I enjoy living in a society with music, literature, dance, plays, sculpture, painting, architecture, and not-strictly-necessary decoration. Those are all good for Americans, individually and collectively.
There may be an argument for university degrees in these domains but that isn't one. All these things existed before students had to be 100 K or 150 K in debt to learn them.
There's a big difference between actual artists and the people studying them.
Addition: Most of great Mathematicians in last two centuries did not graduate with a math degree. That doesn't mean that we should abolish math degrees. People also built cities and beautiful huge buildings before there was a university degrees in architecture and civil engineering. No one will say that we don't want them because of that
The problem isn't that humanities jobs are all worthless, it's that there are a very, very limited number that have enough of a value add to society to make a good living. For every successful author/artist there are 100 or 1000 struggling ones. The numbers just don't work.
Universities--especially private big-name art schools--have preyed on this lack of perspective on this asymmetry. The other commenter is right about administrative costs, but this particular scam of selling an unrealistic dream has got to stop somewhere.
As pointed out elsewhere, a significant increase in the cost of education (the actual operating budgets) is the increase in the administrative class. That needs to be addressed as part of fixing the issue with high costs.
Does it? I'm serious. I see people say all the time that incomes of people with stem vs humanities degrees get so cleanly bucketed. But the actual data that I see from the universities I've been involved with are far less clear. The distributions are wide and overlap within individual majors, within BA/BS distinctions, and within STEM/Humanities distinctions. We don't see this sort of discourse about how sad it is that biology majors exist when they could otherwise be studying computer science.
Yes, computer science graduates have higher average starting salaries than music performance graduates. But it does not clearly convert into "humanities graduates get low paying jobs and stem graduates get high paying jobs." It is further complicated by the actual social merit of various jobs coming out of these disciplines. A math major who goes to graduate school to do pure math research gets paid way way less than a math major who goes and does analytics for a trading firm. But... I'm not certain that we actually want the government to push people towards doing analytics on Wall Street.
I work in a front-office engineering role at a successful quant hedge fund, after a decade working in FAANG and equivalents. My wife is a stay-at-home wife/fur-mom.
Incidentally, I also graduated with total debt of about $13k, which I paid off six years after graduating with my first paycheck from Amazon. I know several other people from my English program who are equally successful -- one who graduated from a top-20 law school, one who was the lead narrative designer for Halo: Infinite, several software engineers.
Let's stop this stupid argument about STEM vs. humanities, and talk about integrative learning. (And, let's stop treating university as job training -- but that's a harder battle.)