article in the New York Times a little while back (maybe a month or more ago) about how kids are entering college without having read entire books or articles. If you don’t read, then your writing skills will also be poor.
Quality counts
I look at two of my kids from Smith and Bryn Mawr, coming from a highly technical STEM parents, who got liberal arts degrees but can discuss any aspect of our work at the dinner table cogently.
They are both successful in fields requiring communication skills,both written and spoken.
Memo to parents – you can always google technical stuff up to your intelligence level. You cannot google communication skills.
(From an Ivy League Doctorate in Physics)