The Case for the Liberal Arts

“The liberal arts are dead” has been a dominant narrative for much of this century.

Pushed by mainstream media, large corporations, and government officials responsible for workforce planning, this view has hardened into conventional wisdom and an unquestioned orthodoxy.

Public intellectuals and thinkers who dare to challenge this doctrine are quickly met with a barrage of charts, data, and statistics meant to shut the debate down.

Declining enrollments, colleges closing at a pace of one a week, questionable returns on investment, and the supposed mismatch between liberal-arts degrees and current labor-market needs are among the arguments critics use to claim that the liberal arts are in decline.

While there is factual evidence behind some of these claims, framing the issue this way amounts to an easy and ultimately shallow misdiagnosis of the problem.

The liberal-arts ethos is not itself to blame for the crisis in which we now find ourselves. Liberal education did not fail students; institutions of higher learning failed liberal education. The liberal arts are too often tied to small, elite colleges with bloated bureaucracies and soaring tuition. They should not be. The liberal arts should be associated with enduring ideas, not viewed through the narrow lens of institutional mismanagement or abandonment.

Much of this misunderstanding stems from the notion that a liberal-arts education is meant to function as job training and should neatly align with current workforce trends. That was never the purpose of such a course of study. Its ultimate aim is and has always been the formation of citizens and the cultivation of critical thinking—goals that have endured across centuries, continents, and political systems.

One might ask why this debate matters now. The answer is that this is the point at which the rise of AI, deepening social polarization, and a crisis of confidence in higher education are all converging. A properly understood liberal-arts education offers a starting point for addressing these challenges. If done right, the liberal arts can help build a free, prosperous, and virtuous society, and the first step in that project is forming good citizens.

Making Good Citizens 

In the year of the American Republic’s Semiquincentennial, it is important to remember the wisdom of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

These words reflect the high regard and appreciation the Founders had for education and knowledge, which they perceived as an essential key to sustaining the republic.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, advocated the idea of an informed and educated citizenry, which was, in his opinion, a cornerstone to the success of the young American nation.

His belief was rooted in a centuries-long tradition of the liberal arts contributing to self-government and civic responsibility. From Athens and Rome to London and Philadelphia, the liberal-arts education fostered critical thinking and moral reasoning while instilling civic duty into future generations of leaders—all skills and virtues necessary for informed and successful participation in a democratic as well as a prosperous society.

Being an informed citizen who actively participates in and cares for res publica is a learned skill, not a natural instinct. A democratic-republican state, in which citizens elect representatives for a government of laws not men, requires good judgment, restraint, and persuasion—all the things Western political elites lack these days but that a true liberal-arts education provides.

A liberal-arts education encompasses political philosophy, rhetoric, ethics, and history. Together, these teach students how to think, train them to debate without violence or cancelation, and make them good citizens.

This is the reason why a liberal-arts or civic education cannot be replaced by STEM programs, workforce training, or DEI workshops and seminars. Making good, free-thinking citizens cannot be outsourced to campus cultures, university administrators, or ideologically driven professors.

On the eve of the country’s Semiquincentennial, just seventeen percent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington, seventy percent believe higher education is headed in the wrong direction, and Americans see the country as more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

A liberal-arts education is the only kind uniquely suited to address these issues and to transform students into informed, engaged citizens and virtuous leaders, capable of preserving the American Republic by prioritizing the common good over selfish interest. One might argue, therefore, that a liberal-arts education is a public good, not a luxury item for coastal elites to check off on their résumés.

Adaptability Over Credentialism

The Founding Fathers cared deeply about an informed citizenry and placed a high value on the liberal arts in American universities. What they could not have imagined was the outsized role the federal government would eventually play in higher education.

Federal involvement in higher education has infected both universities and the labor market with credentialism. Degrees now function largely as signaling devices for employers—a proxy for general competence—rather than as evidence of genuine learning or specific skills. This practice has created a vicious cycle of credential inflation, leading to higher and higher paper requirements for jobs that do not truly need them. Today, many entry-level positions demand a master’s degree; a decade ago, the same jobs required only a bachelor’s, and thirty years ago they were often filled by high-school graduates.

Beyond credentialism, today’s college-education framework is also exposed to high labor-market volatility. Over the past decade, many newly minted graduates have experienced significant career churn, hopping from one entry-level job to another. The rise of AI—bringing automation and job disruption—combined with the outsourcing of jobs overseas has stacked the deck against graduates who pursued college mainly in hopes of securing a credential.

The accelerating pace of labor-market change makes it nearly impossible for colleges to train students for specific future outcomes. Yet that is exactly what many institutions of higher learning are trying to do: educate students today for the labor market’s needs of tomorrow.

