Sure. As someone with a PhD and a few masters in STEM fields, the holy grail of "useful" degrees a la HN here, I trust the academic institutions to vet what is a "valuable" PhD topic on a societal level. If you don't, we have bigger problems than your snarky attitude about the relatively benign amount of money spent on "useless" PhD topics. When in reality the large majority of waste on campuses is on buildings, administration, and other massive Uni programs being driven/subsidized by unfettered access to student loans to the undergraduate population, who will then never be free from those shackles.
Why are people so focused on this straw man? The problem isn't bad humanities degrees or programs. At all. The problem is the cost of higher ed and the number of people going to get a degree that is effectively a certificate to work in the US economy. Then people needing to take out loans to pay these gate-keepers.
A strawman is an intentional misrepresentation of a proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.
So where's the strawman? People do get degrees that many people and the labor market itself finds useless. Lots of people get them! No strawman.
The problem is the cost of higher ed and the number of people going to get a degree that is effectively a certificate to work in the US economy
The cost of higher education has been driven by the misguided attempts by the government to make college affordable. As for a degree being necessary to work in the U.S. economy - I know first hand this is not the case. At all. But trying to convince someone with a PhD and "a few masters" of this fact is going to be as successful as trying to convince an 80 year old life-young devout follower of a religion that they're wrong about their religion on their deathbed.
Not trying to vet every single edge case in my five sentence vision statement.
For one thing PhD's teach statistics no matter what's studied...and if more people...you included....were good at statistics to evaluate good policies, the world would be much better off.
What if they want to get a PhD on how autumn leaf colors in New England impact the emotions of rattlesnakes from Texas? You want to pay for that?