Elon Musk thinks faculty is ‘principally for enjoyable’—however his former Tesla HR chief tells Gen Z even their liberal arts levels are extra worthwhile than ever

But Valerie Capers Workman, who served as vp of individuals at Tesla, has a sharply totally different message for the graduating class of 2026: don’t purchase the noise. This comes whilst her former boss, Elon Musk, is a part of the refrain of highly effective voices casting a doubt on faculty.

“Do not let anyone, not a tech founder, not a headline, not a podcast host, convince you that your education was a waste,” Workman said last week on the Defining the Future convention at California State University, San Bernardino. “It was not. It is more valuable today than it has ever been.”

The abilities a level develops—the power to motive, query, and lead with humanity—are exactly what synthetic intelligence can not replicate, she argued. 

And counterintuitively, it’s liberal arts fields like historical past, English, and the humanities that she says have gotten extra related within the AI period, not much less, regardless of lengthy being dismissed as financially impractical.

“In the age of AI, these disciplines are not ‘soft skills,’” Workman, who at the moment serves because the chief human assets officer at Empower Pharmacy, added. “They are the source code for the emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning, cultural fluency, and critical thinking that machines will never have.”

How to make use of your diploma to land a job in at this time’s AI world, in keeping with Tesla’s former head of HR

Workman’s optimism about levels comes at a time when touchdown a job proper out of faculty has turn into considerably tougher.

Job postings on Handshake—an early careers platform the place Workman additionally previously held a C-suite function—declined greater than 16% 12 months over 12 months as of August 2025, whereas the typical variety of functions per posting rose 26%. For the category of 2026, who will quickly start strolling throughout the stage, greater than 60% are pessimistic about their profession prospects, with AI’s disruption of the job market a central frustration.

Workman’s recommendation to graduates—no matter their diploma or desired occupation—isn’t to lean on their diploma alone. It’s to pair it with one thing their predecessors by no means needed to study: AI fluency.

“You do not get to sit this one out,” she stated. “You do not get to say, ‘I am not a tech person.’ That identity is retired. If you plan to work, lead, build, or earn in this economy, you must become fluent in artificial intelligence the way your parents’ generation had to become fluent in email and the internet, the way your grandparents’ generation had to become fluent in the personal computer.”

She supplied two concentrated methods to get began. First, study immediate engineering—and deal with it severely: “Treat it like a second language,” Workman stated. “The people who can instruct AI clearly, specifically, and strategically will out-earn and out-perform everyone else in the room.”

Second, grasp the artwork of asking nice questions: “The graduates who win this decade will not be the ones with the best answers. They will be the ones with the best questions.”

Fortune reached out to Workman for additional remark.

Tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk aren’t offered greater training is price it

While Workman joins a rising variety of enterprise leaders who stay bullish on greater training, most of the loudest voices in tech aren’t.

Mark Zuckerberg—who famously dropped out of Harvard University after launching Facebook from his dorm room—has expressed his concern that schools are failing to equip college students for at this time’s workforce.

“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are…really big,” he said last year on Theo Von’s podcast.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who has three levels of his personal, has been notably scathing, criticizing greater training for each the debt it saddles college students with and what he calls ideological “indoctrination.”

“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Karp instructed CNBC in 2025.

Elon Musk—Workman’s former boss—has echoed that concern.

“I think college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning,” Musk said on the Satellite 2020 convention, including that requiring a level for employment is “absurd.” 

At Tesla, the principle requirement for touchdown a job is “exceptional ability,” Musk stated, who obtained a bachelor’s from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.

But regardless of the anti-college rhetoric from Silicon Valley, there hasn’t been a mass exodus from greater training. Total postsecondary enrollment within the United States grew 1.0% in fall 2025, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center—suggesting that many Gen Z are nonetheless betting on levels.