A liberal-arts education offers the opposite approach. It emphasizes timeless, transferable skills, such as writing, reasoning, problem-solving, and critical thinking. It is no surprise that investment banks, Silicon Valley startups, and even AI firms increasingly hire liberal-arts majors, the best of whom are well-rounded and prepared to tackle the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

A liberal-arts education should be seen as adaptability insurance. It is a wild card that can open countless career paths and outlast the latest job-market trends.

The Liberal Arts as an Antidote to Workforce Central Planning 

While the liberal-arts education has endured for centuries, universities and government agencies have, of late, chased fads and promoted “hot” jobs, adopting the language and priorities of industrial trends abetted by government planning.

Throughout history, attempts at centrally planning the workforce (and, concomitantly, the higher-education curriculum) have failed time and again. The Soviet Union stands as the clearest example of a centrally planned system that collapsed under its own weight.

We can also find other examples of this in recent American history. Throughout the 2010s, political and financial elites became fixated on the mantra “learn to code,” which soon turned into a public campaign endorsed by politicians, business executives, and even Hollywood actors.

At its core, this idea amounted to a form of central planning, marketed as a solution to deep-seated economic and social problems. It drove a rapid expansion of computer-science programs at public universities and fueled a wave of newly established coding “boot camps.” In 2013, President Obama urged Americans to learn to code and become familiar with computer science. This codemania peaked in 2020, when then-presidential candidate Joe Biden suggested that West Virginia coal miners learn to code as an alternative career path in poverty-stricken Appalachia.

That once-popular mantra has not aged well. Many advocates, including government officials, failed to anticipate the rise of artificial intelligence and its long-term effects on coding career paths. It is entirely possible that, in the near future, many coding jobs will disappear entirely or be transformed beyond recognition.

The lesson is clear: Labor markets are dynamic and move faster than curricula ever can. Workforce-alignment policies tend to chase short-term labor demands, while a liberal-arts education endures.

Workforce central planning also produces oversupply and credential bottlenecks. Add in the student-debt crisis, and you have a clear picture of today’s America: a government that has pushed “college for all” for decades and a workforce now experiencing the natural volatility of labor markets as once-hyped industries cool.

A liberal-arts education offers a decentralized form of learning insulated from these trends. It separates genuine education from the narrow job-placement metrics favored by governmental central planners. The liberal arts educate students to become virtuous citizens and independent thinkers—not just another cohort of graduates designed to satisfy arbitrary or misguided government targets.

Intellectual Pluralism and Viewpoint Diversity

Rooted in ancient Greece and Rome, the original liberal-arts ethos focused on cultivating intellects, virtue, and wisdom. Students were encouraged to grapple with rival traditions, competing schools of thought, and opposing arguments. At its core, the liberal arts are built on education through disagreement—the Socratic method—and the intellectual pluralism that flows from it.

Unfortunately, this is no longer true of much of contemporary American liberal-arts education. For decades, campuses across the country have drifted toward an ideological monoculture. Classrooms and auditoriums too often function as sites of ideological indoctrination, where professors moralize and virtue-signal rather than encourage genuine inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge.

Ideology replacing education has turned many American campuses into ivory towers, detached from the needs of the nation they were meant to serve. This shift has not gone unnoticed. As previously mentioned, seven in ten Americans now say the country’s higher education system is headed in the wrong direction, up from fifty-six percent in 2020.

The cost of this faculty-driven ideological conformity falls on students, as well. Many leave college unprepared for real-world disagreements, let alone genuine viewpoint diversity. According to the fall edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, nearly forty percent of young Americans believe political violence can be acceptable under certain circumstances. That is a highly troubling figure, especially given that many of these young people were educated in what bills itself as the liberal-arts tradition, at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities.

Restoring viewpoint diversity as part of the original liberal-arts ethos is a necessity, not a partisan demand. A properly grounded commitment to the liberal arts and genuine viewpoint diversity would benefit not only colleges themselves but the country as a whole.

National Unity, Historical Continuity, and Intergenerational Understanding 

Americans are divided over values, economics, and politics, with a deepening generational gap and a growing loss of shared language and common reference points.

Zoomers (Generation Z), shaped by doomscrolling and instant gratification, have been pushed toward presentism. For many, there is no sense of past or future—only the current fleeting moment, measured in the length of a TikTok video. The result is a kind of historical amnesia—a failure to know, and often to care about, the ancestors who built this great country.

This is precisely where a liberal-arts education can make its greatest contribution: by serving as connective tissue. Studying the Western canon, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the founding documents and principles of the American republic can help restore a shared sense of meaning. It reminds the next generation that the world did not begin with them and that innovation is best grounded in an understanding of, and an appreciation for, inherited traditions.

