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Never mind that neither politicians nor students seem to have a particularly good idea of which college majors will actually prepare young people for the work force. History majors had a lower unemployment rate than economics, business management or communications majors, and their salaries barely lag behind in those fields, according to a recent study. Art history majors do just fine, too, with strong projected job growth in the next decade. And despite the sneers, those with bachelors degrees in philosophy have an average salary around $76,000, according to PayScale. But this is a grim and narrow view of the purpose of higher education, merely as a tool to train workers as replaceable cogs in Americas economic machine, to generate raw material for its largest companies.

Higher education, with broad study in the liberal arts, is meant to create not merely good workers but also good citizens. Citizens with knowledge of their history and culture are better equipped to lead and participate in a democratic society; learning in many different forms of knowledge teaches the humility necessary to accept other points of view in a pluralistic and increasingly globalized society.

The university as we know it emerged in the Middle Ages, founded around the study of rhetoric, grammar, logic, astronomy, mathematics, geometry and music or what the Romans called artes liberales, meaning the arts of free people. The first three disciplines evolved into the modern humanities and arts; the others evolved into natural and social sciences.

It was Cold War-era American nationalism that reframed this course of study, once available only to the wealthy few, as something essential for American success. In 1947 a presidential commission bemoaned an education system in which a student may have gained technical or professional training while being only incidentally, if at all, made ready for performing his duties as a man, a parent and a citizen. The report recommended funding to give as many Americans as possible the sort of education that would give to the student the values, attitudes, knowledge and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society, which is to say the liberal arts as traditionally understood. The funding followed.

The report is true today, too. There is still value in our health professionals knowing something about literature, our financial professionals knowing something about history and our political leaders knowing something about ethics. But as that funding is dismantled, the American higher education system is returning to what it once was: liberal arts finishing schools for the wealthy and privileged and vocational training for the rest.

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Opinion | Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational Schools - The New York Times