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.
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?
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