In a world of AI, some wonder what will happen to the humanities. If a computer can write a paper, why bother to teach the skill? If an elaborate code can summarize hundreds of books, why bother to read a single one? What can English teach that AI can’t do? 

Those kinds of questions are understandable. Yet every day it becomes clearer that AI has only increased the value of English. You don’t have to take my word for it. The co-founder and president of Anthropic AI, Daniela Amodei, said that AI was making humanities majors “more important than ever.” Matt Candy, the global managing partner in generative AI at IBM, advised future tech workers to get a robust liberal arts degree. As Amodei explained to ABC News, “In a world where AI is very smart and capable of doing so many things, the things that make us human will become much more important.” 

At WashU, we have embraced “the things that make us human” — the plots and particulars of human nature as they weave their way through novels, poems, and plays. If we want to understand human beings, we must read the stories they create. 

In the English department, as in many other WashU humanities departments, our students learn to interpret texts that resist easy answers, weighing competing meanings, attending to nuance, and defending their judgments in conversation with others. These are lessons AI cannot replicate. A machine can relay the plot of a novel; it cannot decide what it means, or why that meaning matters. 

The results have been startling. Where national trends show steady declines in English enrollment, WashU has risen for seven straight years. From 2018 to 2025, enrollment in our major increased by 60%. 

What makes the WashU difference? Classes, community, and careers. 

English starts with great seminars. At WashU, we put our best professors in front of students early and often. It is an honor to teach a first-year seminar. It is a privilege to teach the sophomore survey. In 2018, we began creating small, first-year courses that get students thinking together about the biggest questions of human life from the moment they enter WashU — and we award those courses to proven teachers. 

Top professors in first-year classes might begin a student’s journey, but we encourage new majors to find fellow companions quickly. Community matters. It enlivens and enriches the experience. The discussions that spill beyond the classroom deepen the understanding of what it means to be human across vast differences. 

To develop community, we host events throughout the year: a Halloween murder mystery, trivia nights, coffee hours with faculty, a blind date with a book, a bad poetry contest, and much more. The age of AI is also, we know, an era of overwhelming loneliness. In English, we want our students to find their friends. Our majors do the major together. 

What students gain at WashU through their classes and community must, of course, prepare them for careers. English majors often face a single, stark question: “What are you going to do with that?” At WashU, we give our students the answer: anything they imagine. 

For more than 10 years, the department has been tracking career outcomes of our majors. The results may surprise some parents. Roughly 25% end up in business; 25% go into law and medicine; another 25% choose education; 20% end up in publishing and media; and the rest scatter across a variety of careers. Our majors go everywhere. They do everything. 

National data support our findings. According to the American Medical Association, English has the highest admittance rate to medical school of non-STEM majors. In fact, as the Association of American Medical Colleges discovered, humanities majors have a higher admittance rate to medical school than biology majors. 

Businesses also seek out what we offer. According to Robert Goldstein, the COO of BlackRock, “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English — in things that have nothing to do with finance or technology — and it’s that diversity of thinking and diversity of people and diversity of looking at different ways to solve problems that really fuels innovation.” Goldstein joins many other business leaders saying the same thing repeatedly: They want the humanities. 

Classes, community, careers. Human nature is discovered and discussed in human interactions across courses and beyond classrooms. At WashU, English provides what is both desperately needed and deeply desired. 

And we are booming.

Abram Van Engen is the former chair of the Department of English, the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities, and the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. He publishes widely on religion and literature, focusing especially on early American culture, and co-hosts a popular podcast for general audiences called “Poetry For All.”