The Vindication of Thomas Aquinas College

For years my advice to college-age young men has been the same: if you attend college, pick a practical major. Major in computer science or accounting or graphic design. Don’t pick “soft” majors like theology or philosophy or history. And whatever you do, don’t go to a school like Thomas Aquinas College (TAC), where there are no majors, and you just get a degree in a generic “liberal arts.”

My logic was simple: you will need to support your family one day, so you need skills that will allow you to do that. Yes, majoring in philosophy might be fun and intellectually stimulating, but it won’t put food on your future children’s plates.

This advice was based on personal experience: in the 1990s I majored in systems analysis and was easily able to obtain a nice-paying job. I had friends, however, who majored in theology or philosophy, and they literally were on food stamps to support their families.

Times have changed.

I still believe young men should be practical in choosing what to study in college. However, what constitutes “practical” has radically changed since the 1990s (heck, it’s radically changed since just a few years ago). Recent computer engineering grads went from 2.3% unemployment in 2022 to 7.8% in 2024. Computer science went from 4.3% to 7.0%. One tech leader said regarding the 2010s mantra “learn to code”: now “it’s almost exactly the opposite.” We all know the reason: AI.

This isn’t restricted to only computer-related degrees, however. Almost every sector of the white-collar economy is being—or will be—impacted, but more importantly, we just don’t know what degrees will be helpful four years from now. So if you are entering college this year to study accounting, maybe that industry—which is doing fine right now—will still be intact when you graduate, but it’s more likely it will be radically transformed.

For a lot of young people, I think this transformation should lead them to re-evaluate the value of any college education. Jobs that don’t need a four-year degree are more immune to the AI revolution than those that do. The plumber today has more job security than the software engineer. The electrician can sleep easier than the accountant. To be clear, there are still intangible benefits of attending college, particularly building relationship networks, both personally and professionally. But the practical value of many degrees is rapidly disappearing—and with the cost of most schools still rising, it’s hard to argue that the standard four-year degree is worth the cost.

More and more people are recognizing this. A recent Gallup poll revealed that only 35% of respondents call college “very important,” down from 75% in 2010 and 53% in 2019. Another 24% say it’s “not too important.” They are right.

But there are exceptions, and here’s where I’ve changed my views. Well, more accurately, the world changed, so did how my principles apply. I believe that in an AI-dominated world, we need more people who can truly think. This may seem ironic, considering the job of most AI is to do our thinking for us. But machine thinking, no matter how advanced and even brilliant, will always be missing that human “spark.” It will always lack wisdom as opposed to knowledge. As Pope Leo said, “Authentic wisdom has more to do with recognizing the true meaning of life, than with the availability of data.” And wisdom is needed for understanding truth and making good judgements.

Further, AI automates codified, procedural knowledge, i.e., specific skills. But what still is needed, even in an AI world, is judgment, arguing, asking the right question, moral reasoning, and adapting. In other words, what is still needed are minds formed in first principles, not specific skill sets.

This is where a school like Thomas Aquinas College begins to shine. For it does not waste time teaching specific skills that will soon be replaced by AI (or have already been replaced). Instead, it teaches timeless truths, and it teaches students how to think. This produces graduates who can adapt better to changing situations, can apply eternal principles to modern problems, and can best understand the central place of man in any economy. Peter Kreeft says that TAC graduates “stand out like supernovas. They know how to read, write, think, and argue clearly and persuasively, as very few people do any more.”

And TAC is not the only such school; others include Wyoming Catholic College (WCC) and Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (and both Christendom College and the University of Dallas have a heavy emphasis on a classical liberal arts education).

Wyoming Catholic College in particular might seem like an odd school to recommend in an AI world. At WCC, every student spends at least 10 weeks in the wilderness, starting with a three-week freshman backpacking expedition, and takes a horsemanship course. It also imposes a “technological fast”: students check their cell phones in on arrival. Doesn’t this mean that WCC students won’t know how to use the latest AI tools? That’s the difference between old tech and new tech. The whole point of AI is that you don’t need technological skills to use it: you just tell it what to do and it does it for you. So what matters isn’t tech savvy, but instead knowing what to ask AI to do for you (and what to not ask it to do).

Does this mean that a liberal arts degree guarantees a high-paying job? Of course not. And people with computer science degrees are still getting jobs (but for how long?). But I’m not talking about just any liberal arts degree—most are worthless and woke-infested these days. I’m talking about solid, Catholic liberal arts degrees, based on the Great Books and the Western tradition. These programs will produce young people who will not only survive in our AI-dominated world, but thrive. Far from being impractical, as I once thought they were, they can be eminently practical.

Thirty years ago I would have told you to avoid schools like Thomas Aquinas College as impractical. Today, it may be one of the most practical choices a young man can make.