College students know the the usefulness of humanities majors: students assess the value of majors based upon their calculation of college success. From the article:

Students attend college for different reasons. Some … see college primarily as a financial decision, an investment that they hope will have a relatively short-term payoff. Others … may hope that a degree will bring financial rewards, but their focus is more on the intellectual and social aspects of the college experience. (Others, of course, seek both.) Those different goals affect where students go to college and what they do once they get there.

These varied approaches to college are clear from the fields that students at different colleges choose to study. According to data from the federal Education Department, students at elite universities are more likely to pursue degrees in the humanities, arts and social sciences than students at less selective schools, who tend to choose majors that are more likely to lead to an immediate, well-paying job.

But while focusing on more practical majors — such as business — may seem like the best route in the short term, majoring in the humanities may be more beneficial in the long term. In the first years after graduation, social sciences and humanities majors earn less than people who have pre-professional degrees, but at peak earning ages, liberal arts majors surpass people in pre-professional degrees, in part because they are more likely to have graduate degrees. After people who focused on the social sciences and humanities as undergraduates attend graduate school, they may end up working as lawyers or professors, which are high-paying professions.

h/t Robert Townsend