Your reply is symptomatic. In what forsaken world is a society's cultural vitality to be measured by the quality of its investment bankers? That is decadence itself.
Finance is one of the pillars of modern society. You need finance to bankroll everything from scientific research to wars to infrastructure development. The dominance of the British Empire, for example, was intertwined with that of its banks: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/can-place-built-on-gl.... The quality of a country's investment bankers is incredibly important, and America has benefited tremendously from having a very strong banking sector. (You should watch Hamilton.)
If you think that my point is that a society's cultural vitality can be measured by the quality of its investment bankers then I invite you to read the comment again. I'm not making the point you were hoping to rail against. To explicate it a bit more, I'm saying that college major decisions are mostly a result of market forces, and a higher degree of social mobility (ie, competition for who gets to be rich in the next generation) forces college students to make more pragmatic choices.
Fewer philosophy majors doesn't mean that people don't care about philosophy as much anymore, it means that it's no longer reasonable for 18-year-olds to expect that they can spend four years contemplating Kierkegaard and then have a skills-heavy job waiting for them once college is over (in which they'll be taught the necessary skills via OJT), so long as they start the process from a highly-enough-ranked school.
Unfortunately, modern American capitalism has stripped from 99% of college students the ability to worry about "society's cultural vitality". It's easy to talk a big game about the choices you make and 'a forsaken world', but when you're an 18 or 19 year old trying to pick a career path that won't leave in you in debt the rest of your life the considerations become a lot more immediate and pragmatic.
