Ouch! I am guilty of trying to explain too much in too little space.  As I
look at  a number of  historical and general  museums of the late 70's and
80's, such as the Edison Institute (Greenfield Village, Henry Ford
Museum), the New York Historical Society, the Detroit Historical Museum,
and a host of others that had large able curatorial staffs that have now
been reduced of as much as 80%.  Certainly,  good museum graduate
programs( and not all are good) turn out bright well trained folks who
have better backgrounds in general museum operations than starting museum
professionals had in the past.   We are turning out a generation of people
who have training in how to run a generic museum. What I have found, and I
admit this is not a valid sample, in my museum visits are curators in
charge of tool collections that don't know a jack plane from a block
plane, curators in military museums who don't know a rifle from a smooth
bore.  I think this is more of a problem in historical museums than
natural history museums.