[TacticalCoder]

> I enjoy living in a society with music, literature, dance, plays, sculpture, painting, architecture, and not-strict-necessary decoration.

There may be an argument for university degrees in these domains but that isn't one. All these things existed before students had to be 100 K or 150 K in debt to learn them.

There's a big difference between actual artists and the people studying them.

[elashri]

Not that I want to abolish university degrees for either STEM or humanities but your argument can go about STEM fields too. Engineers, physicists and Mathematicians existed before the students had to be in debt too to learn those things. But to be honest in many STEM fields like particle physics, aerospace engineering (just examples) it is very difficult to practice it without rigorous and formal education.

Addition: Most of great Mathematicians in last two centuries did not graduate with a math degree. That doesn't mean that we should abolish math degrees. People also built cities and beautiful huge buildings before there was a university degrees in architecture and civil engineering. No one will say that we don't want them because of that