TRD I think the point you are missing is running a University as a business means efficiency and turning out a product with an education that creates both breadth and meaning. Liberal Arts is a catch all for I learned nothing of any real marketable value to the marketplace but I expect companies to hire me because I went to a school for 4 years.
Sure, if they want to take Art History or other in high demand majors let them, but then don’t whine if you cannot make a living with it.
In China approximately 10% of ALL University graduates have the requisite skills required by multi-national corporations who do business in their country. This also explains why they flood to US schools to at least have a chance at getting the skills needed to meet the market. Why spend 100K and get a degree and end up driving a txi because you cannot do anything?
BTW China is planning to spend billions of dollars to reform this and make their workforce more marketable in their workforce, education is my passion but it has become a repository for hoary old theoreticians ho have never had a job in their lives or mills to indoctrinate Liberal entitlement thinking into young minds.
JMHO of course
Do remember that “liberal arts” was named long before the left stole the word “liberal”. It meant “arts appropriate to free men”. The sentiment often attributed to Churchill (who may have quoted at second or third hand) expressed by James Alexander Smith, a Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, “Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education,” is still the prime point of acquiring a liberal education (remember that’s the uncorrupted use of the word “liberal”).
Unfortunately the reform needed, a return to the classical model of the university, is not the reform which will occur by adopting a business model.