You pay thousands of dollars every year to go to Commonwealth University, why? Are you in school to become a well-rounded academic or to become ready for a career? From the time of the late 1700s, states started passing laws to make education compulsory. These laws required that children attend something akin to a grammar school, a school intended to teach students the very basics of the English language, mathematics, and history. By 1850 most states had public schooling offered, but many didn’t require public schooling. By the early 1900s, every state was requiring that students attend public schooling. While these public and grammar schools were effective in helping the attendees to become, for the majority of students, literate, and to not become, for the majority of students, child laborers, there was an issue with these grammar schools. That issue is that because they were for ages 7-16, they didn’t adequately prepare their students for college. Enter the college preparatory school. A student attending a grammar school might go on to a college preparatory school in an attempt to be prepared for attending a university. While grammar schools have faded from our collective knowledge, replaced by their arguably haughty descendant the elementary school, our high schools continue to follow college preparatory education. Then, students would attend college to learn the liberal arts, this being the trivium focused on the arts of humanities and consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, as well as the quadrivium focused on the arts of mathematics and consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. This was intended to provide a well-rounded education to what we now may refer to as nepo-babies, helping them to become leaders. There was a time when college was intended for exactly that purpose, providing a balanced education to academics, and specialized jobs for many years, and including this period, didn’t require the classical education as a prerequisite. While this was effective for some time, we eventually reached our current college conundrum. College is now viewed as a way to prepare students for a majority of middle-class careers. While there is uncertainty as to when this shift occurred, it certainly has, and it seems to have tiptoed up to us in such a way that many of us still have no idea it has happened. Students are receiving a liberal arts education in a time far past the date carved into its tombstone. Students take courses to meet general education requirements, English majors are forced to take so many credits of math or science, Engineering majors are forced to take public speaking, and still, we believe we are being prepared for a career in a major we selected. Students learn in a juxtaposition between a well-rounded liberal arts education, and the functional career preparatory education. Some even have to take exams to prove their readiness for a career after taking solely the liberal arts curriculum. We as a nation of academics have reached a fork in the road, and the majority of us haven’t even noticed. We must either put the liberal arts education to death in favor of practical career readiness training, or revitalize the liberal arts in their true purpose of education for education’s sake.