A true liberal-arts education would strengthen civic cohesion among the nation’s elites by restoring a shared language and common ground. According to a recent Martin Center study, only fourteen states require civics education as a graduation requirement. It is now difficult to find a public university that truly anchors its curriculum in the Western intellectual tradition. That must change.

A liberal-arts education would turn the younger generation into stewards—men and women dedicated to preserving and advancing our traditions and institutions. Rather than becoming rebels without context, Maoists who believe everything begins with them, or enemies of the Permanent Things, as the great Russell Kirk warned, they would grow into individuals who understand, cherish, and sustain what they have inherited.

Cost, Scale, and Institutional Mission Drift 

In the spring of 2025, Inside Higher Ed reported that Wellesley College in Massachusetts had become the first American institution to surpass $100,000 in tuition and related costs. Other private liberal-arts colleges in New England are not far behind.

Liberal-arts degrees, often dismissed by the public as luxury items, are frequently blamed for rising costs they did not create. The real driver of higher-education inflation is the endless stream of federal funding supplementing tuition revenue and fueling ever-expanding administrative bureaucracies disconnected from student learning. At some institutions, the imbalance is stark: Yale, once a model liberal-arts college, now employs nearly one administrator for every undergraduate student.

Administrative bloat and DEI-compliance regimes have distorted academic priorities, while mission drift has become a defining feature of many liberal-arts institutions. Colleges have morphed into organizations their founders would scarcely recognize, replacing faith, critical thinking, and character formation with critical theory and grievance studies. Many still brand themselves as liberal-arts colleges but often only rhetorically—their programs have been hollowed out and bear little resemblance to the original mission of liberal education.

The Martin Center’s research and policy fellow, Shannon Watkins, documents this trend in her recent report From Purpose to Politics: The Decline of Three Liberal Arts Institutions, which examines how once-distinct colleges drifted away from their founding missions.

Instead of chasing prestige, revenue, and DEI compliance, liberal-arts institutions should return to their roots. There are many small, teaching-oriented, liberal-arts colleges that do not rely on federal funding and still manage to remain affordable. These schools should serve as case studies for understanding the real costs and true value of a liberal-arts education. Otherwise, judging the discipline by the trends of DEI-saturated programs will only produce a distorted picture.

Make the Liberal Arts Great Again 

American higher education is at a crossroads. After decades of ideological indoctrination, declining academic standards, and bureaucratic bloat, the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

Once-prestigious liberal-arts colleges across the country are now mere shadows of what they once were. To ensure a quality education for future generations—and the future of the country itself—we must return to basics and rediscover the original ethos of the liberal-arts education.

In order to do that, institutions and states need to enact concrete reforms. Reducing administrative bloat, trimming unnecessary or ideologically driven academic programs, and further dismantling DEI infrastructures would be a step in the right direction.

Additionally, adopting the Chicago Principles would signal a genuine commitment to free speech and free expression, helping to restore intellectual pluralism on campus. Establishing other mechanisms to protect viewpoint diversity is essential if universities hope to counter entrenched campus monocultures.

Although it may seem like a Sisyphean task, a full overhaul of general-education curricula may be the most effective solution available. It is difficult but not impossible. In the spring of 2025, Utah passed a General Education Act that reoriented curricula toward the Western canon, civics education, and viewpoint diversity. The legislation was inspired by a model bill developed by the Martin Center, the National Association of Scholars, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Unfortunately, passing similar model legislation elsewhere has proven to be a difficult, multi-year ordeal—even in states with Republican trifectas that might otherwise be receptive to such reforms.

If state legislatures fail to act, boards of trustees must step in to defend the academic mission and rigor of their institutions. Trustees have a responsibility to demand accountability from administrators and to initiate necessary reforms. Yet it may be that, in many places, the status quo is now too deeply entrenched to be seriously challenged. Perhaps we are nearing the point where we must confront an uncomfortable reality: that the liberal arts are effectively dead at many state universities and so-called liberal-arts colleges.

No, there is still hope. New liberal-arts and Great Books colleges are emerging across the country, serving as beacons for the revival of liberal education. Wyoming Catholic College, John Adams College in Utah, and the University of Austin are just a few examples showing that parallel institution-building works. Their success proves there is still real demand among young people for a genuine liberal-arts education. The liberal arts are not dead—their story is just beginning.

The liberal-arts educational model is indispensable to a free, prosperous, and virtuous society. If we hope to leave such a society to our children, we must restore the original ethos of the liberal arts—and renew our appreciation for them. Or, to put it in political terms, we need to make the liberal arts great again.

Jovan Tripkovic is the founder and managing editor of  From the Academy and communications manager at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.