The idea of higher education is that it aims to create an educated public and not just trained workers ready to fill whatever jobs are needed in the marketplace.  It is, of course, necessary to have an educated public in order to maintain a democracy.  Citizens need some knowledge of the natural world, culture, and things like politics in order to reason together in the public sphere about how to govern ourselves.  So, education is a big deal.  But, increasingly, institutions of higher education are marginalizing the study of those subjects that put the "higher" in higher education like the Liberal Arts and focusing more and more on vocational or professional training.  A new report indicates that this trend is probably just going to continue, according to a story that came out today on InsideHigherEd.com.

"But the lead author of the report said in an interview that the report should also shake up colleges -- and challenge most of them to be much more career-oriented than they have been and to overhaul the way they educate students, to much more closely align the curriculum with specific jobs.

The colleges that most students attend 'need to streamline their programs, so they emphasize employability,' said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown center.

Carnevale acknowledged that such a shift would accept 'a dual system' in which a select few receive an 'academic' college education and most students receive a college education that is career preparation. 'We are all offended by tracking,' he said. But the reality, Carnevale said, is that the current system doesn't do a good job with the career-oriented track, in part by letting many of the colleges on that track "aspire to be Harvard.' He said that educators have a choice: 'be loyal to the purity of your ideas and refuse to build a selective dual system, or make people better off.'

From where I'm standing the study of non-career oriented subjects in the colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences are already marginalized within higher education.

Students view courses in subjects outside their majors as a waste of time and seem to think that because it's not in their major the course should basically be an "easy A" because they are being "forced"to take it.  And, by "easy A" they mean that they should be given an A even if they don't really learn much of anything.  University adminstrators pack these classes full of students to the point that the isntructors and professors basically have to dumb things down and don't have the time or energy to give the attention to each student that they need in order to gain a mastsery of the material.  Of course, every semester the administration will make a big deal about their 10 year excellence plan and raising academic standards even as they cut faculty and increase class sizes.  So, there's already a kind of de facto marginaliation of "academic" stubjects in higher education.

Based on the story above, I'd say it's inceasingly looking like that marginalization will become official if universities move more in the direction of vocational and professional training at the expense of "academic" subjects.  But, it might not just be the out of work Philosophy professors that pay the price if we don't have an educated public. To keep society free you need a well-educated public and not just a well trained public.