Why Liberal Arts Education Matters More Than Ever
Why Liberal Arts Education Matters More Than Ever: A Christian Perspective in the Age of AI
In a paradox that would have delighted the medieval scholastics, artificial intelligence (the technology many assumed would render liberal arts obsolete) may actually be proving its indispensability. As Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered, recently admitted, his MBA from Wharton was "a waste of time" compared to his undergraduate liberal arts degree: "I learned how to think at university, and for the 40 years since those skills have been degraded" by routine business tasks. Now, with AI handling technical functions, he says, those liberal arts skills have become invaluable again. This counterintuitive reality offers Christian families a fresh lens for understanding what liberal arts education (particularly in the fine arts) actually accomplishes.
The case for liberal arts from a Christian perspective rests on theological bedrock older than the medieval universities that preserved it. When Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1877 that "each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells," he was articulating a profound truth about Creation: everything God made expresses its unique essence. Hopkins's poem "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" moves from observing nature (kingfishers catching light, stones ringing in wells) to a stunning Christological vision:
"the just man justices… Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men's faces."
This is the heart of Christian liberal arts: studying Creation reveals the Creator, and understanding the Creator illuminates human purpose.
This tradition traces back fifteen centuries. Augustine elevated the liberal arts from "merely useful to the mystical" by teaching they "lead the mind to God." Medieval monasteries preserved civilization itself through copying manuscripts, teaching the seven liberal arts (the trivium of grammar, logic, rhetoric and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) as pathways to wisdom. Thomas Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, demonstrating that "reason and faith cannot contradict each other, because they come from the same divine source." As Wheaton College's faculty articulate today: "With the apostle Paul, we believe that all things were created through Christ and for Christ, in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17). Therefore, learning is a form of worship for us."
Yet liberal arts education faces an existential crisis. Humanities degrees dropped from 17.2% of bachelor's degrees in 1967 to just 4.4% by 2018. Between 2012 and 2020, liberal arts enrollment declined 46% at major universities. West Virginia University eliminated 28 majors in 2023, including entire world languages departments, citing budget deficits and workforce development priorities. Parents understandably ask: why invest in an English or art degree when engineering pays $78,700 starting versus $40,300 for liberal arts graduates?
But this question reveals a category error—judging liberal arts solely by immediate economic return while ignoring both long-term career trajectories and deeper human formation. The economic data actually supports liberal arts: by age 40, humanities and social science majors reach earnings parity with STEM fields, and Georgetown's 40-year ROI analysis shows liberal arts colleges deliver $918,000 median return—25% higher than all colleges' $723,000 median. More tellingly, 93% of employers prioritize critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving (precisely what liberal arts cultivates) over technical skills. One in twelve Fortune 500 CEOs holds a liberal arts degree, including leaders of Starbucks, YouTube, and Disney.
The AI revolution reinforces this value paradoxically. As Noam Chomsky argues, ChatGPT's "deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case...but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case." AI is fundamentally a language predictor—it generates the most statistically likely text continuation. It cannot stray from the norm, propose genuinely new ideas, or exercise ethical judgment. A Scripps College thesis concluded: "ChatGPT's limitations—particularly its inability to think critically—prevent it from replacing real liberal arts work, which involves questioning, critique, and re-examination."
Research confirms AI cannot replicate empathy, creativity rooted in personal experience, ethical reasoning, or contextual adaptability. World Economic Forum data shows 83% of employees believe AI makes uniquely human skills even more critical. The very skills liberal arts develops (what one CEO called "the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes") become premium competencies as AI commoditizes routine cognitive work.
Learning to Love Through Learning to See
For Christian families, the case goes deeper than career preparation. A Liturgy for Students & Scholars in Every Moment Holy captures what's at stake:
"May I learn to love learning, O Lord, for the world is yours, and all things in it speak (each in their way) of you."
This isn't pious decoration on an otherwise secular education. It's the whole point.
