With AI reshaping the job market faster than most colleges can update their course catalogs, the question of what to study has never felt more pressing. Morgan DeBaun, founder and CEO of Blavity Inc. and the force behind AfroTech, offered her answer during a rapid-fire segment on the Earn Your Leisure podcast.
Her picks quickly went viral, and one of them led her to publicly reconsider her stance days later.
DeBaun didn’t hesitate when asked where students should focus. Her top recommendations were electrical engineering, cybersecurity and risk, along with mathematics, economics and computer science, as long as the school understands AI.
“Do not do frou-frou stuff,” she said. “Like, even a business undergrad, I wouldn’t do it right now. Things are moving too fast and the colleges aren’t keeping up with the trends.”
Some of her picks were more surprising. DeBaun was confident in philosophy and the arts, arguing that as technology takes over more work, people will have more time for experiences and creativity. “I think arts and experiences and philosophy are going to continue to be strong because that’s what people are going to have more time for,” she said.
She gave an enthusiastic yes to sociology and anthropology, pointing out that the companies building AI are hiring people who understand human behavior. “Researchers at these companies are absolutely sociologists and anthropologists because you’re studying the art of being human and human interactions, because they’re building these agentic systems. They have personalities,” she said.
Medicine got a yes, though she warned it comes with a tough lifestyle. So did teaching and nearly every branch of engineering, including mechanical, electrical, chemical and biotechnical. Communications and psychology got a no, and so did media. Rather than spending years in a classroom, she said, aspiring media professionals should simply start creating.
Law also landed on her no list, a call she admitted she didn’t love making. “I hate to say it because we need people to regulate and people to do the work,” she said, explaining that the average salary for a law degree is falling as AI handles much of the contract work and back-and-forth that lawyers have traditionally done. “Way more efficient, lower cost.”
The answer that drew the most attention was African American studies. DeBaun initially said students didn’t necessarily need a degree in the subject unless they planned to teach it, write about it or become a professor. “I agree with studying our history, but do you need a degree in it?” she asked. “Just read the books. Just know your history.”
A few days later, DeBaun returned to the topic in a TikTok video, explaining that rapid-fire clips leave out context. She said she still believes everyone should take it upon themselves to learn their culture. But a close friend who majored in African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where DeBaun also went to college, had reached out with a perspective that changed her mind.
With the current administration actively removing Black history from archives and from the books children can read in public schools, her friend argued, this is no time to discourage anyone from becoming a student of that history.
“She makes a good point to even give any wiggle room to the idea that we should not be students of our own culture and historians and archivists and people who are studying our culture and our history,” DeBaun said. “And she was absolutely right.”
