On the one hand, and as its advocates often claim, there seems to be a particular timeliness to the liberal arts approach that would explain its increasing popularity, both in England and globally. On the other hand, we might just as well expect to see a move towards more technical and specialist education (Boyle, 2019), and indeed we do see that move at the same time; for instance, in the long-touted T level technical qualifications. I have tried to argue that the liberal arts do not present some inevitable direction of travel for English higher education, but rather constitute a much more complex mess of values that, by virtue of its very messiness, is able to appear as an inevitability and thus as the best imaginable form of education, rather than one among others.

Since the liberal arts approach is advocated as simultaneously the best preparation for modern work, as the most prized sort of education for the intellectual, as a personally curated degree for the world's individuals, as training in character, mind and soul – that is, because it is presented as the best preparation for work, leisure and life in general – it is the entanglement of these values that makes it possible to make hyperbolic yet vague claims for this as the best form of education in every context. It is also a brief hop from the idea that this is the best imaginable sort of education to the belief that it attracts the best sort of applicants and produces the best sort of graduates.

This conclusion begins with a discussion of plural values as at the heart of higher education today. Seeking to move beyond notions of unveiling within the critical sociology of education, which posit a fundamental truth (the reproduction of inequality) at the centre of educational encounters, masked by a cloak of legitimacy, this account stresses instead the idea of opening and closing one's eyes to different sorts of values, depending on what one is trying to do. Importantly, the students and academics I interviewed were themselves in the business of trying to unpack, and critique, what was happening in different educational contexts. This is a very significant difference between what individuals think about the liberal arts and how they are presented on institutions’ promotional websites.