Christopher Ohan, an associate dean at Texas Wesleyan University, recalled a recent graduate asking him for a recommendation letter for a six-figure job.
The student graduated with a history degree four years ago. The position he was applying for, however, had little to do with the title on his diploma — it was to train people in banking to use an artificial intelligence tool.
When Ohan asked how a history major could be in the running for that job, the graduate said his employer saw he could speak, write, research and construct an argument.
The bank wanted all those skills for the AI job.
Texas Wesleyan and the University of Texas at Arlington are taking the same approach to AI as the bank officials seem to be. Both universities are trying to answer the same question: What should someone who is “AI-ready” actually know how to do? And both are looking at the thinking end of AI as well as its technology.
Texas Wesleyan’s new bachelor’s degree pairs AI with the humanities. The University of Texas at Arlington is taking a business route, replacing its business analytics degrees with bachelor’s and master’s programs focused on solving workplace problems with AI.
“As the new technology comes along, we’re sort of discovering it, and it’s kind of exciting,” Ohan said. “It’s scary at the same time.”
What belongs in an AI degree?
By the time Ohan began developing the new bachelor’s degree, Texas Wesleyan faculty across the humanities, such as history, English, mass communication, political science and religion, were already experimenting with AI.
What’s included in Texas Wesleyan’s Bachelor of Humanities and AI?
Students can begin the Bachelor of Arts in Humanities and Artificial Intelligence this fall.
They start with an 18-hour humanities core spanning art, history, mass communication, philosophy, political science and sociology. Students then choose a computer science track or a cross-disciplinary humanities track built from English, history, mass communication and political science.
The challenge, he said, was building a program where the technology didn’t overwhelm the humanities.
“It’s not a degree in AI,” he said. “It’s humanities and AI.”
Texas Wesleyan is trying to make the degree stable at its core and flexible around the edges. Students will continue studying history, philosophy, literature and political thought. Faculty can change the AI tools used in gateway and upper-level courses as the technology evolves.
UTA began with programs already built around data. Its College of Business launched a master’s degree in business analytics in 2015 and a bachelor’s degree in 2021. This fall, UTA replaced both of those with programs in artificial intelligence for business and redesigned the curricula.
“This is a continuous evolution, not a one-time change,” said Radha Mahapatra, chair of UTA’s information systems and operations management department.
In the UTA approach, statistics and programming provide a foundation beneath newer applications. An open-ended undergraduate seminar gives faculty room to teach generative AI, agentic AI and future developments. Faculty review course content each semester and receive AI training, said Fernando Jaramillo, UTA’s associate dean for students and programs.
What is generative AI and agentic AI?
At UTA, business students in AI-related programs will learn about generative AI and agentic AI.
Generative AI, which describes models like ChatGPT or Claude, focuses on creating new content based on an input, such as user prompts, questions or other data. Its output can include text, images, audio, video or software code.
Agentic AI focuses on achieving a goal. It can determine what steps are needed, select among possible actions and work through a task over time independently while still involving a human for approvals, oversight or decisions that require judgment. An example includes retailers like Amazon that use the tool to track inventory or create delivery routes.
UTA College of Business has an advisory board with executives from BNSF Railway, Accenture, Walmart, AT&T, Ericsson and other companies that helped shape its programs. UTA’s latest AI and Analytics Symposium drew about 200 participants from academia and industry, with roughly 50 companies represented, Mahapatra said.
Conversations like those going on at UTA and Texas Wesleyan speak to a gap studied by Michael Fried, a senior researcher at Ithaka S+R, an education research nonprofit.
In spring 2026, Fried surveyed 500 instructors at nationwide four-year nonprofit colleges and universities and compared their answers with a separate survey of 200 U.S. AI decision-makers conducted by HiBob, a human resources technology company.
The comparison found that employers focused on what AI could do for productivity, such as workflow design, automation and technical integration. Instructors emphasized how people should use the technology, such as transparency, attribution, critical thinking and reviewing AI output.
The difference does not mean colleges chose the wrong priorities. Fried said higher education’s role in job preparation is a contested question that varies by institution and degree program. For any AI degree, universities should define learning outcomes, design courses to meet them and assess whether students achieve them.
