This leads to an entirely different discussion about whether universities exist to educate the populace or to train future workers.
==The result being, a median plumber making more than a median law graduate.==
Which should entice more people into the trades. Is that happening?
Getting poor pseudo-education is perhaps more harmful than getting no education at all. People with no education are more likely to have some intellectual humility, while the "quarter-intellectuals" that took some low-effort third-rate humanities courses tend to fall victim to Dunning-Kruger more often, and offer simple solutions/explanations to overwhelmingly complex topics.
Are you sure you don't have some sort of bias here? In my experience humanities study involves lots of critical thinking and reasoning.
Wikipedia [1]: "The humanities use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element —as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences, yet, unlike the sciences, it has no central discipline. The humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, philosophy, history, human geography, law, politics, religion, and art."
People studying this would seem less likely to rely on simple solutions and fall victim to Dunning-Kruger.
Google ran a test of their employees skills and found that many humanities-based skills are more highly correlated with success than STEM skills [2].
"Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities [2] https://outline.com/TJAaaZ
I've never understood this argument. STEM requires far more critical thinking and reasoning than the humanities. The scientific, medical, and engineering achievements you use every single day stand as mute proof of that.
On top of that, the trade schools were criminally neglected over the past 20 years, so it's very possible to go there and not learn much practical skills...
In Poland's case, there are stupendously large numbers of people studying various branches of humanities (literature, psychology, pedagogy, law) which have poor job prospects in our country. After graduating, a lot of these people just work service jobs or emigrate to Western Europe (to work the same crappy jobs there, but for more money). It's an enormous waste of taxpayer's money, which is happening because the the students are spending out of somebody else's pocket.
Meanwhile, the governing parties eviscerated the trade schools, because "we need educated people", "we're entering knowledge economy" etc. The result being, a median plumber making more than a median law graduate.