Someone who's only exposure to education included 4 years of English, 3 years of math, and 2 years of science could rationally conclude that English is a valuable skill. Particularly when they don't have familial connections with degrees.

Why would you assume a 17 year old, first generation college student would know that degree wouldn't pay for itself?

Because it's easy to search for salary information on the internet?

Put yourself in the shoes of a naive 17 year old for a second. You're gonna do that when every person in your life is telling you "just go to college and don't worry about the loans because you'll make enough money to pay them off?" That was literally a true statement not too long ago. It's entirely possible every single adult in our hypothetical student's life is telling them this, because it was true when those people went to college.

I did that when I attended college and I didn't have the internet to tell me what a stupid idea it was to blow tens of thousands of dollars I didn't have because I didn't have access at the time. I won't for a single second lament the decisions of people who refuse to do the bare minimum. They aren't victims of the system with regards to being able to simply look at the market and do basic math. They're too lazy to be adults.

When I graduated with a CS degree and an EE minor in 2004 it wasn't clear my degree would pay for itself. When the dot com bubble burst, a ton of people got laid off and software engineering jobs became very competitive. A significant percentage of the people in the CS program at my school changed majors. When I graduated in 2004 near the top of my class from a respectable university and had prior work experience, the best offer I got in the Greater Boston area was for $45K. That seemed to be the ceiling for those in my peer group, too. Those with Master's degrees were getting $55K ($10K premium for a Master's seemed standard).

I was pretty deflated. I ended up applying for a research assistant position and fortunately got it, so I went back to grad school. Along the way I opted to start a company since I at least had guaranteed health insurance as a student. I graduated and ran the company for 4.5 years. The job market recovered some during that time.

Software engineering salaries now are monumentally different than what they 18 years ago. For a long time I questioned whether I had made the correct career choice. Of course, nowadays we can't get enough engineers and new grads are being offered salaries that I still have trouble believing (and that took me years to work up to). I don't have a problem with that, either. It's just the last time I saw something like that, the industry collapsed.

I feel reasonably comfortable with job security now. But, that's a semi-recent thing. I worked my ass off trying to stand out in case another dot com situation was forthcoming. And for maybe the first decade of my career I operated under the assumption my salary could be cut in half if the other shoe dropped.

Anyway, my point I suppose is that society sometimes changes rather quickly and it can be hard to predict what's going to work. As the first person in my family to attend college, I had to navigate uncertain waters. But, when the price of entry to most jobs is having a degree, you go and get a degree and hope you can work the rest out later. Of course, nowadays we understand that the US doesn't put any value in the humanities so getting a degree in it is probably a bad deal. It just wasn't always that way and the current trend hopefully won't last either.

-- It's far easier to get an engineering job without a degree now, at least in the US. Even if you could get one in 2004, you almost certainly were going to get paid less and be relegated to back office scripting.