“What can ultimately hurt students and eventually new employees is if institutions talk about AI skills but really mean one thing, and employers talk about AI skills and mean another,” he said in an interview.
What’s included in UTA’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees of AI in business analytics?
UTA replaced its business analytics degrees with Artificial Intelligence for Business programs this fall and redesigned the curricula.
The 120-hour bachelor’s combines accounting, finance, management, marketing and supply chain courses with statistics, programming and AI. A full-time student can complete the 33-hour master’s in a year, though working professionals may take longer.
Both local programs leave room to combine fields. Texas Wesleyan’s plan allows for 36 to 39 elective hours. Jaramillo said UTA graduates can double-major AI with finance or marketing.
UTA leaders compare AI’s spread to the rise of another tool that employers expect every graduate to know.
“I call it the Excel of the 21st century,” Mahapatra said.
What can a graduate do?
Texas Wesleyan wants students to question how AI systems are used and explain their judgment, Ohan said. That could mean asking whether an automated loan process recreates redlining or weighing privacy concerns when a police department uses facial recognition.
Ohan wants students to treat AI as an argument partner, not an answer machine.
“If you get this degree, you’re not going to be the tech,” he said. “But you might be the adviser in the room in the school district and the police department and the bank that’s training people to use it ethically.”
UTA, meanwhile, approaches those questions through data. Mahapatra described a hiring model trained on records showing that past employees from certain ZIP codes were more likely to succeed. If the data favor high-income neighborhoods, the model can reproduce that bias when recommending applicants.
The output may look efficient. The decision can still be discriminatory or illegal, Mahapatra said.
UTA students will study statistics, natural language processing, machine learning and neural networks, but they must understand the business problem, decide whether the AI’s answer is useful and explain their findings. The curricula include courses on ethical AI use.
The University of Texas at Arlington campus sign is pictured on Oct. 21, 2024. Its College of Business is replacing its master’s and bachelor’s degrees in business analytics with Artificial Intelligence for Business programs. (Camilo Diaz | Fort Worth Report)
Mahapatra already has been allowing students to use AI in his classes, but they must disclose how.
“It doesn’t make sense for me to say, ‘Don’t use AI,’” he said, “because it’s a productivity enhancement tool.”
Texas Wesleyan is also developing a proposed Master of Science degree in project management for the AI economy. The degree would combine project management with AI, automation and data analytics, moving closer to the employer side of Fried’s findings.
How other Tarrant County institutions approach AIWhat is generative AI and agentic AI?
Other Tarrant County institutions are taking more short-term approaches.
Professor Thomas Bell, who developed the proposal, said AI can generate schedules, assemble budgets and identify risks.
It cannot read the room.
An AI system may calculate that a team working 60-hour weeks can meet a deadline, Bell said. It does not understand the burnout that follows or notice why a stakeholder has stopped speaking.
“AI predicts, but ultimately humans decide,” Bell said.
Texas Wesleyan’s humanities capstone and proposed project-management curriculum would require students to show how they used AI and where human judgment entered.
Whoever approves an AI-assisted result remains accountable, Bell said. A prompt entered into a public platform could expose a company’s private information. A system may absorb work that an artist, writer or designer never agreed to contribute. Data centers consume power and water even when the requested output is only a short email.
Determining whether students are learning those lessons will take time. Fried estimated that building a record showing whether the programs help graduates find work could take three to six years. Until then, students may see “AI” in a program name and assume the degree will lead to a growing field.
“That is a real risk,” Fried said.
Skills matter
Earlier this summer, Ohan sat beside a parent whose son wanted to major in a humanities field. The parent wondered: What job could he get after graduation?
Ohan thought of the history graduate — he got the AI job, earning $120,000 a year.
The job was about artificial intelligence. The skills that landed him the job were not.
“It’s those human skills that you learn in the traditional humanities,” Ohan said.
Dang Le is the higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at dang.le@fortworthreport.org.
The Fort Worth Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
The Report’s higher education coverage is supported in part by major higher education institutions in Tarrant County, including Tarleton State University, Tarrant County College, Texas A&M-Fort Worth Christian University, Texas Wesleyan University, the University of Texas at Arlington and UNT Health Fort Worth.
At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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