What's the moral or economic case for charging every major the same tuition regardless of potential earning power?

The other side of the question is, what's the case for having the arts or academia in our society? Would you rather just abolish any human activity that isn't financially lucrative?

MFA is a high degree that needs a lot of education. It may not pay well, but it still has quite an impact for general education. Even if knowledge is just replicated.

Is there societal value in art and the humanities at all? If not, why do we produce anything except engineers and financiers? That seems like a bigger cultural question that society needs to answer over decades, rather than saying to an individual student, "Haha! You picked the wrong major. Now you're fucked for life. Too bad."

Most college kids going into school have no idea what they're going to be doing in the future. There aren't really standard systems in place to help guide them. Even a basic lifetime ROI analysis by major isn't something you encounter organically through the school system, and whether you're lucky enough to have done that sort of evaluation before choosing a path just totally depends on the circumstances of your upbringing or internet browsing.

Our higher-ed system was inherited from Old World elites, and there's probably a case to be made that it's not as relevant to the modern workforce or society anymore, but that's not a very fair thing to pin on any individual degree or student.

Morally, if we've decided that the humanities have any intrinsic worth at all, it stands to reason that we should be feeding the people who practice the humanities. And unless we want them all to be slave-artists, maybe even pay them a livable wage. Maybe the moral failing here is our lack of funding for the arts, or our lack of appropriate valuation at least. Especially in a create-one, share-unlimited-times digital economy of production.

Economically, what societal value is there in an indentured class of artists not making art? Does society really get more value out of painters flipping burgers while their loan sharks muck around in spreadsheets making more money?

Personally... as a tax-paying dev, I would be happy to pay a little more tax if it means people who chose a different path in life got to eat, sleep under a solid roof, and create beautiful things. I don't want to live in a ruthless, hypercapitalist society where human worth is reduced to dollars and bankers determine our destinies.

You're arguing against a strawman. No one here is seriously claiming that there is no societal value in art and the humanities. But we are currently producing a surplus of college degrees in those fields. Many of those graduates have no real artistic talent and no future in academia. Their educations were largely wastes of time and resources. As a tax payer and voter I am unwilling to continue funding that (or suffering inflation because of loan forgiveness). We ought to steer some of the less talented students towards other career paths.

By the way, most of the greatest artists throughout history never attended college at all.

You could use the exact same argument even for many engineering degrees. A lot of people spend a lot of time, and money (from loans) trying to get CS degrees, only to fail to get through to upper division courses before changing majors. Is that money wasted? Should we move towards a model where your major is preselected for you before you attend college, based on your aptitudes, without you having any say in the matter? After all, we don't want to waste any money. What about if the major was preselected and you still failed to make any progress?

We should move towards a model where the availability and interest rate of student loans is based on actual risk as determined from the default rate of previous students who attended the same school with the same declared major. Students will then be able to make informed decisions about which major to select and how much debt to take on.

That seems pretty reductionist. An education shouldn't just be dollars in, dollars out for future job training. We don't merely need good workers, we need better citizens.

Please provide evidence to show that a college education reliably makes people into better citizens. In my experience there is very little correlation.

Well, they're more likely to not vote Republican, for starters. That's a good thing, almost always.

My reading of the OP was, "Society shouldn't fund useless art degrees". I was arguing against the "society shouldn't fund" part, because IMO art and other careers have social value beyond the ROI of income vs tuition. By the same token, teachers are generally extremely underpaid, and could use help with student loans as well (they get it in some localities, to various degrees). In fact I think all higher education should be paid for by taxpayers rather than students -- which you are free to disagree with.

However, if you're arguing that art degrees don't produce good artists, that's a separate argument altogether. It's a valid consideration, I think. But that's less of a question of "who should pay for education" and more "what is the value of education". I don't know enough about MFAs to comment on that, but I do know that there are many, many majors that don't produce high-income careers. I don't think that should be their goal or metric, personally. Maybe that's valid for trade schools, but society shouldn't only have tradespeople learning industry skills and nothing else.

That's the underlying concern... it's not a strawman, it's the whole point: that morally or economically, we shouldn't be evaluating human productivity on dollars alone.