Reed Hastings Predicts Liberal Arts Will Make a Comeback

Thanks to the rocketship rise of AI and its scrambling of the job market, many people are asking the same question these days: what skills do I need to have a stable career in the future? Turns out a lot of billionaires, including most recently Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, are all giving the same unexpected answer: those you gain from a liberal arts degree.

Why Reed Hastings would urge his child to study the liberal arts

Speaking to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and his chief of staff Aria Finger on the Possible podcast recently, Hastings mused that, if he had a young child today, he wouldn’t push them to study computer science.

“We spent 25 years saying, learn to code. Oops, you know, don’t learn to code,” Hastings said.

Now that AI looks set to take over many technical tasks, what’s becoming more valuable is “the things that are more emotional, how you read people, how you work with them… because they’re much harder for the computers to do.”

Where do you get a solid understanding of all things messy, human, and complex? Liberal arts degrees.

“Maybe what we’ll see is a rotation back to the humanities into understanding the combination of history and literature, but also kind of the physiology of the brain and how we interact with each other,” Hastings continues. “If I had a three-year-old today, I would be, like, doubling down on the emotional skills.”

Billionaires agree with Reed Hastings

Given recent trends, a rebound in the liberal arts is a bold prediction. The number of students pursuing these degrees cratered in the past few decades. So much so, that as recently as 2023 the New Yorker declared “The End of the English Major.” And while there are a few scattered data points showing a modest uptick in students pursuing the liberal arts recently, there is hardly a stampede back into these fields.