John Zmirak is the noted Catholic author of the popular “Bad Catholic’s” series, including The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism: A Faithful, Fun-Loving Look at Catholic Dogmas, Doctrines, and Schmoctrines.

In National Catholic Register, he takes a look at an potential unintended consequence of President Obama’s “College Affordability” plan.

But there’s another purpose of higher education that may well get lost in this reform: Many fields taught at modern universities have value that is impossible to quantify — and whose graduates are less likely to earn high salaries than those who study finance, math or engineering.

I mean the liberal arts, including literature, history, art, philosophy and other subject matters once considered as essential knowledge for a fully educated person. If the Obama reform indeed makes federal financial aid hinge on the salaries of a given college’s graduates, that will exert pressure on schools to scant already-threatened programs in such liberal arts in favor of ever-more “practical” fields of study.

Given our financial constraints, such a choice may be inevitable. We don’t like to admit it, but the traditional liberal arts curriculum that cultural traditionalists venerate was never intended for mass education. Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote The Idea of a University with a very specific social class in mind: It was a program for educating “gentlemen” with some measure of inherited wealth who could afford to delay practical training in any specific profession. Put bluntly, since their development in the ancient world, the liberal arts have always worked as a school of civility for a country’s leadership class, to guarantee that the people who make the big decisions in society have a broader vision of life than utilitarian studies or their inherited cultural biases can provide.

An admirable populist impulse led Americans to try extending this kind of education to anyone who wanted it. Thus what followed was the mass expansion of state universities after World War II, many of them equipped with core curricula aimed at offering solid liberal arts educations to all. It only took 30 years for this experiment to fail, for schools to begin dismantling their core curricula and lowering their standards, as it became clear that average students with moderate talents did not much benefit from — and, frankly, did not want — a preparation in the liberal arts.

But even as schools made liberal arts study optional, they did maintain healthy programs in these traditional fields of study — partly to train future teachers and partly out of a kind of cultural bad conscience. Could you really call yourself a college if you didn’t even offer Latin and Greek?

So the liberal arts survive today, at some schools serving largely as window dressing. The Obama plan seems designed to strip away much of this window dressing and goad schools to focus even more relentlessly on the bottom line.