This really seems to be one of the important problems (not the only one and I certainly wouldn't want to write a thesis here)
Humanities in the 70s/80s meant your degree wouldn't cost 6 digits and you could probably find a good enough job as a teacher or in the editorial market (press/publishers/etc) or in several other places.
Today those degrees costs one zero more and pays half of what it used to, and your knowledge of Latin won't be only useful for fancy coffee names, if you're lucky.
It's really the result of a shift in mindset about education from primarily being about the benefit to society to one where the primary benefit is to the educated individual. I unfortunately can't find it anywhere, but I remember reading an interesting Rolling Stone article that traced the shift in thinking to Ronald Reagan, first during his governorship of California and eventually during his presidency. What happens when you start viewing education that way is that you start subjecting it to the laws of supply and demand. If you view an education as having hundreds of thousands of dollars of value for a graduate, you start to be able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of getting that education. When it was viewed primarily as a public service that people did to become better citizens, there was more emphasis on cost controls since the state was shouldering more of the burden cost.
Once that shift in mindset happened, or so posited the article, the increase in the cost of education that we've seen over the past 3 decades becomes an inevitable conclusion of schools closing the gap between what they charge and what people are willing to pay. And once education becomes this expensive, the move towards STEM and away from humanities also becomes inevitable so long as both degrees are roughly the same cost. If the humanities want to survive and thrive in today's educational environment, they need to figure out how to charge significantly less for that degree. If a humanities grad can emerge into the job market with $20k in debt compared to a STEM major that comes out with 10x that, you might see more people choosing the humanities route.
Humanities in the 70s/80s meant your degree wouldn't cost 6 digits and you could probably find a good enough job as a teacher or in the editorial market (press/publishers/etc) or in several other places.
Today those degrees costs one zero more and pays half of what it used to, and your knowledge of Latin won't be only useful for fancy coffee names, if you're lucky.