Welcome to the new and shiny version of anti-intellectualism: where the only purpose of education is to get a job and the value of a job is determined by how lucrative it is. Now scale that up to the level of an economy and you have a basic idea of how we live in a materially-rich and intellectually-poor culture.
In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals. At this point, the best path forward is probably to entirely decouple "skills-based" (i.e. lucrative) training programs from "education-based" programs. Otherwise, anything that isn't economically-valuable will eventually lose funding - which has already happened for fields like philosophy or literature.
In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals. At this point, the best path forward is probably to entirely decouple "skills-based" (i.e. lucrative) training programs from "education-based" programs. Otherwise, anything that isn't economically-valuable will eventually lose funding - which has already happened for fields like philosophy or literature.