AI is already reshaping which degrees are worth their cost. Companies like Anthropic, which seem to target a new profession for automation every few weeks, are creating real uncertainty around career paths that once felt bulletproof — accounting, law, even software engineering. The question isn’t whether this changes the calculus on college. It’s how.
My daughters will be of college age in the next 12–15 years and I wonder what my advice will be for them when the time comes. I can’t see into the future by any means but I can provide my thoughts if they were seniors in high school today and on the verge of making a decision on college and major. Two things will matter more than ever: where you go, and what you study. The AI disruption question will shape both answers.
One note before the rankings: everything below assumes you’re still figuring out your path. If you are one of the few people who has known their whole life what they want to pursue, go for it. If you want to become the next Spielberg, go to USC. If you want to become an interior designer, go to RISD or SCAD. If you want to be an aeronautical or petroleum engineer, CalTech or Harvey Mudd fits the bill, respectively. If your family has all gone to Cornell and it’s part of your lineage and dream, then who am I to say otherwise. The framework is for the undecided — and most 18-year-olds are.
The College
I wouldn’t recommend spending private school tuition at a small northeastern liberal arts school with a tiny alumni network and six months of bad weather. More and more, I hear of kids from the NY metro area abandoning the traditional college hotbeds nearby to go south and the pull makes sense. A school in the SEC or ACC brings traditions, weather, a massive alumni base, and an argument for the college experience that’s genuinely hard to dismiss. You graduate without the identity crisis that comes with a school nobody’s heard of outside the tri-state area.
Tier S: Premier Ivy League
Yes, I said northeast private schools are dead and then jump back to the Ivy League as being S-tier. Correct. There is no substitute for Harvard, Princeton, Penn, or Yale. You can immediately change your life’s trajectory with the doors you open for your career and the network you build. These schools have their own traditions and aura due to the fact they are the oldest and most prestigious schools in the nation. If you get in, go.
Tier A: Ivy-esque
The next level would be the regional Ivies that in some cases could be considered Ivy League in themselves. Stanford, MIT, Duke, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, Notre Dame, NYU, and Michigan. Incredible schools with insane pedigree, massive networks, great locations, and a track record that rivals the Ivies in most fields.
Tier B: Schools with Premier Weather and Sports
Next, you need to start following the lifestyle that comes along with the university. UCLA, UNC, UVA, UT-Austin, and U of Miami. Great academic institutions with massive alumni bases and you get to enjoy a combination of pristine weather and awesome sports. These schools give you the bulk of the network, and the college experience itself is genuinely hard to beat. As you move down the list, location becomes a bigger attractor than pure academics.
Tier C: Schools with Premier Weather or Sports
Finally, you get to the schools where you have to pick your poison. You can go to Penn St for the network and football team but the weather will be rough. You can also go to UCSB or UCI and never see a football game, but live at the best beaches in America. At this tier, the institution’s name carries you less, but the experience is still incredible.
Tier D:
This is a strategy, not a consolation prize. Find the most affordable school in your state with the highest pedigree available where you can excel, graduate near the top, and use that as your launchpad into a Tier S, A, or B graduate program. The credential that ends up mattering most on your resume may be the one you earn at 25, not 18. Do this instead of contemplating an expensive school with limited name recognition, crappy weather, and no sports.
The Major
This is where the AI question comes back into focus. A degree that trains you to execute a specific set of tasks is increasingly vulnerable. A degree that teaches you to think and to analyze, argue, and adapt is not.
For nearly every college student, I would recommend what I call “One Hard, One Soft.” Double-major in something that builds technical depth and pair it with something that teaches you to argue, interpret, and synthesize. The “hard” major makes you employable. The “soft” major makes you adaptable. In a world where AI can execute tasks but can’t yet replace judgment, that combination is the most defensible education you can get. Pair Physics with Philosophy. Or Biology with Religious Studies. Or Accounting and English. Or perhaps Industrial Engineering with Art History. You want to go to college with a profession in mind. You also want to soak up one of the last bastions where you can argue about ideas just for the sake of it.
If my daughters had no direction or were unsure of what to pursue, I would recommend accounting. Despite real AI pressure, it’s still a field in high demand that every organization in the world needs, and the analytical foundation it builds transfers to almost everything else. Alternatively, if they are more technically minded, I would recommend a physical engineering field such as civil. I believe that the future will require much more physical infrastructure to support the energy demands of the AI revolution and the world’s growing population.
If they didn’t love accounting or engineering and wanted to go to graduate school, I’d recommend law school. Law school teaches you how to think in a world that is increasingly driven by the legal profession. In business especially, but many other fields, an accounting and law background is a powerful one-two punch. And if AI does hollow out parts of either field, the combination of quantitative and legal reasoning is exactly the kind of hybrid that gets harder to automate, not easier.
The college and major formula I laid out above is a framework I’ll share with my daughters and one I wish I’d had for my own studies. There is no way in hell that I would go back in time and once again study finance at an unknown state school. You live and you learn.
the counterfactual 