SVB crisis: Why biz world should worry about the decline of liberal arts

Most companies will have to grapple with the question of establishing the right division of labor between knowledge workers and intelligent machines

By Adrian Wooldridge

Liberal arts students are in danger of joining the one quarter of species that may be extinct by the end of this century. In the United States, the number of students taking English or history at college has fallen by a third over the past decade. Across the 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, four-fifths report that humanities enrollment is falling. From a purely economic point of view, getting a PhD in the humanities these days is only marginally more sensible than taking up smoking crack.

A recent New Yorker article, Nathan