English Works

What brings you here is what will set you apart. 

An English major at the College of Charleston builds toward a good career and a good life. We think both matter.

Our graduates work in business, finance, law, marketing, education, technology, publishing, journalism, healthcare, the arts, and the nonprofit and public sectors. They lead teams, build companies, write books, argue cases, design products, and run classrooms. Year after year, they tell us the same thing: the skills they built in our classrooms are the skills that stay with them.

What you'll learn to do

English at the College of Charleston builds durable skills that translate across industries and careers. You will learn how to:

  • Read closely and critically
  • Build clear arguments backed by evidence
  • Write and create content for any audience
  • Pull together complex information and present it clearly
  • Work across cultural, historical, and ideological differences
  • Recognize and shape the stories that move organizations and ideas

English in the news

The case for studying English has gotten harder to ignore in the age of AI. Tech CEOs, finance executives, and the press have been making it for us. At Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, two of the cofounders studied literature in college — including one who has called his English Literature degree "extremely relevant for AI."

Across the tech sector, companies are competing for senior communications and storytelling roles. Recent computer science graduates face higher unemployment than communications graduates. The Washington Post argues that AI elevates the kind of human judgment a liberal education builds. A few voices from the conversation:

AI is the revenge of the English majors.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA

The things that make us human will become much more important.

Daniela Amodei, President and cofounder of Anthropic

We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.

Robert Goldstein, COO of BlackRock

A.I. will force us humans to double down on those talents and skills that only humans possess.

David Brooks, "In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human”

The research tells the same story about the skills you will gain as an English major. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report ranks analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, and curiosity as the core skills employers need most by 2030. A companion white paper, Unlocking the Human Advantage, names creativity, innovation, and adaptability as the hardest skills to automate — and the most valued by employers. These are habits of mind English majors develop.

You are not choosing between something you love and something practical. You are choosing the major that puts those together.