Speaking at Fortune magazine’s summit, “Future of Finance: Technology and Transformation,” Robert Goldstein, the chief operating officer of the asset management firm BlackRock, signaled changing views toward job candidates with degrees in the humanities and the arts. “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology,” he said. “It’s that diversity of thinking and diversity of people and diversity of looking at different ways to solve a problem that really fuels innovation.”

Employers’ desire for candidates with a liberal arts education, according to Fortune, is fueled in part by the rise of AI, which is creating a demand for the very skills developed and honed by studying the humanities and the arts: questioning, creativity and critical thinking, among others.

In our humanities courses at Rice, students become writers, artists, historians, philosophers. They learn languages, engage cultures, analyze, interpret and compare evidence, they ask big questions in their written work and oral presentations, and they study art history, classics, literature and film at Rice and in courses offered abroad. Students from all of the schools at Rice work with our prize-winning faculty to interpret, critique and debate the crucial issues facing the world today.

There has never been a better time to study the humanities and the arts at Rice.

Best wishes,

Kathleen Canning
Dean, School of Humanities
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History