Since the Great Recession, liberal arts education has been discussed through a lens of skepticism. Rising tuition costs, shifting student expectations, and an increased focus on career outcomes have placed humanities and social science programs under persistent pressure to justify their practicality and relevance.
At The Parish Group, we’ve long been staunch defenders of the liberal arts, not just because many of us hold liberal arts degrees, but because of what we’ve seen those degrees enable in practice.
And recently, something interesting has begun to shift.
The proliferation of AI is reshaping the nature of work. It’s changing how value is created, distributed, and evaluated across industries, and, in doing so, inadvertently highlighting the value of liberal-arts practicalities.
The skills and experiences that liberal arts education develops—adaptability, critical thinking, storytelling, synthesis, for example—are increasingly being recognized as durable, transferable, and future-relevant capabilities in an AI-driven economy.
Liberal arts institutions now have an amazing opportunity to tangibly showcase how their degrees help students and alums navigate our ever-evolving world of work.
AI ISN’T UNDERMINING LIBERAL ARTS—IT’S REVEALING ITS VALUE
In an interview with ABC News, Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic—who herself studied literature at the University of California—spoke about how humanities-centric skills are something she looks for when hiring for her AI company.
“I ultimately believe in a world where AI is very smart and capable of doing so many things, the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important,” she said. “And what I mean by that is when we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious, who want to help other people, because at the end of the day, people still really like interacting with people.”
Her point highlights an important aspect of the current moment: there is a real and growing distinction between what AI can master and what people inherently excel at.
AI can process information at scale, identify patterns across vast datasets, and generate outputs in seconds. It can summarize, translate, classify, and recombine information at a speed and level of consistency that far exceeds human capacity. In many contexts, it is increasingly effective at work that is structured, repeatable, and rules-based.
People, however, are still responsible for determining what matters in the first place. They decide which questions are worth asking, how problems should be framed, and what context is necessary for information to become meaningful. Human contribution shows up in judgment under uncertainty, in interpreting nuance rather than simply producing output, in communicating ideas across different audiences, and in applying ethical reasoning when there is no purely technical “right answer.”
As AI systems take on more of the work of production and analysis, human value increasingly concentrates in interpretation, prioritization, and sensemaking. The question is less about what can be generated, and more about what should be done with what is generated—and why it matters in a broader human context.
THE AI BOOM IS MAKING THIS SHIFT VISIBLE IN THE LABOR MARKET
From November 2024 to November 2026, LinkedIn data shows that job postings in the U.S. that include the term “storyteller” doubled, to about 50,000 listings under “marketing” and more than 20,000 under “media and communications.” Similarly, executives used “storyteller” or “storytelling” on earnings calls 469 times in 2025, versus 359 times in 2024 (and 147 in 2015), according to FactSet data.
Why? Because of AI. AI can write competent narratives. People, however, are the ones who can design compelling stories.
Students seem to have been taking note. While liberal arts majors have declined for most of the 2000s, that’s recently started to shift at some institutions. UC Berkeley saw a nearly 50% increase in arts and humanities majors over the past four years, and community colleges are seeing similar increases.
At the same time, routine forms of knowledge work are becoming steadily automated or consolidated by AI systems. It used to be that when corporations made cuts, it was often marketing and HR—where a lot of liberal arts majors landed—that were cut, but increasingly, engineers and programmers are being AI-ed out of jobs. A Washington Post analysis found that more than a quarter of all computer programming jobs, for example, have vanished over the past two years, challenging assumptions about which careers are truly “future-proof”—according to LinkedIn’s Work Change Report, 30% of the skills required for the average job are expected to change by 2030 because of AI.
As a result, career paths themselves are becoming less linear, something many liberal arts majors have always navigated.
Rather than planning to move through clearly defined professional tracks, the savvy move might be to pursue studies that foster adaptability, synthesis, the ability to move across contexts, and the exercise of judgment in constantly changing systems.
WHAT THIS MOMENT REQUIRES FROM INSTITUTIONS
As the external environment shifts, institutions have an opportunity to make clearer connections between academic disciplines and the capabilities they develop.
This does not require changing what liberal arts education is. It requires greater explicitness about how it functions in a changing world.
A philosophy program, for example, develops structured reasoning and ethical analysis in environments defined by ambiguity (creating AI guidelines is a great example of this). English programs develop communication, interpretation, and narrative construction in contexts where meaning matters as much as information (see the aforementioned business success of “storytelling”). Sociology and history develop systems thinking and contextual analysis that are increasingly relevant in complex, data-rich environments (showcase how understanding past systems helped individuals create new ones).
Again, these are not new outcomes. But for a long time, they weren’t framed through outcomes at all. Think about how liberal arts have been described for so long: broad terms like “well-rounded education” or similar language that emphasizes breadth over specificity.
The opportunity is not to reposition liberal arts education around AI. It is to better reflect how its existing strengths have always enabled graduates to navigate and contribute to changing professional landscapes.
Liberal Arts Education Was Built for This Moment
The AI revolution is not diminishing the value of liberal arts education. It is revealing what has always been most valuable about it: the ability to exercise human judgment in situations where the answer is not predefined.
As AI systems increasingly take on production, analysis, and pattern recognition at scale, the most important work in organizations is shifting upstream—toward interpretation, prioritization, communication, and ethical decision-making.
These shifts don’t require a liberal arts education to become something new. But they do change what becomes visible and legible about its outcomes. For higher education leaders, the implication is less about repositioning the degree itself and more about how clearly its capabilities connect to the realities students are entering. The institutions that can make those connections explicit—between disciplines, skills, and modern forms of work—will be the ones that help students (and families) better understand where value is already being created.
Wondering about the best way to market a liberal arts education in our current environment? We’ve got you covered. Check out our “How to Market a Liberal Arts Education in 2026” for insights from The Parish Group team.
