The world is changing quickly. In the 2010s, computer science was considered one of the most “marketable” majors. Nowadays, it has an increasingly high unemployment rate. Philosophy on the other hand, once the caricature of a “useless” major, is now being praised by people like Marco Argenti, the CIO of Goldman Sachs, who stated in April 2024 that future engineers should study philosophy as a supplement to traditional engineering coursework in order to be able to develop “a crisp mental model around a problem” and “debate a stubborn AI.”
Argenti’s commentary illustrates the fact that our economy is changing. The economic model of the last century rewarded specialization and the development of domain-specific skills, like coding. Yet with AI (artificial intelligence), the value of these advantages is diminishing. When mundane tasks are automated, critical thinking, general intelligence, intellectual dexterity, well-roundedness, and other soft skills, such as public speaking, become increasingly important.
Many college graduates have been misled by our higher education system and its emphasis on “majors,” which can cause them to pigeonhole the scope of their potential. Moreover, in my experience, many college students mistakenly view college as a form of trade school and assume that there are jobs directly connected with their majors. University web pages frequently provide information about what types of jobs are available for certain majors. While this information may be helpful in some instances, this framing can limit individuals’ occupational endeavors and lead to an underestimation of the possibilities available to them.
When I studied behavioral science, the science of human decision-making, at the London School of Economics, many of my classmates aspired to secure “behavioral science” jobs—whatever that meant—rather than applying their critical thinking and quantitative skills in actual jobs, such as finance. Students should walk away from university convinced that they can do almost anything, but in practice, it seems that the opposite is true.
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