This person seems to think they are entitled to a living in art/poetry just because they got a graduate degree in it. Degrees don't ensure employment, marketable skills do, and we should not mislead students to this fact.
This is a line sold to millions of students in all fields of study. You may be unsympathetic, but given the systemic promotion of higher education over the last few decades it's easy to understand why she would believe the degree would be the ticket to an opportunity in the field of study.
But as she's working in an Amazon warehouse for just about minimum wage, so I don't quite see how one would see a sense of entitlement quite as prominently as you do. I could just as easily characterise the sentiment as "desperation".
After all, the "American Dream" isn't, at its core, just about rags-to-riches. It's also about a society where everyone can find opportunity that at least approximately match one's aptitude.
For the so-called "Great Generation" the situation was starkly different. While graduate degrees mattered less, opportunity was abundant. And someone somewhat diligent and not too stupid, as one without a doubt must be to keep a job in a warehouse while publishing essays as she does, would have found a way into the middle class[0].
To see this change and react with the sort of told-you-so glee of others' misfortune, possibly informed by some anxieties around "the two cultures", strikes me cruel.
0: only valid for white men, of course. So some things do get better with time.
My parents strongly urged all of their children to pursue professional, specific degrees: engineering, law, medicine, or accounting/finance. They reinforced time and time again that "liberal arts degrees" provided fewer career options, and to put it plainly, that I would probably end up broke if I chosen that path. I don't think they would have provided financial support to study something like, for example, music. Or even psychology, for that matter, unless the goal was to be a PhD/academic.
I agree with your points, however, that degrees do not guarantee employment and we should not mislead students. Too many students think "degree = job". Having observed the Norwegian education system from afar (Norwegian mother & family), I advocate the way they do it and the way many Europeans have vocational programs and opportunities for technical training as an alternative to university. Even the janitors in Switzerland may train for as much as 3 years ( see https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-skills_training-t... ). Although, I do not know how that would work in the American culture, where tradesmen typically are not respected and do not make as much money as engineers and the like. Income inequality is a much bigger problem here than in some of the Scandinavian and European countries.
TLDR: degree != job, if paying for degree, get a technical one (engineering), accounting/finance, or legal/medical. Make good grades. Grades are more important in some professions than others. Don't expect to get a job with a liberal arts degree.
A degree in some of the traditional liberal degrees History, Litrature from good Uni (Ivys' Oxbridge ) is still viable.
I used to work (at one of the big publishers) with a younger colleague who had a first from Oxford in English - she has now moved into the City and probably earns as much if not more than some of the developers
The cult of the MBA is a separate thing.
They were already in the class or network of people. They knew they were going to be 'doing that work' because they were already recruited into that world long before university. It has nothing to do with their degree other than a passing qualification that they were expected to receive and in many cases the school just hands them no matter what their grades really were.
The degree is a technicality to their position and I am saying that the example you gave while interesting is not normal for anyone planning to work for a living.
I worked peripherally to publishing and am quite familiar with the situation. We had $1 million plus commission sales people 'of the right sort'. Did they know what the tech they sold did or have any real sales skills? Did it matter?
That technicality, however, is a fine point in a much larger discussion, and I wasn't going to bring it up for the purpose of this post. I imagine the type of jobs you are talking about, "high-status, high-paying" would place a, for example, state-school Electrical Engineering graduate with good grades higher than a state-school liberal arts graduate. But they will usually rank a Harvard, etc. graduate with a liberal arts degree even higher than the EE graduate. Just my read on how that works. An English degree from <Insert State School> is not perceived the same as an English degree from Oxford or Cambridge.
It is, don’t get me wrong, but if a more granular cultural standard for what education is meritorious - disciplines contra brand name unis - maybe vocational training would be more appetizing.
If you have any single friends who are successful lawyers, you might be surprised how easy they have it on dating apps compared to someone with more normal jobs. I don't think there's an easy answer to changing that social behavior at a massive scale; it's just part of our culture and the only thing we can do is teach our children to be accepting of everyone and that they are free to pursue whatever careers they want without judgement.
According to Glassdoor, $43k/y is the average salary for a creative writer.[0]
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/creative-writer-salary-SR...