A shift toward private schools/colleges means a shift away from secular education.

The decent job listings in my field are getting scarcer and scarcer. It's not just that most of them are for part-time/adjunct positions now (out-of-state, no moving expenses, semester-to-semester contracts), but that the positions requiring affiliation with a particular faith or even denomination seems to make up a majority of the openings now. Many require some kind of essay on how the applicant will help fulfill the school's Mission Statement, which is explicitly Christian, and often explicitly one denomination only. No way I'd ever be able to fake my way past that.

The more I've hunted for a university/college job, the more I've become aware of how many small, church-affiliated colleges there are in this country. Many of them are so small -- they're restricted to memebers of one denomination, after all -- that they can't support the necessary faculty to cover their degree-granting fields even half-adequately, so you can graduate from those schools and still have a really inadequate education, in your major and in general. I've never understood why someone would want to hamstring their own education by insisting on a college education wholly within their restricted little community instead of braving the wider world. Even if your denomination is one of the reasonably sane ones you're simply not going to get as broad an education as you would at a good state school. Yeah, I know some people prefer small colleges. Some people prefer private colleges. I've taught at both, and really liked some of them. But if the whole raison d'etre for a private school is to immerse its students so fully in one way of thinking that they simply can't imagine any other having merit (the ultimate goal of most religious "educators&quot then that is a school to avoid like the Plague itself.

Of course, this sort of resistance-is-futile approach to a wholly Christian education is exactly what the Bible-bashers like Huckabee and the lip-servicers like um, all the other Repug candidates, really want. The more dogmatic your training, the less chance you will produce a dangerous original thought. No one encourages dogmatic ridgity more than authoritarian, would-be political "leaders".