In the age of AI, human skills are the new advantage

In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), why should anyone study the liberal arts? Liberal arts enrollments in higher education are in free fall: according to one source, the number of humanities students in US higher education is down 17% over the past decade. Dozens of liberal arts programmes have shuttered, as have several liberal arts colleges.

This is widely attributed to two factors: broadly, the perception that majors like history, philosophy and sociology are not “useful”; and specifically, that the rise of AI, with sophisticated language and communication skills, is obviating the need for students to develop these abilities in the same way.

The first critique remains hollow. For more than two thousand years, the liberal arts have given people the agency to take action and shape their own futures. That’s where the name comes from: the Latin term artes liberales literally means “arts for free people.” Its various disciplines promote human freedom by helping people understand the physical, biological and human worlds – in other words, why things are as they are.

Today, we tend to associate the liberal arts with universities and discrete academic majors. But originally, the liberal arts were not postsecondary content; they were the foundational capacities young people needed to become self-governing humans. What we now refer to as noncognitive skills – analytical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration and resilience – are simply the modern vocabulary for the same human capabilities the liberal arts have always aimed to cultivate. The terminology has changed; the purpose has not.

The liberal arts also teach students to navigate the three worlds — how to get things done. They have evolved over the centuries into a curriculum focused on broad knowledge, critical analysis, argumentation and deep thinking about complexity. Traditionally, students learn these skills through sustained attention to texts and the hard intellectual labour of writing.

This is precisely why the impact of AI on liberal arts instruction has been so disorienting, and why the second critique rings true. In addition to the physical, biological and human worlds, AI has now introduced a fourth, digital world that impacts all the others. As a tool, AI automates analysis, argumentation and hard intellectual labour. Any student who wishes to avoid the deep engagement with texts required to write college-level assignments can do so, losing the “why” they would have gained through reading and writing.

But that’s not all: as an agentic entity, AI also threatens to replace “how” graduates will navigate the labour market by producing intellectual work on its own. In both ways, AI is a threat to human agency.

This tension is not confined to higher education. Primary and secondary education systems are wrestling with it as well. For generations, schools assumed that reading, writing and discussion would naturally produce the habits of mind associated with the liberal arts. Yet AI now performs many of the tasks through which young people once developed persistence, reasoning and independent thought. The challenge is no longer whether we value human skills – it is whether our current mechanisms can still produce them.

Should this spell the end of the liberal arts? Only if colleges continue to rely on reading as the main vehicle for students to acquire knowledge and writing as their main catalyst for understanding. In the face of AI’s talents – and the intellectual shortcuts it offers – higher education needs another mechanism for students to acquire what 19th-century educator Cardinal Newman called “a clear conscious view of [their] own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them…to master any subject with facility.” In other words, we need an updated model for teaching students how to think with rigour, depth and originality, and to act with wisdom and efficacy.

That updated model already exists: it is experience. Sustained internships, immersion in professional and community settings, global experiences, student research and entrepreneurship provide the lived contexts through which young people practice the liberal arts – not by describing the world, but by acting in it. These experiences require the same reasoning, communication, creativity and ethical judgement that the liberal arts were designed to produce, except now they are developed through doing rather than solely through reading and writing.

This is the premise that has guided the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) for nearly four decades. Founded in 1987 by educator and entrepreneur Steve Mariotti, NFTE emerged from a simple, but profound insight he reached while teaching struggling students: when young people see purpose in what they are learning, they do more than absorb information – they engage, persist and begin to imagine futures they can own.

Mariotti noticed that entrepreneurship had a unique power to unlock this agency. Business concepts that felt abstract in textbooks – profit, cost, value, innovation – suddenly became meaningful when students used them to solve problems they cared about. What began as an effort to teach academic content through entrepreneurial thinking evolved into a broader developmental vision: entrepreneurship could be a delivery system for the very capacities once cultivated by the liberal arts – analysis, communication, creativity, collaboration and disciplined judgement.

Over time, NFTE’s work has expanded from a single classroom innovation into a global network of educators, business leaders and community organizations who share this belief. Today, NFTE partners with schools and nonprofits across the United States and around the world, providing young people with the chance to design ventures, test ideas, pitch solutions and engage with mentors who expect rigour, resilience and clarity of thought.

In NFTE settings, students are not told to think critically – they must think critically to get anything done. They are not lectured on collaboration – they collaborate because no one can build a business alone. In this way, NFTE does not replace the liberal arts; it operationalizes them. It turns abstract ideals into practiced habits, ensuring that the human capabilities our education systems have long prized are not left to chance but intentionally cultivated through real-world experience.

This reframing of entrepreneurship as a developmental pathway is not limited to the United States. Around the world, educators are adopting similar models that use real-world experience to cultivate the very skills AI cannot replicate.

In Switzerland, the Swiss Center for Entrepreneurial Thinking and Acting (scETA) embeds human-skills development into its national dual education system through its myidea learning programme, where students launch sustainable entrepreneurial projects, solve real problems and iterate on ideas that matter to them. These projects do not occur in isolation; they are woven into Switzerland’s broader vocational-education model, where young people split their time between classroom learning and applied work experiences. In that context, entrepreneurship becomes a developmental bridge – helping students connect what they know to what they can do – and ensuring that the human capacities once cultivated through the liberal arts are not left to chance, but intentionally practiced through real-world challenges.

The same pattern is emerging in Israel, where Unistream operates 22 entrepreneurship centres serving young people from underserved communities. Founded on the belief that entrepreneurship can narrow socioeconomic gaps, Unistream blends business training, applied learning and mentorship from industry leaders. In a country where ongoing instability has disrupted daily life and heightened uncertainty, skills like creativity, resilience, and analytical thinking are no longer optional – they are essential for helping young people adapt, persist and chart their futures.

Entrepreneurship education, in this context, functions as both a developmental engine and a stabilizing force. Students build ventures, collaborate with business professionals and apply ideas to real problems, gaining confidence through action rather than abstraction.

This experiential practice also shapes how young people encounter AI: instead of using it as a shortcut, Unistream teaches them to understand, interrogate, and apply AI responsibly — strengthening critical thinking, digital literacy and ethical judgment. The result is a model in which entrepreneurship becomes a modern apprenticeship for agency, cultivating human capacities that AI cannot replicate, including creativity under constraint, persistence in ambiguity, and the ability to act when no clear answers exist.

Some students will still benefit from the rigours of a traditional liberal arts curriculum based on sustained engagement with texts. They will willingly forgo the intellectual shortcut of AI, much as people at the gym forgo the use of levers or hydraulics to lift weights. But for many others, experience will prove a more effective means of understanding the world and taking agency within it. It’s time to bring more of it to higher education.

AI has accelerated a reality that education has been slow to confront: information no longer differentiates people – agency does. The abilities to ask better questions, navigate ambiguity, empathize and turn ideas into action are not extracurricular; they are the defining competencies of our era. The liberal arts articulated this purpose centuries ago. Our responsibility now is to deliver it through updated means. The schools that rise to this challenge will not merely prepare students for the future. They will equip them to shape it.