The Boston Globe Ideas section reports on a conference pondering the future of the liberal arts in higher education, a subject that is near and dear to my heart as a graduate of Swarthmore College. And unfortunately, the Globe finds that colleges are under enormous pressure to make education more career-focused, meaning shifting to more “practical” courses like accounting and journalism even at the most elite colleges and universities.

One response is to try to square the circle by taking a liberal arts approach to “practical subjects”:

Menand noted that many economics departments at liberal-arts institutions have historically resisted student demands that courses be added in practical subjects like accounting. But what about courses that put accounting in a broader historical and theoretical perspective? “Garbage is garbage,” Menand said, “but the history of garbage can be scholarship.”

Jonathan Crewe, a Shakespeare scholar at Dartmouth and the organizer of the conference, said that attitudes like Menand’s may well be necessary. Dartmouth’s English department, for example, just approved its first course in journalism. Crewe said students had been pushing for a course for years, and the proposal, which probably would have been rejected as inappropriately careerist 10 years ago, sailed through. The syllabus suggests that it will take the kind of approach Menand suggested: Practical assignments on various types of writing will be mixed with reading and analysis of journalism from different periods in American history, from muckraking to the Tom Wolfe-style “new journalism” of the 1960s.

If done properly, this sort of responsiveness to the market can be fine, but the problem is that it might be the first step toward abandoning the liberal arts model. Students are much better served by being taught how to think than by any career-focused education that will be out of date in five years. That is the great virtue of the liberal arts education, and it is no less true today than it was thirty years ago. But unfortunately higher education costs far, far more today than it did then — in large part to finance an absurd country club lifestyle for students — and the escalating price tag drives demands to justify that investment by providing a gateway to a high-paying career. If liberal arts institutions don’t break this vicious cycle, the shift to careerist higher education is inevitable.