The Rush to STEM and AI Might Not Be the Best Bet for Your Child: A Letter to Parents

Dear Parents,

I know the dread that is keeping many of you awake right now. It is the fear that artificial intelligence is taking over the world faster than anyone can follow, that the jobs you once pictured for your children may not exist by the time they are grown, and that you are being asked to choose where your child should go to college, and what they should study, with no way of knowing what the world will ask of them. You are not wrong to feel it. I want to speak to that fear directly, because I would rather meet it head on than let it sit.

You are hearing the same advice from every direction: push them toward STEM, toward computer science, toward anything technical, and treat the humanities as a sentimental indulgence you can no longer afford. I understand the worry behind that counsel. I am a parent too, and I am raising a child through this very moment. But I am writing to tell you, as gently and as firmly as I can, that the advice is backward.

Let me give you the picture as it actually stands. American higher education is shrinking, the result of a birth rate that fell after 2008, and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that enrollment will drop about 13 percent through 2041, with a wave of college closures already underway. In response, families have fled the humanities. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that humanities degrees fell roughly 16 percent between 2012 and 2020, even as engineering and health degrees rose more than 56 percent. The instinct to herd every child toward STEM and AI looks like the safe choice. It is the opposite, and the shrinking itself should worry us, because higher education, with the humanities at its center, is where young people have always learned to think clearly, judge wisely, and become whole. To hollow that out now, at the very moment artificial intelligence makes those capacities decisive, is to take from our children the one thing they will need most. If we lose it, where will the next generation learn to be wise rather than merely capable? We do not need it less in this new era. We need it more than we ever have.

“We do not need it less in this new era. We need it more than we ever have.”

Here is what the instinct misses. The work AI does best is precisely the routine, technical work everyone is rushing toward. What it cannot do is exercise judgment, weigh competing goods, persuade, or decide what is worth doing at all. When the World Economic Forum surveyed more than a thousand large employers, the most valued skill was not coding but analytical thinking, followed by resilience, leadership, and creative thinking, and its conclusion was blunt: the strongest candidates pair technical ability with the human skills a machine cannot copy. Even the technical degree is no longer the shield it once was. For the class of 2026, a diploma has become valuable and yet, on its own, no longer enough to secure the first job.

Now consider the part I most want you to hear, because it comes from the people with the least reason to flatter the humanities. The companies building this technology are themselves hiring philosophers. Google DeepMind and Anthropic are recruiting them to confront questions their engineers cannot settle alone. Anthropic hired the philosopher Joe Carlsmith, whose work concerns the moral status of AI, and stood up a dedicated research program to study whether the machines themselves might one day warrant moral consideration. The field leans on thinkers like David Chalmers, among the most respected philosophers of mind alive today. Sit with what that means. The most advanced engineering effort in human history reached a point where code was not enough and turned to people trained in ethics and the examined life, because it had built systems that can reason without being able, on their own, to reason well about right and wrong. Even Anthropic's cofounder Daniela Amodei, who studied literature, says plainly that critical thinking will only grow more important, not less. The frontier of technology is now hiring for the very capacities we are tempted to let our children abandon.

Think, too, about something as plain as scarcity. If every family makes the same bet and pours its children into STEM and AI, the people who can reason ethically, remember history, and ask the human questions will become rare, and rare things grow valuable. While the crowd runs in one direction, a gap opens in the other. The young person who brings moral judgment and a clear sense of what a technology is actually for will be scarce at the very moment the world, and the machines, need that most. The future does not need more sameness. It needs the human conscience that keeps the machines, and the people who run them, pointed at something worth doing.

So here is what I hope you take from this letter. Do not make your child choose between the technical and the human. The students who will thrive are the ones who carry both: who can code and also write, who understand systems and also history, who can use these astonishing tools and also ask whether they should. By all means, teach your child to use AI, and teach them early and well; it is part of how I work with students. But understand what makes it work. A model only produces something worthwhile when the person directing it has the judgment to aim it at the right outcome. Give it a vague mind and it returns vague results; give it a trained one and it returns something real. The capacity to guide the tool is precisely what a humanities education builds. So let your child learn the technology, and make sure they also learn to think, to read deeply, and to reason about right and wrong. That combination is not the soft option. In the years ahead it is the safe one.

And there is something larger at stake than a first job. A child taught only to compute, and never to wonder or to feel or to question, learns to think like the machine instead of learning to lead it. If we let the humanities slip away, we will raise a generation fluent in the tools and strangers to themselves. We cannot make that trade for our children. They do not need the technical or the humane. They need both.