Somewhere along the way people forgot what the purpose of a college education is, particularly a humanities degree like Art History or English Literature.
It is about signaling to the world that your father is so rich that you do not NEED to worry about a career. You do not NEED to go to trade school to learn about how to build bridges. Veblen wrote this in the 1890s and called education one of the most prominent forms of conspicuous consumption.
Why non-rich people get these degrees and then wonder why they cannot find a job is the real tragedy. If you need a job, you need a different degree!
That could be the case, or it could be that the student wants to become the next generation of intellectual expertise. Put more simply, the "original" purpose of college was for people who were either so rich they could afford it, or so smart they could become scholars (hence "scholarships").
One of the unintended consequences of the GI Bill was turning college into a means of entering the managerial class, to rise from labor into management. Learning became secondary to obtaining the sheepskin, to the point that today the sheepskin is no longer a door to anything--unless you happen to be from the underclass, in which case it is a means of rising up from poverty without physical labor. The only exceptions to this are the professions, which is why the "popular" programs are nursing, education, and criminal justice.