Want to Succeed in an AI World? Study Anthropology

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 firm’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AI officer positions, he predicts every C-suite job will ultimately require AI savvy and specialized roles will become outdated.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.

Anthropology

Published on Tue, 09/15/2026 - 10:12