It would be great to see political/cultural literacy taken more seriously, but the trend as you point out has been in the opposite direction (and has been/will be for some time).
Being burdened with debt and not having the choice to pursue further education are the real problems, and can hopefully be solved in a way other than restricting access to those fields.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in this thread... it's pretty cynical (but not uncommon) to suggest that one's primary value to society is what they contribute economically (or otherwise validated economically).
I'm lucky that the situation is a bit more optimistic here in Australia...
Thomas Jefferson said something similar:
An ignorant people can never remain a free people.
There's an excellent video [1] of former Supreme Court Justice David Souter (if only we could get judicial nominations of this quality these days from either party, let alone Republicans) where he makes the point that lack of civics education is the largest problem in America today. I think he'd argue that one's primary value to society is being an informed citizen who votes and properly holds the government to account, which doesn't mean simply voting for the opposite party every 8 years because you're dissatisfied with life.
Especially after an election where it's so clear that many people are not being responsible citizens, either not voting or voting ignorantly, I with you in wondering why more people in this thread can't understand the value to society of a well-educated populace, regardless of how that education provides an economic benefit.
The result is our current educational system, where costs have ballooned and administrative and facilities costs dwarf the spending on actual education. I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was an excellent article that traced beginning of our rapidly increasing education costs to the era when Reagan was governor of California and he pushed that shift in mindset. The whole system and all the problems we're experiencing suddenly make perfect sense when you view it from that perspective.
I'd personally like to see a hybrid approach. We should identify a core curriculum that leads to a well-educated populace. Things like statistics and formal logic that make it much harder to manipulate people the way that our current politicians and media do. It should be free to study that curriculum. Anything beyond that, including vocational training, could be market based and lenders should consider the likelihood of repayment when loaning money for tuition.