Why Study Humanities? The Value of an Arts Degree in the Age of AI

6 days ago

4 min read

As AI reshapes the workplace, tech leaders and Oxford research are proving why studying humanities is a strategic career move—delivering the critical thinking, adaptability, and executive skills modern businesses need most.

Illustration representing humanities and technology, showing a classical bust with digital AI overlays inside a university library.

While educators continue to champion the arts as an integral part of the curriculum, the humanities have seen a steady decline in A-level and University enrolment since the de-coupling of A-levels in 2017 and broader government drives to increase STEM participation since the early 2010s. Yet a growing body of evidence supports the long-term value of these disciplines.

Why Study Humanities in an AI-Driven Job Market?

Given the unprecedented shake up to the workplace by Large Language Models (LLMs), more and more tech founders and CEOs are reminding us that it will be graduates entering the job market with the soft skills typically acquired through studying the humanities that best meet the risks and rewards of the evolving workplace.

Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic and herself an English graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has recently stated that studying the likes of Philosophy, History and Literature will become more appealing to employers in the future: “A lot of these models are actually good at STEM,” she says of new LLMs. “But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human––understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick––I think that will always be really, really important.”

Comments like Amodei’s should bring hope to prospective students who, unfortunately, see a fork in the path between studying the sciences and the humanities.

But whilst debate around AI and the job market has only inflamed recently, Amodei’s argument is nothing new.

In 2014, David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s biggest private equity funds with more than $450 billion assets under management, pointed out that many of Wall Street’s top executives have studied the humanities at university. Far from being ‘worthless’, a humanities degree equips graduates with the problem-solving skills that help them to stand out from their peers in a crowded job market.

Jamie Dimon, the vocal CEO of JPMorgan Chase, says something similar. For him the key to success in the workplace is critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and how well we communicate with others––in other words, the key skills found on resumes by graduates with training in the humanities.

UK University Excellence and Long-Term Career Outcomes

Indeed, the UK is one of the best places in the world to study the likes of English, Art History, and Modern Languages. Four of the top ten best universities in the world for these subjects are based here.

And yet despite the humanities’ evidential value to employers, applications for STEM subjects have continued to rise at unprecedented levels, while applications for the humanities that the UK teaches so well, continue to decline.

In one sense it is easy to appreciate why. The UK has some of the highest wage premiums for STEM graduates. Recent workers with a science background tend to earn 18% more than their average counterpart.

Whilst this might appear attractive to prospective students looking for lucrative careers immediately outside of higher education, research by Oxford University suggests that a degree in the humanities, whilst less financially rewarding in the first years of entering the workforce, will pay off in the long run.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers at Oxford followed the career destinations of more than 9,000 of its humanities graduates, between the ages of 21 and 54.

Their research found not only that humanities students impressively develop ‘resilience, flexibility and skills to adapt to challenging and changing labour markets’, but that the skills developed from the humanities are ‘highly valued and sought by employers’ and that, whilst initial wages might vary depending on the sector you enter, the wages will pay off over the long run.

Indeed this research speaks to an observation made by the psychologist Dr Jim Taylor on the BBC. “If you think of the Zuckerbergs and the Gates and the Sandbergs and all these people who become successful in the tech world,” Taylor says, “it wasn’t because they could code; it was because they could think.”

“In an age of AI,” says Vivienne Stern, the chief executive of Universities UK, “we’ll value the understanding of how humans think and act more, not less, in the future.”

Far from being ‘worthless’, the value of studying the humanities as a foundation from which to build a meaningful career is evident. What is more, it is enriching.

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Blog Post Crafted by Will

Will works on our Admin Team and is also a private tutor. He read English Literature at Cambridge University. He wrote plays for the ADC Theatre, winning the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Prize in 2015. He studied for an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University, before moving to New York City, completing an MFA in Fiction at Columbia University as a Chair’s Fellow. Passionate about literature, Will loves to share his passion for reading and writing with the students he tutors.