I don't have the numbers handy but I'm reasonably sure that more people are studying liberal arts as previously defined than ever before in history. I think th

I don't have the numbers handy but I'm reasonably sure that more people are studying liberal arts as previously defined than ever before in history. I think there are really two large phenomena that underlie the apparent decline of liberal arts education: 1) More and more people are attending 4-year colleges due to inflation in expectation without necessarily any fundamental change in demand for skills which means 4-years colleges are increasingly forced to perform the roles previously filled by vocational schools and community colleges. 2) As our understanding of the world increases and our technological capability expands, more and more things are brought under the umbrella of STEM. A lot of what counts as science (social sciences, for example) for example would have counted as liberal arts going back a few hundred years. Even much of computer science as we know it today would've fallen somewhere between math and philosophy. Study of languages at one point was an extremely liberal-artsy pursuit, but Linguistics is a quantitative discipline with strong connections to math and computer science. Likewise political science had its roots in political philosophy and humanities but now it's a discipline strongly influenced by statistics, economics and even game theory.