I think a real problem is that there is thinking that confuses education with job training, and that if you cannot turn a buck on something you learned, it is useless to you.
My degree and minors are both in sciences, with a special emphasis within each discipline. These allowed me to get a well paying job in a field in high--and growing demand.
I loved my classes--loved the material, loved learning the skills that went along with the knowledge base and the way of looking at the world that I acquired along with my degree. But I knew that the job I would most likely get with my degree (given my limitations of geography--my husband had a really good job in a specific location) would not be what I really enjoyed doing. I knew it would be a well paying job and if I was lucky, a job that could potentially lead to more opportunity. Just telling people where I worked gains me a lot more respect than it should.
But I didn't actually enjoy the job very much. It was in many ways just too rigid a work place for me. I'm not complaining about the rigidity: it was in place for very good reasons. But it rubbed against me the wrong ways, no matter how hard I shifted. I stuck it out for a long time but I honestly wanted to quit from the very beginning. It drained the life out of me more than I can describe here. Not the job's fault. It was simply a mis-match. I don't regret my degree. I do regret that I ended up living in an area with so limited options for using my interest in this field.
I also took a bunch of courses in subjects that seemingly would never profit me. My language skills got me a job years ago that I had never dreamed existed. It wasn't well paying but I didn't intend to stay long--and I didn't. There were good things and bad things about that job but honestly,most of the time it was fun and I learned a lot that I would never have learned in another kind of job.
My background in theater, drama, etc.(strictly non-performing), along with a hefty resume of volunteer work, helped me land another job where I was surrounded by creative people, and had a bunch of side benefits (aside from working with creatives) to it but again, it wasn't well paying, had no capacity to be well paying and was not intended to be a long term gig. And it wasn't. But it was fun.
Maybe I enjoyed those shorter term jobs because they were shorter term jobs. Maybe it was precisely because they took me in directions that were opposite of what my main areas of study were.
My father was shocked at the drama/theater classes I took. He saw them as a waste of time/money. I thought they were fun and I never dreamed they'd help me get a job I liked, but they did. He tolerated the foreign language as a fad I had to submit to to earn a degree that would earn me money. But it did help me earn a living at a time when I really really needed that job--and learned a lot from that job.
In my view, an education isn't to get you ready for the job market. It's to teach you to think. Not what to think but: To Think. To think for yourself, to think about things you'd never have thought of before, to see the world and the people and other creatures (and organisms) living on this world more fully. To be able to imagine different worlds, different ways of looking, seeing, believing, describing, interacting, doing.
Perhaps most importantly: by learning, you become more capable of learning more and different things. Your brain is trained, so to speak. It's expanded. It's more capable than it was before.
The purpose of an education is to make you a better person. Not better than the person who didn't go to the same school/program for the same number of years earning the same GPA or degree but better than you were before.
So just imagine what dumb evil person I used to be!
