The Slow Death Of Liberal Arts — 'Not Everyone's Cut Out To Be An Engineer Or Computer Programmer And That's Okay'
For every Anthropology department gasping for oxygen, there are a dozen robust, new business departments.
Tima Miroshnichenko | Pexels Most of us aren’t destined to become billionaires. Unless one’s only goal is to become unspeakably rich, it’s possible to have a deeply rewarding career that also pays the bills.
Realistically, one’s passion may not burn as hot as Mark Zuckerberg’s, and society won’t reward one’s work so lavishly. Still, we can attain the same professional satisfaction as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Zuck.
Ideally, one’s career is a confluence of these four elements:
- Passion for the field
- Talent to perform the work better than most, if not the best
- Open positions in the field
- Good pay
Absent one of these, a worker may:
- Have a highly remunerated career they hate, counting the days until retirement — the miserable big-firm lawyer billing 100 hours a week.
- Kill it in a job that doesn’t pay the bills — the dedicated program manager at a nonprofit that barely keeps the lights on.
- Never succeed in the profession, always passed over for promotions, or looking for work — the cloud engineer with a dense, jargon-filled resume identical to thousands of others.
- Pine away for a foothold in an ultra-competitive field — the middle-aged actor waiting tables, waiting for their big break.
So, how does a high school student without a burning passion find their sweet spot? Try before you buy.
Trade schools typically help students arrange apprenticeships. Colleges and universities facilitate internships. Often, a dose of real-world experience helps students decide if their intended path is for them or for the birds.
The slow death of liberal arts
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Historically, the liberal arts provide college students a few years to explore a wide-ranging curriculum, ideally revealing an unexplored passion. A Bachelor of Arts degree often lacks sufficient specialization and requires students to narrow their focus in graduate school.
Sadly, the liberal arts face extinction. Many schools that offer curricula in the humanities and arts face greater demand for pre-professional majors. For every Anthropology department gasping for oxygen, there are a dozen robust, new business departments.
STEM, STEM, STEM
Everyone knows the big money is in Computers, Engineering, and Information Technology. While it’s true that technology jobs typically pay better than humanities jobs, compensation is only one of the four elements required for a rewarding career.
A student who embarks on a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) career without aptitude or interest in the subject may become a highly-paid, miserable engineer or a computer programmer struggling to find work. Bottom-of-the-barrel workers in any field, even STEM, are not the ones making the big bucks — and sometimes not any bucks.
Yuri A / Shutterstock
A world without the arts
The Kennedy Center Honors is an annual tribute given to those in the performing arts for their lifetime contributions to American culture. In 2024, Francis Ford Coppola, Arturo Sandoval, Bonnie Raitt, and The Grateful Dead were honored.
Artists like previous honorees, Bruce Springsteen, Harrison Ford, and Yo-Yo Ma, are backed by ecosystems with thousands of participants —composers, lyricists, business managers, advance teams, media, journalists, backup performers, set designers, costume designers, photographers, musicians, cinematographers, artists, and caterers, to name but a few.
Imagine if all the unheralded people committed to careers in the arts became software developers instead. Our culture would suffer, and the world would absorb legions of mediocre computer programmers.
AI and the Boomerang Effect
Achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is one of the holy grails of AI. AGI is a type of artificial intelligence that meets or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across various tasks.
For example, an AGI bot might create a novel with greater human insight and better storytelling than Ann Patchett. Anyone who’s read AI-generated stories or books knows that AGI is still a distant dream.
However, present-day AI is remarkably good at solving technical problems. Most STEM workers today have AI in their toolbelts, using it to generate the beginnings of a solution that they craft into something that addresses the specific problem.
Unsurprisingly, AI excels at STEM and struggles with problems requiring humanity. AI will mercilessly eliminate some technical jobs and cull the herds of the bottom-tier workers.
Those with the prescience to follow their hearts and choose humanities jobs will provide therapy, training, and counsel to STEM workers forced to find other careers. Perhaps a revival of liberal arts will become one of AI’s unexpected, marvelous by-products.
David Asch published The Agile Enterprise, a book about applying Agile principles to drive organizational success. David writes an eclectic assortment of articles covering business, careers, humor, politics, finance, movies, and music.