The most fashionable college applicant in America right now is probably a seventeen-year-old who wants to study artificial intelligence.
Not long ago, every admissions office was flooded with aspiring investment bankers. Before that, doctors. Before that, entrepreneurs. Ambitious families have always had a remarkable ability to identify yesterday’s winner and assume tomorrow will look roughly the same.
This year’s version arrives with Python projects, machine learning courses, AI startups, AI nonprofits, AI research papers, AI summer programs, and, increasingly, AI majors.
What’s interesting is not that students are interested in artificial intelligence. They should be. What’s interesting is that many of the institutions evaluating these students seem increasingly interested in something else.
Spend enough time around highly selective admissions and you notice that universities rarely reward a trend simply because it is a trend. In fact, they often become more skeptical as participation becomes more widespread. Scarcity has always mattered in admissions. Once everyone begins optimizing for the same thing, differentiation becomes harder, not easier.
That may help explain one of the tensions emerging beneath the current AI enthusiasm.
Families see a future dominated by technology and conclude that technical expertise will become the most valuable skill. Yet many of the people closest to these systems appear to be arriving at the opposite conclusion.
Earlier this year, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei argued that studying the humanities may become more important, not less, in an AI-driven world. The comment generated surprisingly little discussion, perhaps because it sounded counterintuitive. After all, if machines are increasingly capable of writing, summarizing, analyzing and generating content, wouldn’t that place the humanities directly in the line of fire?
But that assumes the purpose of a humanities education is producing content. Historically, its purpose was something different. It was a training ground for judgment.
For centuries, universities used literature, history, philosophy, religion and political thought to teach students how to interpret ambiguity, evaluate competing arguments, understand human motivation and navigate complexity. These were not vocational disciplines. They were disciplines concerned with how people think.
That distinction feels more relevant today than it did ten years ago.
The technical advantages associated with specialized knowledge are becoming easier to access. The ability to generate information is becoming abundant. What remains stubbornly scarce is the ability to determine which information matters, which conclusions deserve confidence and what should be done next.
Admissions offices seem to understand this instinctively. It is one reason they remain fascinated by students who can write exceptionally well, think independently, connect ideas across disciplines and engage thoughtfully with the world around them. Those traits have always been difficult to measure. They may also prove unusually difficult to automate.
One of the ironies of the AI era is that the more powerful the technology becomes, the more valuable distinctly human judgment appears to be.
We may eventually discover that the great beneficiary of artificial intelligence wasn’t computer science. It was the humanities.
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.
