Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen one time said that the average English caste holder is fated to go a shoe salesman, hawking wares to onetime classmates who were lucky plenty to have majored in math. Meanwhile, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who studied philosophy at Stanford, refers to degrees like his as "antiquated debt-fueled luxury goods." Faced with such attacks on the liberal arts, it's no wonder that interest in the humanities is waning. Equally the higher year begins, many students are likely to take President Obama's advice and forgo an art history degree for a certificate in skilled manufacturing or some other trade.

Not to be outdone, defenders of the liberal arts are jumping into the fray. Among them are New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, liberal arts consortiums and even a pair of cartoon crusaders chosen Libby and Art (get it?) who are quick to respond to people besmirching the humanities on Twitter. But joining this chorus are some unexpected voices: CEOs of technology companies.

While the tech boom is partly responsible for the fasten in students majoring in science, technology, engineering and math, many tech CEOs still believe employees trained in the liberal arts add value to their companies. In 2010, Steve Jobs famously mused that for engineering to be truly brilliant, it must be coupled with artistry. "It'due south in Apple tree's Dna that technology lone is not enough," he said. "It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing." Other tech CEOs across the land agree that liberal arts training–with its emphasis on inventiveness and critical thinking–is vital to the success of their business.

And then how exactly do the humanities translate into positive results for tech companies? Steve Yi, CEO of web advertizing platform MediaAlpha, says that the liberal arts train students to thrive in subjectivity and ambiguity, a necessary skill in the tech globe where few things are black and white. "In the dynamic environment of the technology sector, at that place is non typically one right answer when you make decisions," he says. "At that place are just different shades of how correct you might exist," he says.

Yi says his interdisciplinary caste in E Asian Studies at Harvard taught him to encounter every event from multiple perspectives: in college, he studied Asian literature in one class, and then Asian politics or economics in the next. "It's clumsily similar to viewing our arrangement and our marketplace from different points of view, quickly shifting gears from sales to technology to marketing," he says. "I need to synthesize these perspectives to decide where we need to go equally a company."

Danielle Sheer, a vice president at Carbonite, a cloud fill-in service, feels similarly. She studied existential philosophy at George Washington University, which sets her apart from her technically trained colleagues. She tells me that her academic background gives her an edge at a visitor where employees are trained to assume there is always a right solution. "I don't believe there is one answer for anything," she tells me. "That makes me a very unusual member of the team. I always consider a plethora of different options and outcomes in every situation."

Both Yi and Sheer recognize that the scientific method is valuable, with its emphasis on logic and reason, particularly when dealing with data or engineering issues. But they believe this arroyo can sometimes be limiting. "When I collaborate with people who have a strictly technical groundwork," says Yi, "the perspective I notice virtually lacking is an agreement of what motivates people and how to remainder multiple factors that are at piece of work outside the realm of technology."

Employees trained in the liberal arts bring an alternative indicate of view in day-to-day decision-making in the tech workplace, merely Vince Broady, CEO of content marketing platform Thismoment, argues that they also think differently most bigger questions, such as the impact a company should have on an industry. Equally a educatee at Chocolate-brown, Broady studied organized religion, a field that emphasizes long-term goals, rather than quick gains. "You report people who dedicate their lifetime to their faith," he says. "Their touch is measured across hundreds and thousands of years." His academic background shapes how he thinks about his piece of work: he wants to stay committed to building a company of lasting value, even during difficult times. This goes against the grain of tech culture, where entrepreneurs are encouraged to accept risks but quickly move to new ideas when things don't pan out. Broady questions whether "failing fast" is actually the best way to practice business organisation.

Broady's written report of faith has also convinced him that leaps of faith are important in one's career. If students are inclined towards the humanities, he encourages them to pursue what they beloved, even when others claim these fields are worthless. "There is always a story about a wasted teaching, about someone who paid so much for a caste and is now driving a taxi," he says. "But you have to have some faith that your educational activity volition not exist wasted on you. This is about yous and your specific situation; you need to make certain that what you larn serves y'all."

Ultimately, Broady believes that people who are passionate almost their work are amend poised to succeed. "If you don't personally care about what y'all are doing, you lot are not going to be competitive at it," he says.

For women in tech, a humanities background can be an added liability, since there is already a perception that they are less competent at scientific discipline and math. Danielle Sheer says that when she joined Carbonite, her commencement impulse was to hide her lack of knowledge and retreat at meetings. Nonetheless, she quickly inverse strategy, deciding it was more of import for her to ask questions to fully grasp the technology. She's spent hours tinkering with the software and working with engineering teams to larn virtually it. She says her colleagues are supportive, even if she sometimes slows them downwards. "By articulating complicated technical or strategic ideas in plain English, you lot'd exist amazed at how much progress we've fabricated solving problems," she says. "Nosotros've become very skillful at assuming that we don't have the aforementioned definition."

While women have more biases to overcome, all the humanities-trained tech leaders I spoke with emphasized the importance of understanding their company's technology within and out. Once they accept this noesis under their belt, they have the unique power to translate complex technical processes into clear, uncomplicated language–an important skill when dealing with investors and buyers. "The ability to quickly synthesize information and structure it in a way that is comprehensible to non-technical people is powerful," says MediaAlpha'due south Steve Yi.

Only maybe well-nigh importantly, liberal arts training allows people to call back nearly applied science itself in fundamentally different ways. David Rose, CEO of photo analytics visitor Ditto, is pushing for companies to reimagine the office that engineering science plays in our lives. His recently published book, Enchanted Objects, is brindled with ideas from literature, fine arts and philosophy to prompt the reader to think about engineering equally the kind of magic that humans have always been longing afterwards. "I'm and so glad that no one asked me to choice my career equally an undergrad," he tells me, remembering his years at St. Olaf, a liberal arts higher. "It allowed me to accept a broad range of courses and do things like study in Scandinavia. For a young mind, that is the very all-time thing yous tin do, considering it allows you to come at questions near the globe and new technologies from radically different perspectives."

Tech CEOs are generally neat to hire people trained in the humanities, partly because a large proportion of them take similar backgrounds themselves. (A third of all Fortune 500 CEOs accept liberal arts degrees.) But for students coming out of liberal arts colleges, information technology can yet be hard to observe piece of work in the tech sector. Georgia Nugent, the former president of Kenyon College who is currently a senior boyfriend at the Quango of Independent Colleges, says that height executives are non responsible for hiring entry level staff. Instead, recruiters and 60 minutes managers on the hiring front lines often use systems that pick candidates for tech jobs based on key terms like "coding" and "programming," which many liberal arts graduates volition not accept on their resumes.

Nugent is concerned about this trend considering she thinks that training students for very specific tasks seems shortsighted when engineering science and business organisation is evolving at such a fast rate. "Information technology's a horrible irony that at the very moment the world has become more complex, we're encouraging our immature people to be highly specialized in 1 job," she says. "Nosotros are doing a disservice to immature people by telling them that life is a directly path. The liberal arts are still relevant because they prepare students to be flexible and adjustable to changing circumstances."