U.S. — In a 2024 interview with economist Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel argued that the education and employment systems disproportionately disadvantage individuals with strong quantitative abilities compared to those skilled in verbal and communicative domains. "It seems much worse for the math people than the word people," Thiel said.
Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, contended that gatekeeping mechanisms in higher education rely excessively on mathematics. "If you want to go to medical school, we weed people out through physics and calculus," he said.
Labor market trends in 2025 and 2026 reflect a growing demand for verbal and creative skills. A LinkedIn report titled "LinkedIn Skills on the Rise 2026: The Fastest-Growing Skills in the U.S." identified communications and creative thinking among the most in-demand competencies. According to a LinkedIn spokesperson, "Companies are increasingly looking for great communicators, because strong writing, clarity, and judgment still matter." The same spokesperson noted that "On LinkedIn, we’ve seen job postings mentioning ‘storytellers’ double over the last year."
High-paying communications roles underscore this shift. Anthropic advertised a head of communications position with a $400,000 starting salary, while Netflix listed a senior director of communications role paying between $656,000 and $1.2 million. Meanwhile, technical roles such as AI prompt engineering also emphasize linguistic and creative abilities alongside programming knowledge. Job postings for AI prompt engineers call for proficiency in Python and JavaScript, experience with large language models, and strong linguistic skills to optimize AI outputs. According to Glassdoor, AI prompt engineers earn an average salary of $128,000.
Recent labor data from the New York Federal Reserve shows mixed outcomes for graduates with quantitative backgrounds. In 2025, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates reached 5.6%, exceeding that of the overall workforce. Computer engineering majors faced a 7.8% unemployment rate—the second highest among all majors, behind only anthropology. In contrast, aerospace engineering and engineering technologies majors had unemployment rates of 2.2% and 1.7%, respectively.