Christian higher education at its best isn't merely about accumulating information or sharpening analytical skills, though both matter. It's about cultivating a way of seeing that recognizes the interconnectedness of all things under God's creative and sustaining hand. When a photography student learns to perceive how light reveals form, when a literature student traces the arc of redemption through a novel, when a music student discovers mathematical patterns in Bach's fugues, they're not just mastering their disciplines. They're learning to see the fingerprints of the Creator in every quark and quandary, every quotient and quatrain.
This kind of seeing transforms how we love. The liturgy continues:
"As I apply myself to learning, may I be mindful that all created things are your creative expression, that all stories are held within your greater story, and that all disciplines of order and design are a chasing after your thoughts."
When students understand that studying biology means tracing God's intricate design in cellular structures, that analyzing historical injustice means wrestling with the fall's consequences and redemption's demands, that creating art means participating in God's own creative nature, education becomes formation. It shapes not just what they know but who they are and how they love.
This is the imperative for parents whose children have been taught to think critically and weigh matters carefully. If you've raised a child who asks hard questions, who doesn't accept easy answers, who wants to understand the world deeply, then Christian liberal arts education isn't a luxury but a necessity. These students need an environment where their questions are welcomed, where doubt and faith can coexist in tension, where the life of the mind is celebrated as worship rather than treated as a threat.
The liturgy prays:
"Give me a deepening knowledge of truth and a finer discernment of the ideas I encounter in my studies. Guard my mind always against error, and guard also my heart against the temptation to compare my own performance to the work of my peers, and so to fall into either of the twin traps of shame or pride."
This is formation that secular education cannot provide. It acknowledges that intellectual growth without character development produces clever fools at best and dangerous ones at worst. Christian higher education aims at the whole person: mind, heart, and will aligned toward loving God and neighbor more fully.
Consider what happens when this integration succeeds. Students don't just learn photography; they learn to see others as image-bearers worthy of dignity in their frame. They don't just study literature; they develop empathy for experiences utterly unlike their own. They don't just master music theory; they create beauty that points beyond itself to Beauty himself. As the prayer concludes:
"Let me be in this school, even in small ways, a bearer of love and light and reconciliation; which is to say, let me in humility be your child."
This is why statistics about starting salaries miss the point entirely. Yes, liberal arts graduates earn well over their careers. Yes, they develop adaptable skills employers value. But the deeper return on investment is a life oriented toward truth, beauty, and goodness; a mind trained to perceive God's glory in unexpected places; a heart expanded to love more widely and more deeply. These outcomes resist quantification, but parents know their worth.
The Arts as Theological Practice
Fine arts education addresses what Lancaster Bible College calls "the human pursuit of the eternal through cultural expressions." When students paint, compose music, or analyze literature, they're not merely developing marketable skills. They're engaging fundamental questions: What is beauty? Why do we suffer? What does human flourishing look like? How do we image God through creativity? As scholars at Public Discourse have observed, "At its best, the practice of writing well or producing art is a kind of co-creation of beauty, or a discernment of the order of truth...And this is something that we not only have an ability but also a desire to do." C.S. Lewis insisted God "makes no appetite in vain." Our hunger for beauty, truth, and meaning points beyond itself to transcendent realities.
This is why Francis Schaeffer argued "a Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself." The arts train students to perceive what Hopkins called "inscapes," the God-given essences of created things. This contemplative attention is spiritual discipline, not luxury. It develops the capacity to see truly, beyond surfaces to the divine patterns beneath.
But this seeing must include the courage to examine our own tradition with honesty. Rusty Hawkins, Dean of the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University, has demonstrated through his historical research how sincere faith divorced from rigorous thinking and critical examination can produce grave injustice. His work reminds us that even deeply held convictions, even those we believe are grounded in Scripture, demand scrutiny and humility. We must be willing to ask hard questions about how our cultural assumptions shape our biblical interpretations.
True Christian liberal arts education develops both devotion and critical consciousness, both love for tradition and willingness to examine its failures. This is the "through, not around" principle in action. We don't grow by avoiding difficult questions or uncomfortable histories. We grow by facing them honestly, wrestling with complexity, acknowledging where the church has failed, and refusing to repeat those failures. This requires both humility (recognizing we might be wrong) and conviction (holding fast to Scripture's authority as we work toward right understanding). It means learning to distinguish between timeless biblical truth and cultural prejudice dressed in theological language.
