Um, most voters in this country didn’t go to college. And the ones they did go to tended to be publics where practical education has always been stressed. And when colleges were more about learning than training, they were much smaller and educated a much smaller percentage of the populace.
So she’s setting up this platonic ideal that never existed.
In fact, she has the history completely backwards. When the liberal arts curriculum was set at small Northeastern privates, it was to educate clergy and sons of the elites who actually had the time to learn Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. It certainly wasn’t meant to democratize anything. It was the land-grants and other publics, with their emphasis on practical education and well as the WWII GI bill that democratized higher education more than the classical liberal arts curriculum.
Thank goodness you don’t have to go to college to participate in a democratic society, though.