On the flip side of this phenomenon, English and liberal arts majors became subjects of scrutiny, some dubbing them “barista” degrees in the belief that pursuing those majors would inevitably confine one to a job at a coffee shop, assuming such degrees have limited career prospects.
“It seems much worse for the math people than the word people,” he said.
As AI development advances, many leaders and AI experts predict AI will dramatically reshape the job market, and with it, the most-valued skills. With that development, some math and other STEM skills risk becoming obsolete.
But some STEM graduate unemployment rates hover below the average for all college graduates of 3.1%, including for aerospace engineering and engineering technologies majors, at 2.2% and 1.7%, respectively.
Still, during the 2024 interview, Thiel argued that even in STEM fields currently untouched by AI automation, using math skills as a bar to entry will fall out of fashion thanks to AI.
“If you want to go to medical school, we weed people out through physics and calculus,” he said. “As a neurosurgeon, I don’t really want someone operating on my brain to be doing prime number factorizations in their head while they’re operating on my brain.”
