In recent years, globalization, privatization, deficit-cutting, and the supposed needs of a "knowledge-based" market economy have driven governments to reshape their approaches to higher education. Funding now privileges the market-oriented, high-technology fields of study, in which students, too, are showing growing interest. But such policies and choices are based on the belief that liberal education - the humanities, the social sciences and the fine arts - have little investment value for the individual and society.

Our paper challenges these assumptions and the educational policies that flow from them. Overall, liberal arts graduates have done well in the world of employment. To the degree that they and other university graduates have encountered under-employment - and this reality for many cannot be denied - the problem will not be fixed by marginalizing liberal education within the university curricula in favour of more "applied" subjects. We argue that the universities' ability to anticipate market needs is no better than that of government or business. We contend, too, that liberal education is the core of higher learning - in good economic times and bad - and in its effort to prepare people for employment, the university must not be permitted to raze its own intellectual and cultural foundation. In any event, the liberal arts are not static; they continue to be reformed, but less in response to ephemeral market trends than on the basis of intellectual merit. As employers themselves have periodically asserted, by broadening the knowledge base of employees, liberal education can enhance the abilities of graduates in applied and professional fields.

Historically, both the university and the liberal arts were available to a privileged minority, and the antipathy they sometimes elicit undoubtedly arises from this tradition of elitism. But higher education is now more broadly accessible than ever to women, minority groups, and those of modest means. They are entitled to reap the intellectual and material rewards that university education offers. It remains to be seen whether the "privatizing" of university funding, and the large personal debts that this requires, will undermine the accessibility gains of the last two decades.