Two weeks ago, I was standing in the Musée d’Orsay’s Renoir Drawings, the first exhibition ever dedicated to his works on paper, when I noticed something.
He couldn’t draw eyes.
Not well, anyway. Up close, in the drawings especially, the eyes are off in a way that’s hard to articulate but impossible to unsee: flat, slightly too wide-set, almost cartoonish. Like he drew the idea of eyes rather than actual eyes. The portrait I kept returning to, Madeleine Adam from 1887, has a face that’s luminous everywhere except the eyes, which look like they belong to a different drawing entirely.
But scan across his body of work and a pattern emerges. By his later period, the problem has quietly disappeared. Not because he solved it, but because he engineered around it: figures recede into the middle distance, women lean away, eyes close. He stopped putting himself in positions where the limitation would show.
I named what I had just done, standing there: I read a body of work, identified a pattern across it, drew an inference about intention, and arrived at a conclusion without a prompt, a rubric, or anyone telling me what to look for. I did it in about four minutes, in a foreign country, slightly jet-lagged, in front of a pastel.
That is what an English major actually is.
Not essays about dead white men. Not a degree you choose when you can’t do math. It’s a degree in being presented with any text (and I’m using “text” loosely, inclusive of visual media, data, people, rooms) and being able to quickly assess it in context and without context. To read what’s there and what’s been carefully left out.
Families I work with dismiss this skill set constantly. They steer their kids toward computer science, finance, pre-med. Fields with clear pipelines and names that sound like jobs. Liberal arts, English especially, gets treated as a passion play. Something you study if you love it enough to accept the consequences.
The market is starting to disagree.
Business Insider reported in February that English major enrollment at the University of Colorado Boulder has risen 9% since 2021, reversing years of decline. Rice University has nearly doubled its creative writing faculty. Schools that spent a decade bracing for the death of the humanities are watching students return, not in spite of AI, but because of it. Students, as one dean put it, want to know more about the “why,” and that’s what the humanities actually teaches.
Daniela Amodei, the cofounder and president of Anthropic, the company behind one of the leading AI systems in the world, majored in English Literature at UC Santa Cruz and has zero regrets about it. In an interview with ABC News, she argued that as AI grows more capable at STEM tasks, the skills that make us human become more valuable, not less, and that Anthropic hires accordingly, prioritizing strong communicators with emotional intelligence over purely technical credentials. The person building the AI is telling you what she actually values.
What the AI moment is making clear, slowly and then all at once, is that the hardest skills to automate look a lot like English class. Assessing an argument quickly. Noticing what’s missing. Writing with precision and a specific voice. Reading a room, or a Renoir, and turning what you find into something useful. A recruiter at Korn Ferry told Business Insider that organizations are increasingly prioritizing communication style and what he called candidates’ “humanity,” the qualities that don’t compress into a function call.
One copywriter in the Business Insider piece made the point plainly: if every company is running the same generative tools with the same inputs, they’re getting the same outputs. The question becomes how you distinguish yourself from the noise. The answer, increasingly, is a trained human mind with a specific point of view.
Test prep, at its core, is close reading under pressure. Every passage-based question on the SAT or ACT puts a student in front of text they have never seen and asks them to figure out what it’s doing, what it’s arguing, what a particular word is accomplishing in a particular sentence. In under two minutes. That’s not content knowledge. There’s nothing to memorize. The only thing that transfers is a trained ability to look at something unfamiliar and know how to assess it.
This is true even in math. The students who struggle most with math sections are rarely the ones who don’t know the underlying concept. They’re the ones who can’t read the question. They misidentify what’s actually being asked, skip a constraint buried in the third line, or solve for the wrong variable because they didn’t read carefully enough to know what it represented. The math is often the easy part. The reading is where it falls apart.
What we’re building in test prep is a toolkit for encountering the unfamiliar without panicking. Slow down, identify what kind of thing you’re looking at, know what questions to ask of it. That is an English major skill. It is also, not coincidentally, what employers say they can’t find enough of right now.
College essays are an exercise in voice, specificity, and argument. Executive function coaching is pattern recognition applied to behavior. The skills I build in students, whether we’re working through a reading passage or a personal statement, are the same ones English departments have been teaching for a hundred years and that the market is now scrambling to find.
The families who have already written off liberal arts colleges, who have steered their kids away from the humanities before the conversation even started, are making a bet. They’re betting that the skills being called “soft” right now will stay soft. Given what’s happening, that looks like the wrong bet.
I’m not arguing that every kid should be an English major. I’m arguing that the capacity to read carefully, write precisely, and think critically about what you’re seeing, whether in a museum or a dataset or a job interview, is not a consolation prize. It is, right now, what’s becoming scarce.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a genius who couldn’t draw eyes. He knew it, and he adapted.
The question for the families I work with isn’t whether their kid loves reading. It’s whether we’re training them to see.
This piece first appeared on our Substack. Read it there or subscribe to get new essays on testing, admissions, and learning in your inbox.