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This story has been passed around amoungst the philosophical twitterati over the past few days, but I'm posting it here because we Americans need to know what might be coming down the pike on this end. 
Times Higher Education - Being philosophical may be limited to 'leisured' classes

Philosophy is in danger of becoming the preserve of "leisured gentlemen" as post-1992 universities scrap courses because of dwindling student numbers.

The British Higher Education system is very different from ours, with most of their institutions relying heavily on state funding.  Moreover, individual programs and departments admit students, rather than the college as a whole. At the same time, UK universities do not have the tradition of 'liberal arts' and general education we do. The term 'post-1992 university' is a euphamism invented by Major's government to give credibility to the class of schools previously called 'polytechnics'.

In short, these are the UK equivalent of our Community Colleges, with one major exception.  Our CC's do provide polytechnical education, they also sell themselves as providing an equivalent to the traditional liberal arts 'core' or 'distribution' requirements - and often have transfer equivalence agreements set up with their local four-year colleges and universities. While the pressure towards technical degrees is great and the direct incentives to increase general education few, most CC's are constrained in their curricular offerings by the curricula of their transfer colleges. That should mean that Philosophy is relatively safe. So long as community college education is seen as a step towards a 4 year liberal education, not as an end in itself.

At the same time, these differences in the educational system entails that the UK institutions are under enormous pressure to market philosophy in a way we are not. And it's not then a surprise that most popularizations of Philosophy are coming out of the UK: the Philosophy shop teaches Philosophy of elementary-age students, Philosophy bytes produces small interviews for podcast and is an active twitterer, Philosophy now is a glossy magazine, and Warwick U has a 'Senior fellow in the public understanding of philosophy', Angela Hobbs. While I have no statistics at hand, I would venture to say that most of our students discover philosophy through their general education requirements, and come over as majors as a result of dissatisfaction with professionally-oriented programs.

It seems to me that if we are to avoid the fate of the post-1992 Philosophy departments, we need to follow in the footsteps of the UK advocates for Philosophy. The difference, of course, is that we don't need to market to the general public and high schoolers - we need to market to community college students and 1st and 2nd years in our general education courses. I further believe that we need to take a more active role in general education generally, and start acting like the experts on informal reasoning that we claim to be. But that's a topic for an APA talk.