My Liberal Arts Degree Is Better Than Your Law Degree

I have been telling my daughter—loudly, repeatedly, with the confidence of a man who has seen a few economic cycles come and go—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 "aspiring influencer" on the career security index. I've made the speech. You know the one. Learn to code. Consider nursing. Have you thought about the trades? The plumbers and electricians are pulling down six figures while English majors compete for unpaid internships at media companies that won't exist in three years.

I might be completely wrong.

Not about the plumbers—they really will be the new kings, and I'll die on that hill. You cannot outsource a clogged toilet to an LLM. But about my daughter? About what she's actually learning when she studies how humans create and how humans think? I may have had it exactly backwards.

The Useless Degrees

I went to Connecticut College in the late eighties. Theater. English Literature. Philosophy. The holy trinity of unemployable majors. My parents wrote the checks anyway—God bless them—probably lying awake at night 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 racket these days. The skills that seemed to matter were always the quantitative ones—the SQL queries, the attribution models, the ability to sit across from a CFO and discuss pipeline contribution without visibly sweating. Nobody in a performance review ever asked about my thoughts on Heraclitus.

Then I started working with AI. Every day. All day. And something unexpected happened.

The Flat World

Here's the uncomfortable truth that my friends in law and finance don't want to hear: the skills they spent three years and $200,000 acquiring are now available to anyone with a ChatGPT subscription.

Legal research? Contract drafting? Summarizing case law? An AI handles it in seconds—not perfectly, not without human oversight, but well enough that the junior associate billing $400 an hour to do the same work starts to look less like a value-add and more like an expensive habit. Same goes for financial modeling. Market analysis. The entire toolkit of "knowledge work" that defined professional success for fifty years.

The protected guilds are watching their moats evaporate.

But here's what the AI can't do—or can't do without serious human direction. It can't know which question to ask in the first place. It can't sense when an audience is checking out. It can't recognize the moment when a chain of reasoning—however internally consistent—has gone epistemically sideways. It can't tell the difference between an answer that's technically correct and one that's actually useful.

Those skills? The fuzzy ones? The ones I thought were useless?

Turns out they're the whole game.

What Theater Actually Teaches You

Nobody tells you this about studying theater: it's applied psychology with a minor in manipulation.

You learn to read a room—not metaphorically, literally. Where are people looking? When did their attention drift? What happens to the energy when you hold a pause one beat too long? You learn that dialogue isn't about what characters say. It's about what they want from each other. Every line is a tactic. Every scene is a negotiation.

This is prompting.

When I work with Claude or GPT-4, I'm not entering commands into a terminal. I'm shaping a conversation. I'm reading the responses, adjusting my approach, trying different angles when one isn't working. I'm thinking constantly about audience—in this case, an audience of one very capable and very literal-minded system—and crafting inputs that will actually produce the outputs I need.

The people who struggle with prompting, in my experience, have never had to hold a room's attention. They've never felt an audience slipping away and had to pull them back in real time. They think you can just say what you want and the machine will figure it out.

You can't. Communication is a craft. Theater majors know this in their bones.

What Philosophy Actually Teaches You

Heraclitus—one of the pre-Socratics, about 500 BCE—said you cannot step into the same river twice. The water is always moving, always changing. By the time you've named what you're standing in, it's already something else.

This is, more or less, the epistemological situation of working with probabilistic AI systems.

Every interaction is a new river. The same prompt yields different outputs. The context window shifts. The system that worked beautifully yesterday produces nonsense today. If you're expecting deterministic reliability—same input, same output, every time—you're going to have a very frustrating experience.

The Greeks had a framework for this. Plato's dialogues aren't about arriving at the right answer. They're about the process—the dialectic—of getting closer to truth through rigorous questioning. Socrates didn't lecture. He asked. And asked. And asked again. Each question refined the last one. Each answer revealed new gaps to probe.

This is iterative prompting. You're not searching for the answer. You're developing a relationship with the problem.

And epistemology—the branch of philosophy that asks how we know what we claim to know—might be the single most practical thing I studied in college. Because when an AI gives you an answer, the relevant question isn't whether it's correct. The question is: how would I even verify that? What would count as evidence? What are the ways the reasoning might have failed that wouldn't be visible on the surface?

The lawyers and bankers were trained to take inputs and produce outputs. Excellent at execution. But they weren't trained to interrogate the foundations. To ask whether the question itself was well-formed. To notice when their confidence is socially reinforced rather than epistemically justified.

That's what philosophy is for.

The Three Classes

So here's my updated taxonomy of who wins in the AI economy:

The Trades. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs—anyone who works with atoms instead of bits. Their skills don't flatten. They don't commoditize. Software can't fix your toilet. They'll do fine.

The Builders. The engineers and ML researchers who actually make the AI systems work. They'll do better than fine.

And then there's a third group. The one nobody saw coming.

The Liberal Arts Kids. The slackers who spent four years learning how to think instead of what to think. The English majors who can close-read a text and spot the gap between what's said and what's meant. The philosophy majors who know how to trace an argument back to its foundations and test whether they hold. The theater people who understand that every communication is a performance—that getting someone to see what you want them to see is a skill you can practice and improve.

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 humans, and we understand the weird art of bridging the gap between what a system can do and what a person actually needs.

The Apology

To my daughter, finishing her first year at Wake Forest, studying Art and Psychology, learning how humans create and how humans think:

I was wrong. I'm sorry. Keep going.

Art teaches you to make things that didn't exist before—the creative act itself, the skills that AI can amplify but never replace. Psychology teaches you why people do what they do, the messy and irrational and endlessly fascinating machinery of human motivation. Together they're better preparation for whatever's coming than law school or business school or probably anything else I could have told you to study.

The $92,000 isn't wasted. It might be the best money I ever spent.

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

Just sayin'.