- Are you feeling lost among the AI slop? You might want to major in English.
- Humanities skills, once undervalued, are now in demand in AI-driven markets.
- Universities are rethinking how they teach liberal arts in the AI age — and students are loving it.
At the University of Colorado Boulder, you can take a course co-taught by an applied mathematician and a Renaissance scholar.
"The students love it," said John-Michael Rivera, the school's dean of arts and humanities, of the class, which is called Inclusive Interdisciplinary Data Science for All.
The class gives STEM students a way to think about the ethics of AI, he said. In other courses, humanities majors can use their skills to evaluate how AI writes, what it means for the practice of writing, and what the "self" means in an AI world.
Rivera credits the creation of courses focusing on the intersection of AI and humanities with a resurgence in student interest in liberal arts degrees like English. Pre-pandemic, the number of English majors at the university was shrinking, part of a broader decline in English across the country, he said. It was a far cry from the days of over 1,500 majors and long waitlists in the early 2000s, according to Rivera. But there's been a rebound, with the number of English majors rising 9% since 2021.
Rivera said students "want to know more about the 'why' these days. And that's what we do in humanities. We really engage in the 'why.'"
Derided by some as useless, the utility of the English major has long been questioned. Who needs to write essays (or articles) anymore in the age of AI? But AI may be more poised to disrupt humanities majors' peers in computer science — an ironic turn of events, considering the perceived career stability of the two fields.
"We are certainly seeing organizations look more towards the soft skills, the accountability of a job, the identity of the person, their style, their empathy — their humanity," in a world that requires both humans and technology, said Bryan Ackermann, head of AI strategy and transformation at recruiting and organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry.
For the English majors, that's all offered some degree of vindication. As the conversation heats up over which skills will be useful in an AI world, one camp argues it's time for ideas, people, and critical thinkers to flourish. That means that, after years of mocking, English majors are finally getting recognized for their usefulness. Some schools are seeing enrollment in the major rise after years of decline; technical recruiters and experts are seeing greater demand for humanities skills. Call it the makeover of the English major.
A triumphant return of English majors
Jessie Hennen directs the creative writing and literature programs at Southwest Minnesota State University, a large public school with a returning and transfer student population.
"They've had jobs, they have experience, and they're just like, we are not letting AI take creative writing away from us," Hennen said. "And I think that has to do with the fact that creative writing is — it's a business, but it's also an art, and arts are imperfect; we do them for human reasons that are not just to make money."
She said that their program has been growing over the last two to three years.
"I would say we're starting to see trends that look really promising for students starting to ask, 'Can the humanities sustain me at a time when everything is moving so quickly?'" Rivera, the dean at the University of Colorado Boulder, said. Those students "really want to reflect what it means to be part of a technological world."
That's also the case at Rice University in Houston, where enrollment in English classes has grown steadily over the last few years and the number of faculty within Creative Writing has nearly doubled, according to Kathleen Canning, the dean of humanities and arts.
One example of an assignment is an English professor who will issue an essay prompt and ask students to compare their own version to one they get from an LLM, and analyze the difference between the two. The aim is to examine what it means to be an interpreter of a prompt — and the power of their own words.
"Students are trying to ascertain how to develop and advance their own capacities while AI appears to do so much for them in these times," Canning said. "The humanities and arts offer them opportunities not only to probe the limits of AI, to grapple with it as an increasingly powerful reality, but to do so critically by advancing their capacities for self-reflection, interpretation, and revision."
Despite these examples, schools across the country are paring back on their humanities offerings or cutting programs completely, and the nationwide number of humanities bachelor's degrees being conferred has fallen from 2010s highs in recent years.
Still, students pursue English out of passion, said Kevin Caffrey, a senior associate registrar at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. His research found that English majors who participated in his survey "illustrated that even with a strong overall awareness of criticisms of the major, they were determined to enroll in the program because it aligned with their interests, personal ideals, and goals for the future."
"What do you need more in a company than someone who knows how to communicate with people at all different levels from all different backgrounds and walks of life? The English majors are primed to do that," Caffrey said.
They're learning to do it as communication changes rapidly. When 23-year-old Margo D. returned from a semester abroad, she noticed something had shifted on campus.
"Many of my peers were using ChatGPT for almost every assignment," Margo, who graduated from a small liberal arts school in 2025 with a double major in English and Earth and Climate Sciences, said. Margo wasn't sold.
"I noticed that my English professors were asking a lot out of my writing, asking for a lot of creativity and an original voice and style, and asking me questions that AI couldn't necessarily grasp the nuance of, and I don't really think it even can now," Margo said. "And so I felt really grateful to be an English major."
Still, it's a dreary labor market for everyone — English majors included
There are signs of employment hope for the English majors.
Daniela Amodei, the cofounder of Anthropic, studied literature in college. In an ABC News interview, she said "the things that make us human will become much more important," and that when her AI company hires, it looks for candidates who are great communicators.
"I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever," Amodei said.
Steve Johnson, the editorial director of NotebookLM, previously told Business Insider that there's what he's deemed a "revenge of the humanities." Philosophical thinking is necessary; some AI firms are even actively seeking out liberal arts graduates.
Still, companies aren't falling over themselves to snap up English majors — hiring overall has slowed to one of the lowest rates in over a decade, and the recent grad unemployment rate has been ticking up.
Early-career humanities and arts graduates had a higher unemployment rate than their peers in other fields, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey by Georgetown researchers.
Joe Kramer, a 2020 English graduate, hasn't worked directly in a related field since he graduated — he worked in a role that relied on automation, and even helped train AI while searching for post-pandemic work.
"I think it's just getting really scary out there for a lot of humanities adjacent stuff, because the level of AI that's out there now, it generates pictures, it crawls all kinds of web forums, and it can oversee thousands of pages and documents at a time while only being run by one person," Kramer said. "So even if AI isn't taking your job, they don't need to hire a lot of people anymore."
Part of some of the general reticence to hire in hiring right now can also be chalked up to an equal-opportunity dismal labor market. It's not just English majors suffering.
Under the hood, the prospects for English majors aren't as dreary, according to the Georgetown analysis. The unemployment rate for those specifically in humanities and liberal arts is still well below the post-2008 Great Recession highs, although it's still higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Korn Ferry's Ackermann said that it's still a "tad early" to fully declare a revenge of the English major, since it's smaller, more nimble firms looking for those with a good command of language, but he predicts that could expand to bigger employers soon.
"Ask me again in a couple of months, and we're going to see that go from smaller, nimble organizations into the larger enterprises as the larger enterprises begin to incorporate AI-driven development tools into their processes," he said.
Giancarlo Hirsch, a managing director at global tech talent partner Glocomms, said he's seen greater willingness to look at candidates from various backgrounds. Candidates with history backgrounds, for example, are making it further into interview processes than they previously would.
"People are not explicitly targeting folks from humanities degrees, but they're really willing to speak with them and open to it and finding reasons to say yes throughout an interview process," Hirsch said.
Daniella LaGaccia, a 37-year-old copywriter and former English literature major, sees AI as a tool — creatives use all sorts of different tools to complement their work, and AI can be one of them. But, if anything, that makes a greater case for the type of creative thinking and knowledge that humanities majors can bring.
"Think about it this way: If you have five different companies who are using the same generative tools to develop their marketing copy, they're all going to get generally the same type of thing," LaGaccia said. "If everybody's using the same tools and everybody's inputting the same information, then how are you going to differentiate yourself in the market? That's where creative people come in."