This integration of faith and critical thinking isn't weakness. It's maturity. It's what Paul meant when he urged believers to "test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). It's what the liturgy prays for when it asks:
"Guard my mind always against error, and guard also my heart against the temptation to compare my own performance to the work of my peers, and so to fall into either of the twin traps of shame or pride."
Christian liberal arts education creates space for students to ask the hardest questions precisely because we trust that all truth is God's truth, that honest inquiry strengthens rather than threatens genuine faith, and that Christ is Lord over every discipline and every difficult corner of human history.
The Liberating Arts collection makes this accessible to parents: liberal arts aren't elitist luxuries but "for everyone," addressing persistent questions through engagement with great books, enduring questions, and formation in virtues (humility, generosity, courage, tenacity) that accompany "mature love of truth." Contemporary evangelical institutions like Wheaton, Calvin, Biola, and Anderson University maintain this vision, training students in what Wheaton calls "highly marketable skills" while simultaneously cultivating "curiosity about creation, a love for great books, an appetite for truth and beauty, a lifelong passion for the life of the mind."
Excellence in Action: The Anderson University Approach
At Anderson University, we've learned that the conversation doesn't end with lofty ideals about liberal arts education. It begins there, then moves immediately to the practical question every parent asks: "But will my student get a job?" Our answer is yes, precisely because of how we approach liberal arts education, not in spite of it.
What distinguishes institutions like AU is our refusal to choose between formation and function, between contemplation and competence. In the South Carolina School of the Arts, students don't just study theory. They log hours in studios, labs, and performance spaces. They work with real clients, build actual portfolios, collaborate across disciplines, and develop the kind of technical mastery that employers recognize immediately. This is time on task, the unglamorous but essential work of becoming excellent at your craft.
A photography student doesn't just learn to see light metaphorically. They master exposure, composition, editing software, client communication, business practices, and yes, the ethical and theological dimensions of representing human beings made in God's image. A theatre student doesn't only explore dramatic literature. They build sets, run sound boards, memorize lines, collaborate under pressure, and discover how disciplined creativity serves both art and audience. This is what we mean by excellence in action: the liberal arts aren't esoteric when they're embodied in craft, practiced daily, and deployed in service of real human needs.
Our faculty model this integration themselves. They're active practitioners in their fields (photographers shooting professionally, musicians performing, designers working with clients) while also engaging scholarship that advances their disciplines. But their primary calling is teaching, and this matters more than rankings often suggest. Students benefit from mentors who are present, accessible, invested in their individual growth rather than viewing them as assistants for research projects. This mentorship creates the conditions for students to ask hard questions, make mistakes in safe environments, receive honest critique, and develop both their skills and their character.
This is also why we need to acknowledge something often missing from higher education conversations: college isn't the only worthy path. The skilled trades offer dignified, well-compensated work that serves essential human needs. An electrician or HVAC technician who loves their work and serves their community with integrity is living out their vocation every bit as fully as an artist or scholar. The question isn't whether everyone should attend college, but whether those who do (particularly those drawn to the arts and humanities) are receiving an education that forms them wholly: technically proficient, theologically grounded, and practically prepared for meaningful work.
What we've found at AU is that when you combine rigorous liberal arts formation with intensive practical training, you don't produce dreamers who can't function in the real world. You produce graduates who enter their fields already competent, who adapt as industries change, who bring both skill and wisdom to their work, and who understand their careers as callings rather than just paychecks. They're real estate photographers and graduate students, wedding photographers and commercial specialists, filmmakers and brand strategists. They're not just entering the market; they're shaping it with creativity, ethical grounding, and adaptable expertise.
