ultimately resulting in degrees meaning nothing to the economy.
Since when has education been intended solely for the benefit of "the economy", rather than "the people" or "society"?
I suspect that the problem here is that you are wrongly assuming a goal that actual colleges don't generally have.
The post-1980s fad for economic rationalism, and the resulting elevation of money above people, is a bizarre right wing cult, not a law of nature.
Colleges have traditionally taken a much longer and broader view of their role than the churning out of economic components able to be more productive when they leave than they were when they arrived; That's always been a secondary effect of education, not its primary purpose.
They even have a name for it - vocational education - that the administrators of major universities and colleges can't utter without a sneer, because they (IMO correctly) consider it to be a rather vulgar imposition on their actual role of advancing human knowledge and building human achievement.
The economy is a necessary, but rather mundane, backdrop to education. Focusing on it in universities and colleges is like going to see the Mona Lisa to study the kind of canvas da Vinci used; It's a valid thing to look at, but if it's all you care about, you are badly missing the point.