Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

There are some, such as Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale, who worry that the liberal arts model of “intellectual exploration” has become an unaffordable anachronism, unsuited for a democratized higher-education system in which 18 million students are educated each year at an annual cost of more than $400 billion. But I tend to side with Johann Neem, a historian at Western Washington University, who finds it “incredibly elitist to say that the masses cannot have the intellectual leisure and curiosity of an elite education.”