“Should my son major in artificial intelligence?”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had some version of that conversation with several families. It’s a perfectly reasonable question. AI dominates the headlines. Universities are rushing to launch new degree programs.
Employers are reorganizing around it. Every week seems to bring another prediction about which careers will disappear and which will define the next generation of wealth.
There’s just one problem. The student asking that question won’t graduate until 2031.
That’s the part I think we forget.
Every admissions cycle, families make enormously consequential educational decisions based on a picture of the economy that is almost certain to change before their child interviews for a first job. We talk about choosing majors, but we’re really making forecasts. Embedded in those conversations is an assumption that today’s headlines offer a reliable map of tomorrow’s labor market.
History suggests otherwise.
Finance, biotechnology, computer science, data science. Today it’s artificial intelligence. None of those were irrational choices, and many led to extraordinary careers. What proved far less reliable was the assumption that the world would continue rewarding those fields in exactly the same way six years later.
Every technological shift creates the same illusion. Because change feels so dramatic in the present, we become convinced we can suddenly see much farther into the future. We mistake momentum for permanence. The latest breakthrough begins to feel less like a moment in history and more like history’s final destination.
One of the unexpected benefits of spending two decades in admissions is that you get to watch this cycle repeat itself. Families aren’t simply choosing colleges or majors. They’re placing long-term bets on a future that has an extraordinary habit of refusing to cooperate.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve become skeptical of certainty. The students who ultimately thrive are rarely the ones who correctly predicted the next great industry at seventeen. More often, they’re the ones who built enough intellectual range to recognize when their prediction was no longer true and the confidence to change course without seeing it as failure.
Parents often ask me which major will best prepare their child for the future.
I understand why. College has never been more expensive, and the stakes have rarely felt higher.
I’m just not convinced the future is the part we’re best equipped to predict.
That’s the six-year problem. Not that families are asking the wrong questions, but that they’re asking them with a level of confidence that history has almost never rewarded.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
