Why A Philosophy Degree Ages Better Than A Business One

One teaches a body of knowledge that changes quarterly, the other teaches how to think about knowledge, and only one of those keeps.

Sign up for my Substack daily AI newsletter here.

See my AI Training course portfolio for corporate Business Leaders here.

Article link: https://johanosteyn.substack.com/p/why-a-philosophy-degree-ages-better?r=73gqa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanosteyn/

The chief executive of PwC’s United States business said something recently that deserves more attention than it received, and something else alongside it that deserves rather less. He was asked what he tells his own university-aged children about their careers. His answer contained one of the more interesting predictions of the year and one of the more conventional.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

Paul Griggs said PwC has hired fewer consultants and accountants than it did two years ago, and expects that to continue as the firm takes on more data scientists, engineers and machine learning specialists. He remains encouraging about the field nonetheless. What is striking is where he expects the new intake to come from. PwC is hiring more people from nontraditional backgrounds and he anticipates more liberal arts graduates in consulting and other business roles, because AI amplifies the need for broad knowledge. He also described himself as a firm believer in master’s degrees, praising MBA programmes for creating the space to research and discover rather than merely get through the core coursework.

His firm’s own research points the same way on the first claim. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, drawn from more than a billion job advertisements across 27 territories, found AI increasing the emphasis employers place on judgement, creativity and leadership, with entry-level roles most exposed to AI seven times more likely to demand traditionally senior human skills than the least exposed roles.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

He is right about breadth and wrong about the vehicle. Consider what actually decays. Domain knowledge in AI governance, regulation and technology has a half-life measured in quarters. The capacity to read closely, weigh competing evidence, tolerate ambiguity and construct an argument does not decay at all. When a machine produces fluent, confident, plausible text on any subject at no cost, the scarce capability is no longer producing an answer. It is knowing enough about enough things to notice when the answer is wrong. That is what a serious humanities education has always trained, and it is why such a degree ages well. It never claimed to transmit perishable content in the first place.

I have previously written about this in an article on the obsolescence of delayed competency, where I argued that the assumption most wrong about the traditional MBA is not its cost but its premise, being that a professional can pause a career for two years, absorb a body of knowledge, and return to an environment that will reward it for the next twenty.

The space to research and discover is worth having, and Griggs is right to prize it. My objection is to when it is bought and at what price. An undergraduate humanities degree is taken at twenty, when there is no career to interrupt and no senior salary to forgo, and it promises nothing that can expire. An MBA is taken at thirty-five, costs a year or two of peak earnings on top of the fees, and promises current, applicable management knowledge, which is exactly the kind that expires. The same two years buys a durable asset in the one case and a depreciating one in the other.

IMPLICATIONS

South Africa is steering hard in the opposite direction. At the University of Cape Town, Engineering and the Built Environment drew the highest number of 2026 applications, followed by Health Sciences, Commerce and then Humanities, and the university noted that these trends align with national skills priorities. That direction is defensible and the technical skills deficit is real. Honesty requires acknowledging that our humanities graduates face difficult employment outcomes, and I would not tell a family under financial pressure that a philosophy degree is a safe bet in this labour market. The capability case and the hiring case are not yet the same case. What follows is a burden on employers rather than on eighteen-year-olds. If broad knowledge is genuinely becoming more valuable, screening systems that filter analyst applications by discipline are discarding precisely the candidates the research says are scarce.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

PwC’s own Global Workforce Leader put the underlying shift plainly, observing that AI is removing some of the routine work that once acted as an apprenticeship while increasing demand for judgement, leadership and adaptability much earlier in careers. If judgement is being demanded earlier, the question becomes where judgement is actually built. It is not built by memorising frameworks that will be revised before the graduation ceremony. It is built by years of being made to read something difficult, work out whether it is true, and defend the answer to someone who disagrees. That is the least perishable thing a university sells, and we are currently steering our children away from it.

Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net