The latest example (and the one that also made me think along those same lines as your post) is this otherwise really interesting Economist article [1] about gender quotas among Finland's teacher corps (like I said, really interesting article). At some point the authors of the study the article is all about define as "more success" when it comes to the pupils involved in said study those kids that later turned out to study "STEM or medicine" (as it shows up in one of the charts, STEM as a "object of desire" is also explicitly mentioned in the article itself).

So, in a way, it looks like we have already conditioned ourselves (and probably our kids) to look at STEM as inherently more "valuable" than a liberal arts education, which will probably mean even less kids choosing that arts education way.

[1] https://archive.ph/IY9BQ