“The whole purpose of college is to learn how to deal with difficult situations...”
WRONG. The whole purpose of college is to get some worthwhile degree to help with future earnings (and offset current investment). It is all about investments. Useless college degrees should be removed. Only Business, Engineering, and Hard Sciences should be in the public universities(if they should even remain open). The rest should be removed, their “professors” fired, and the university buildings auctioned off. And no more gubmint funding!
Historically, pre-WW2, that role was taken by trade schools. Universities were for getting a well rounded education on philosophy and the liberal arts, not learning a craft. I suppose medicine, law, and architecture/engineering being exceptions. After the GI Bill a lot of those two year trade institutions either got absorbed into larger universities or became community colleges.
The error some make is to to attribute the classical purpose of the university (a spot for gentlemen of means to mature their general classical liberal arts education and engage in intellectually stimulating debate) with the modern purpose (to train in a trade so you can get a job). Some still think it's the former and find that they have useless degrees and can't get a job to pay down their massive debts. Others wax poetic about universities as these august bodies where debate and intellectual curiosity are paramount but they are trade schools now. People need to get over the idea of the old time university, it's dead.
I would not go quite that far. Nursing, architecture, and several other marketable degrees are not on your list. Math is not considered a hard science, but applied math, statistics, and economics are in demand and extremely marketable.