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My Child Wants to Study English Literature. Here’s Why I Stopped Worrying and Started Listening.
I’ll be honest with you. When my daughter sat me down and said she wanted to do a BA in English Literature, my first reaction was not supportive.
It wasn’t that I didn’t respect the subject. I’d read books my whole life. I understood that literature had value. But value in what sense, exactly? Cultural value, yes. Personal value, certainly. But the kind of value that leads to a stable career, financial independence, and a future I wouldn’t spend worrying about? That felt much less certain.
I said what I imagine most parents in my position say: “But what will you do with it?”
She didn’t have a fully formed answer. She was 18. She knew she loved reading, that she was good at writing, that she found ideas genuinely interesting in a way she didn’t with most other subjects. She knew that when she read something well-written, she noticed things about it that other people didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t know yet how to turn that into a career.
What followed was several months of research — mine, more than hers, if I’m honest — that fundamentally changed how I thought about this decision.
The Question I Was Actually Asking
When I said “what will you do with it,” I was really asking three separate questions, and I think it helps to separate them.
The first was about employability: will this degree lead to a job? The second was about earnings: will this degree lead to a livable income? The third was about respect: will this degree be taken seriously by employers and the world at large, or will it be a mark against her?
These are legitimate questions. Any parent asking them is being responsible, not dismissive. The issue is that I was answering them based on assumptions I’d formed a long time ago — assumptions about what English graduates do and don’t go on to achieve — that turned out to be significantly out of date.
What English Graduates Actually Do
I started researching graduate outcomes for English and Liberal Arts programmes, and what I found was more varied and more encouraging than I’d expected.
English graduates work in content and communications — an industry that has grown enormously with the rise of digital media and shows no sign of contracting. They work in publishing, journalism, public relations, corporate communications, policy writing, and legal drafting. They go into advertising and brand strategy. They work in education, both in schools and at the university level. A notable number go into law — the analytical and argumentative skills that an English degree develops translate directly into legal reasoning, and several law firms actively recruit humanities graduates. Others move into consulting and management, where the ability to synthesise complex information and communicate it clearly is genuinely valued.
What I noticed, reading through this, was that the thread connecting all of these paths was not a specific technical skill. It was a set of intellectual capabilities: the ability to read carefully, think critically, argue precisely, and write well. These capabilities, it turns out, are in demand across a very wide range of professional environments.
The digital economy, which I had vaguely assumed would make language-based degrees obsolete, has actually done something quite different. It has created an almost insatiable demand for people who can produce good content, communicate complex ideas clearly, and understand what an audience needs to hear. That is precisely what English graduates are trained to do.
Why I Started Taking the AI Concern Seriously — and Then Stopped
At some point in my research, I started worrying about artificial intelligence. If AI can write, I thought, doesn’t that undercut the value of a degree built around writing?
I spent some time looking into this properly, and my conclusion was more nuanced than my initial concern.
Yes, AI tools can produce functional text. They are getting better at this. But the content industry has not collapsed — if anything, the demand for human editorial judgment, authentic voice, and genuine creative thinking has increased as AI-generated content has proliferated. The graduates most vulnerable to automation are those doing purely executional, formulaic work. The graduates most valuable are those who bring genuine intellectual judgment to what they produce — who can decide what is worth saying, understand why a particular piece of writing will resonate with a particular audience, and bring a perspective that is authentically human.
An English degree, done rigorously, produces exactly the second kind of graduate. The ability to think independently, to read critically, to write with voice and intention — these are not things that can be automated, because they depend on genuine engagement with ideas and genuine understanding of human experience.
I found this reassuring. Not because I think the concern is baseless, but because the answer to it pointed toward the same conclusion: a rigorous humanities education, far from being made obsolete by technology, becomes more valuable as the things that distinguish human intellectual work from machine output become more important.
The Institution Question
Once I’d made peace with the degree itself, I turned my attention to where my daughter would study it.
We are based in Pune, and I wanted to look seriously at what was available here rather than defaulting to the assumption that she’d need to go to Delhi or Mumbai for a credible Liberal Arts programme. What I found at Ajeenkya DY Patil University surprised me, honestly.
ADYPU’s School of Liberal Arts offers a BA (Hons.) in English that is structured around exactly the combination I was looking for: serious academic content, with a clear orientation toward professional outcomes. The curriculum covers English literary tradition in depth — from classical texts through to contemporary writing — while consistently connecting students to questions that matter now, about culture, communication, identity, and the changing nature of how language works in the world.
What struck me in particular was the emphasis on writing as a core skill developed across the degree, not just as a by-product of literary study. Students work across multiple registers — critical and analytical writing, creative writing, and professional writing — which means they leave with a portfolio of demonstrated capability rather than just an academic record.
The NAAC accreditation and NBA recognition mattered to me as a parent because I wanted to know that the institution was being held to credible external standards. And the campus being in Pune meant that my daughter would be studying in a city with a genuine professional ecosystem — internship opportunities, industry connections, and the kind of urban environment that shapes a young person’s professional instincts in ways that a more isolated campus cannot.
The Conversation That Changed Things
About three months into my research, I had a conversation with a friend who runs a mid-sized communications consultancy. I asked him, off the record, what he actually looked for when hiring.
He said something I’ve thought about many times since. He said that the single biggest gap he saw in candidates — including those with business and marketing degrees — was the inability to write a clear, compelling paragraph. Not creatively. Just clearly. The ability to take a complex idea and express it in language that a non-specialist could understand and act on. He said he would take a strong English graduate over a mediocre business graduate for most of the roles in his company, every single time.
I don’t think his view is unusual. I think it’s representative of something that the business world has understood for longer than parents of English students tend to realise.
What I Told My Daughter
After all of this, I went back to my daughter with a different answer than the one I’d started with.
I told her that I’d done my research, that I understood better now what the degree could lead to, and that I was genuinely supportive — on one condition, which wasn’t really a condition so much as an encouragement. I asked her to approach the degree with the same seriousness she’d approach any professional qualification. To treat writing as a skill to be developed, not just an activity to be enjoyed. To think about internships and industry exposure from early in the programme, not as an afterthought. To be intentional about where the degree was pointing her.
She looked at me with the patient expression that 18-year-olds reserve for parents who have finally caught up, and said she’d already been thinking about all of that.
She was right to want to study English. I was wrong to worry — or at least, I was worrying about the wrong things. The right question was never “what will you do with it?” The right question was “where will you study it, and will you take it seriously?”
The answer to both, as it turned out, was a good one.