Or just the first part. Educated residents are beneficial to society, even if they are not working directly for the government.

Furthermore, it is not obvious to me that the government has a use for all the the graduates of all the majors anyway; maybe the State of Tennessee could use a few hundred developers to work on sites and services that are provided/run by the state, but could they find work for all the CS graduates that universities in Tennessee can pump out? Society will value those peoples' skills, so their degrees are not worthless in any meaningful respect, but governments only need so many people in that profession. Maybe you could still hire them and have them do busywork, but that would just be an unnecessary waste of resources that would leave a bad gap in those people's resumes.