College students and workers alike are finding a new set of skills is needed for a rapidly changing workplace.  

A computer-science degree is no longer a golden ticket.  Stanford and MIT graduates are doing just fine, but a stampede of students into this major over the last two decades produced more coders than companies need. Artificial intelligence makes the oversupply even worse. What’s the alternative? Get really good at the stuff machines are lousy at.
For current and prospective college students, and their parents, this might mean avoiding college majors that made sense in a pre-AI world, like computer science, or that were created in response to AI mania. For the rest of us, thinking about what you’d study if you were in college today is a way to identify skills worth developing for the future. And that doesn’t mean focusing on AI itself.

“It’s too narrow,” says Peter Miscovich, an executive managing director at commercial-real-estate giant JLL who advises some of the fi rm’s biggest tenants on future-of-work strategies. While it is trendy for companies to create chief AI officer positions, he predicts every C-suite job will ultimately require AI savvy and specialized roles will become outdated. Likewise, an AI-specific degree could seem antiquated in a decade. “It’s sort of like saying you majored in Excel,” Miscovich says. Instead, it might be time to go back to some of the classic areas of study.

“Human skills remain even more important as AI takes on more complex work and reshapes fields in ways we can’t fully predict,” says Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education.

So I asked a mix of business executives, investors and academics to recommend programs of study. Here are some of their recommendations, for students and the rest of us.

Alec Litowitz majored in math at MIT and went on to earn a law degree and an MBA. Yet the investor who was an early partner at Citadel continually draws on lessons from his second undergraduate major: anthropology.

“The beauty of anthropology for me is that I can telescope out and try to understand what’s happening to society right now,” he says. “I don’t know all the answers, but I have a frame because one of the key skill sets is metacognition. It’s being able to observe a system, and at the same time you are part of the system you’re observing.”

At its core, anthropology is an eff ort to grasp what makes us human. It’s hard to think of a more relevant pursuit when our career prospects hinge on humanity’s value proposition, relative to bots. Just last week, Ernst & Young said it was creating a $100 million bonus pool to reward employees who demonstrate value in ways that can’t be replaced by AI. If you want a piece of pies like this one, it would be useful to know as much about human nature as possible.

In “The Adaptability Quotient,” his book coming out this month, Litowitz argues that much of the knowledge people acquire in college has been commoditized by AI, or will be. He says your time and money are best spent on studies that force you to think critically and understand people because those abilities can help you adapt to change.

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