The Practical Case for Formation
For parents weighing their children's educational paths, the question isn't "Will an art degree get my child a job?" but "What kind of person do I want my child to become?" Liberal arts education, particularly in the arts, forms humans who can:
Think critically about new challenges and adapt as situations evolve
Create beauty that glorifies God and serves human flourishing
Understand diverse cultures, histories, and perspectives with empathy
Exercise ethical judgment AI cannot replicate
Navigate career transitions as industries and technologies transform
Ask the kinds of questions that lead to wisdom rather than mere information
See the connections between disciplines, ideas, and Creation itself
Love God and neighbor more fully through deeper understanding
As David Deming, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard's Kennedy School, concluded in his research on liberal arts education: it prepares students "not for your first job, but for the rest of your life." In an AI-driven economy where specific technical skills become obsolete rapidly, the ability to think, learn, create, and adapt (to engage deeply with "bigger questions of life") becomes the most practical preparation imaginable.
But we cannot reduce even this practical case to mere utility. The ultimate goal of Christian liberal arts education is transformation into Christlikeness through encounter with truth, beauty, and goodness. It's learning to see the world as God sees it, to love what God loves, to create in ways that reflect the Creator's own generosity. When Hopkins wrote that the just man "Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—Christ," he was describing the telos of all Christian education: becoming more fully human by becoming more fully conformed to Christ.
This is what parents are investing in when they choose Christian liberal arts education for their children. Not merely a credential or even a career path, but a formation that shapes how their children will see, think, love, and serve for the rest of their lives. In a world that increasingly reduces education to economic utility and human worth to productivity, Christian liberal arts education insists that persons are not problems to be solved or resources to be optimized. They are image-bearers to be formed, souls to be nurtured, minds to be expanded in worship of the One who gave them.
The question, then, is not whether liberal arts education is practical enough for the modern economy. The question is whether we believe education should aim at anything beyond economic efficiency. If we believe humans are made for more than productivity, if we believe the life of the mind is an act of worship, if we believe studying Creation is a pathway to knowing the Creator more deeply, then the case for Christian liberal arts education is not merely practical but essential. It fulfills the human vocation Hopkins described: to "selve," to become fully who God created us to be, so that "Christ plays in ten thousand places" through lives lived in creative, thoughtful, beautiful response to the Creator's call.
Onward!
Sources
Books and Academic Resources:
Hawkins, J. Russell. The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy. Oxford University Press, 2021.
Every Moment Holy. Liturgy for Students and Scholars.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. "As Kingfishers Catch Fire." Poetry Foundation.
Articles and Reports:
"The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education." Christian Scholar's Review.
"Why Should a Christian Study the Humanities?" Public Discourse, May 2024.
"Christ at the Core: Liberal Arts at Wheaton." Wheaton College.
"How Will the Rise of AI in the Workplace Impact Liberal Arts Education?" Higher Ed Dive, 2024.
"The Rise of AI Will Make Liberal Arts Degrees Popular Again. Here's Why." Inc., 2024.
"Don't Knock the Economic Value of Majoring in the Liberal Arts." Brookings Institution.
"Liberal Arts Colleges Struggle to Make a Case for Themselves." Hechinger Report, 2024.
"Why Liberal Arts Matter—Even in the Age of AI." Community College Daily, September 2025.
"How We Can Elevate Uniquely Human Skills in the Age of AI." World Economic Forum, January 2025.
"Liberal Arts in the Wider World." Dickinson College.
"Employment Outcomes of Bachelor's Degree Holders." National Center for Education Statistics.
"Putting Your Liberal Arts Degree to Work." U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017.
"To See How Liberal Arts Grads Really Fare, Report Examines Long-Term Data." Inside Higher Ed, 2014.
"Why a Liberal Arts Degree Is Often a Ticket to Career Success." University of Southern California.
Historical Sources:
"Monastic Schools." Wikipedia.
"The Seven Liberal Arts Part 1: Tools for Learning." History of Education, March 2024.
"Why Did the Catholic Church Preserve the Classical Liberal Arts?" Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
"Thomas Aquinas, Scholasticism, Theology." Encyclopedia Britannica.
Hopkins Scholarship:
"Inscape and Instress." Wikipedia.
"Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Sacrament of the World, Or God's Inscape." Dallas Baptist University.
"Hopkins on 'Inscape' and 'Instress.'" Victorian Web.