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.