My Liberal Arts Degree Is Better Than Your Law Degree

I have been telling my daughter — loudly, repeatedly, and with the confidence of a man who has seen a few economic cycles — that her $92,000 Wake Forest tuition is money down the drain.

She's studying Art and Psychology. Two disciplines that, by the traditional calculus of parental anxiety, rank somewhere between "podcast host" and "professional Instagrammer" on the career security scale. I've made the speech about learning to code. I've forwarded the articles about trades — the plumbers and electricians who are pulling down six figures while college grads drown in debt and compete for unpaid internships at media companies that won't exist in five years.

I might be completely wrong.

Not about the plumbers — they really will be the new kings, and I stand by that. You can't outsource a clogged toilet to an LLM. But about my daughter, about what she's actually learning, about the strange alchemy of studying how humans create and how humans think — I may have had it exactly backwards.

The Confession

I went to Connecticut College in the late eighties. Theater. English Literature. Philosophy. By any reasonable measure, the holy trinity of unemployable degrees. My parents — bless them — wrote the checks anyway, probably wondering what exactly one does with a deep familiarity with Platonic dialogues and the staging conventions of Jacobean revenge tragedy.

For most of my career, I wondered the same thing. I fell into advertising, then data, then martech, then whatever we're calling the enterprise software business these days. The skills that seemed to matter were the quantitative ones — the SQL queries, the attribution models, the ability to sit in a room with a CFO and talk about pipeline with a straight face. The philosophy degree didn't come up in performance reviews.

Then I started working with AI every day. And something strange happened.

The Inversion

Here is the uncomfortable truth that my lawyer friends and my investment banker friends don't want to hear: the skills they spent three years and $200,000 acquiring are now available to anyone with a $20 ChatGPT subscription.

Legal research? Summarizing case law? Drafting contract language? An AI can do it in seconds — not perfectly, not without oversight, but well enough that the junior associate billing $400 an hour to do the same work is starting to look like an expensive habit rather than a value-add. The same goes for financial modeling, market analysis, the entire arsenal of "knowledge work" that defined professional success for the last fifty years.

The world is flat now. The protected guilds are losing their moats.

But here's what AI can't do, or at least can't do without significant human direction: it can't know what question to ask. It can't sense when an audience is losing interest. It can't recognize when a chain of logic — however internally consistent — has gone off the rails epistemologically. It can't tell the difference between an answer that's technically correct and one that's actually useful.

Those skills — the ones I thought were useless — turn out to be the whole game.

What Theater Actually Taught Me

Here's a thing nobody tells you about studying theater: it's really a course in applied psychology with a minor in manipulation.

You learn to read a room — not metaphorically, literally. Where are people looking? When did you lose them? What's the energy shift when you pause a beat too long, or not long enough? You learn that dialogue isn't about what characters say; it's about what they're trying to get from each other. Every line is a tactic. Every scene is a negotiation.

This turns out to be exactly what prompting is.

When I'm working with Claude or ChatGPT, I'm not typing commands into a terminal. I'm shaping a conversation. I'm adjusting my approach based on what's working and what isn't. I'm thinking about audience — in this case, an audience of one very powerful and very literal-minded system — and crafting my inputs to produce the outputs I actually need. The people who are bad at prompting are, in my experience, the people who have never had to hold a room's attention or sense when they're losing it.

What Philosophy Actually Taught Me

Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. The water is always moving, always changing — by the time you've named it, it's already something else.

This is, more or less, the problem of working with probabilistic AI systems. Every interaction is a new river. The same prompt produces different outputs. The context window shifts. The system that worked yesterday produces garbage today. If you're expecting deterministic reliability — the same input always yields the same output — you're going to have a bad time.

But the Greeks had a framework for this. Platonic reasoning isn't about finding the one right answer; it's about the dialectic process of getting closer to truth through rigorous questioning. You propose, you test, you refine, you propose again. The Socratic method — that annoying habit of answering every question with another question — turns out to be exactly the right mental model for iterative prompting. You're not looking for the answer; you're developing a relationship with the problem.

And epistemology — the philosophy of knowledge, the study of how we know what we know — might be the single most useful thing I learned in college. Because when an AI gives you an answer, the question isn't whether the answer is correct. The question is: how would I even know? What would count as evidence? Where might the reasoning have gone wrong, even if the surface logic looks clean?

The lawyers and bankers I know were trained to take inputs and produce outputs. They're excellent at execution. But they were never taught to interrogate the foundations — to ask whether the question itself was the right question, whether the framework they're using is the appropriate framework, whether their confidence is epistemically justified or just socially reinforced.

That's philosophy. That's what my parents were paying for, even if none of us knew it at the time.

The Sleeper Class

So here's my new taxonomy of economic winners in the AI era:

First, the trades. The plumbers and electricians and HVAC technicians who work with atoms, not bits. Their skills cannot be flattened by software. They'll do fine.

Second, the builders. The people who can actually make the AI systems work — the engineers and the ML researchers and the infrastructure people. They'll do better than fine.

But there's a third group, and it's the one nobody saw coming: the slacker liberal arts majors who spent four years learning how to think rather than what to think. The English majors who learned to close-read a text and spot the gaps between what's said and what's meant. The philosophy majors who learned to follow an argument to its foundations and test whether those foundations hold. The theater kids who learned that every communication is a performance, that every audience is a puzzle, that getting someone to see what you want them to see is a craft that can be studied and improved.

We're the ones who know how to drive these machines. Not because we understand the technology — we mostly don't — but because we understand the humans who use the technology, and we understand the subtle art of bridging the gap between what a system can do and what a person actually needs.

The Apology

So: to my daughter, currently finishing her first year at Wake Forest, studying Art and Psychology, learning how humans create and how humans think — I'm sorry.

I was wrong. You're learning exactly the right things.

Art is about making something that didn't exist before, about the creative act itself, about the skills that AI can augment but never replace. Psychology is about understanding why people do what they do — the messy, irrational, beautifully complicated machinery of human motivation and perception. Together, they're a better preparation for the AI era than law school or business school or probably anything else I could have recommended.

The $92,000 isn't money down the drain. It might be the best investment I've ever made.

Though I'm still right about the plumbers. Learn to fix a toilet, and you'll never go hungry.