Worried about employment prospects following graduation, college students have shied away from liberal Arts majors in recent years. Noticing this migration, administrators are broadening the curriculum to allow students to take more "practical" courses to complement liberal arts offerings.

This curricular phenomenon, as discussed in a New York Times piece, has cropped up at NYU, Columbia, Southern Cal, Colgate, UVA and the University of Washington. At some institutions, students can take business courses and earn academic credit toward their liberal arts degrees. Other universities allow students to pursue non-credit certificates in various specialties such as publishing or finance.

Here's a relevant snippet from the Times:

The belief that college should train students for a career is widely held. When more than 1,000 adults were asked about the primary purpose of a college education in a survey four years ago, 64 percent said it was to prepare students for specific careers, 16 percent said it was to prepare students for work in general, and only 19 percent said it was to provide students with general knowledge. (An additional 2 percent said they did not know.)Let's hope those two percent figure it out soon enough.

But not everyone agrees with this commingling of the liberal arts with vocational studies. "To dilute the power of the liberal arts with premature professionalism," Amherst College president Anthony Marx told the Times, "will deprive our society of the thoughtful leadership it needs."

That view may be a bit extreme, but it's certainly reasonable to fear for the future of the liberal arts in this age of vocationalism.