The ideas of liberal education have been and remain relevant, although in practice the ideas of the education of a free personality face obstacles resulting from tension arising in the interaction between the society and an individual. The traditions of liberal education can already be seen in the Antiquity, the origins of the idea of higher education. Later theoretical speculations on the essence of university education conditioned the rise of a distinctive doctrine of higher education, whose echoes are seen in subsequent scientific discussions on the purpose, the functions, and the aims of a modern university. The idea of university education has always been raised as a response to the increasing influence of the developing industrial society on education and knowledge. The result of this influence is the mass higher education system. The approach presented in the article states that the most important and essential purpose of a university is to provide liberal education that would guarantee a person's intellectual emancipation, the final purpose of such education being not only practical application of the received knowledge, or tangible benefit or other quantitative values, but rather the knowledge itself, which as such is valuable in the conditions of the knowledge society. On the basis of literature and case analysis, the article strives to find the answer to the following question: what are the problems and possibilities of liberal education in mass higher education, and what is the experience of a country in transition in this aspect? The article consists of three parts. The first part of the article presents a discussion on the tradition of liberal education in higher education, and changes in this tradition conditioned by changes in the society and the peculiarities of the development of higher education itself. The discussion is based on the main concepts of higher education. This part is dedicated to the search for the answer to the following question: how to educate a personality in the presence of the massification of higher education, and what conditions do we have for performing the main function of intellectual emancipation? In order to identify the main problems of liberal education in mass higher education, the second part of the article presents an analysis of the way pragmatic approach to mass higher education modifies the idea of liberal education, and what problems of liberal education in higher education are related to this. What possibilities of liberal education are revealed by the idealistic approach to mass higher education? The third part presents the analysis of concrete cases, and the discussion on the special position of higher education in the country in transition, where the society and its higher education system progresses from the stagnant state to the liberal democratic one. What approach to higher education (pragmatic or idealistic, or a synthesis of both?) should be adopted by a country in transition? What possibilities of liberal education in higher education can be used by a liberating society reaching for the quality of an open civic society? The transition to an open civic society requires more profound knowledge of social processes and their changes, since insufficient and superficial cognition of the social reality and decisions based on this narrow knowledge may be adverse for a society that is only starting to be democratic.