You’ll get a lot of people arguing arts degrees where there aren’t jobs are scams.
Frankly, I think there’s a divide between what we expect of education and what education should be.
There’s kind of a spectrum from required credentials like medical, law, or engineering degrees, to things like stem programs which are not required but open job doors, to arts degrees where there’s not really many direct careers being opened.
Charging an arm and a leg for arts programs is a scam because it’s not opening the same economic opportunities as career based degrees. Having or providing arts degrees is totally fine, they just need to be cheaper.
I think the main benefit of an art degree (for the average person) is learning to research, communicate ideas, and think critically. I have a degree in political science and work in an IT/business role but I absolutely don’t regret my choice of degree.
My Bach degree was in history, and I often wrote off the importance of the “critical thinking” skills we learned in that program.
Boy was I wrong, I know too many people who need nothing more than an unsourced headline to fully convince them of something ludacris.
Arts education (which I mean to encompass not just visual art but also literature, plays, music, etc) is important because without it you get idiots with no media literacy. An arts degree, specifically, may not be important or beneficial for the average person, but classes in which one must think critically about the creator, the creator’s intent, the context in which the art was created, and the reception of the art are how you teach people to be well-rounded individuals who don’t just vomit out the first half-baked thought their curdled brain cobbled together from propaganda.
It’s only a scam if they’re being misleading. I’ve never heard anyone say “get an art degree, you’ll get rich!” It’s not a scam to study art simply because you want to develop your knowledge and talents in a structured way. Should art degrees cost as much as they do? Probably not, but “expensive” and “scam” are two different things.
Studying engineering is nothing like science technology or math, so I basically just forget it’s there at all.