Not everything should be yoked to serving the leviathan of business and the all-consuming pursuit of happiness/property/greed.
Many people in the United States attended higher education for acquiring general knowledge in a way that is consonant with the comment you made. Hardly anyone who studies philosophy or political science is interested in pursuing this as a career. It's not a surprise since most jobs involving these fields would be research positions and would require a graduate degree. If you want an exception, it might come as a shock that large institutional investors and many other players in finance are very interested in geopolitical risks. I actually had a friend who declined a job offer doing exactly that. He preferred studying for a master's in management. Regardless, my experience talking with people outside the business school where I studied economics as an undergrad is that they're interested in learning about something: art, languages, politics, philosophy, etc. What they get out of their college education should be something like a good overview of classic works in fields they liked. Being able to synthesize properly and clearly complicated ideas, or being able to express yourself precisely are extremely useful skills. I'd go as far as saying that the whole point behind the classical liberal arts curriculum is to broaden your perspective and give you very general analytical skills. That's not useless for the people involved, nor is it useless for society. Of course, this argument relies on the assumption that the education in question is indeed well rounded. This means that you should be exposed and be brought to understand more conservative points of view as well as more liberal ones. If you spend or spent all your time reveling in far-left ideological masturbation, then I'd say the education was useless to you and a nuisance to society. I'd say the same if it was far-right ideological masturbation, but we all know that doesn't exist in today's American universities.
Now, there is another side to this coin: how do you finance all of that? Because it's all nice and well to sweat and toil for years to learn about interesting ideas, but it's not free. It costs fees, books, transportation and
years of foregone experience and revenues. If you want to ask the government to chip in, you cannot really ask Joe Average who didn't go to college to shut up when he says he thinks a liberal degree is useless. He's the one paying and it's not obvious to him how the taxes the government takes out of his pockets to put toward educating someone else will bring benefits either to him or to society more broadly. Moreover, anyone could be worried about the student: someday, they will have to work for a living, they probably financed a big chunk of their college education with a student loan and not all of them will be able to use their degrees for professional advancement.
Personally, if I had any advice to give people who feel like they absolutely need to study liberal arts, it would be to think seriously about the financial aspect of this idea. Ultimately, all you need to study liberal arts are (i) some course structure and assigned material because it's sometimes hard to draw a big picture without expertise, (ii) people with whom to talk about it and from whom you can receive feedback. There are plenty of courses online for that and many forums where you can chat people about it. In a sufficiently densely populated area, you might be able to organize meetings face to face. It's not the options we lack here, just the imagination.
. Although learning how to unclog a paper shredder would be more useful for most students than having to take another year of a language you will never use. I will correct you one one thing about gaining skills by sitting in classrooms. Sitting in classrooms (for the students that are actually paying attention) largely provides just content knowledge. Skills are attained by actually doing the job, which again brings us to work-study programs, internships, part time jobs, etc. One of the big problems we have with higher ed is that most of what students are doing is a complete waste of time and does nothing but enrich an antiquated higher ed system: