There is no intrinsic benefit to society at large in pursuing a degree - only those degrees which enable one to contribute in some form, and even then the benefit only occurs if one uses the knowledge obtained to conduct useful work.
>Yes, society should absolutely tell business that it isn't as important as it thinks.
Businesses have the goal of generating some sort of value. Yes, that means that employees must make certain sacrifices with their time and future plans - that's why they get paid. But this conflict between the goals of a business and the goals of an employee exist regardless of whether we organize into business-employee relationships or not, because fundamentally any significant, communal goal requires these same sacrifices to be achieved. We won't have any engineers or doctors or programmers if everyone majors in English Literature out of a fundamentally selfish desire to learn something with significantly less benefit to society.
The same goes for the other listed pursuits. I'm not saying that one should dedicate themselves to their work - but the detriment to one's career that comes with pursuing these, again, selfish goals (from the perspective of society) is generally just, because it isn't fair to force others to allocate their resources to activities which do not benefit them.
Businesses have the goal of generating money for their owners. That's what capitalism is. Capital puts up money to start a business expecting a return on that money. Businesses are formed when the expected (in the probability sense) return on the business is considered a good deal.
There are some theories that this magically coincides with creating value in an ideal model, but no period in history has actually worked that way. There are many proposed explanations for why it doesn't, but I'm not much interested in why. All I care about is that those models don't describe reality.
So businesses are all about generating income for their owners. But society is about all people in it, not just those who control the capital. It is necessarily true that there will be cases where the best thing for society is not the best thing for businesses.
Business has pushed the public narrative too far towards blind support of "business is a good thing." Your post even seems to just assume that as a given. You claim that a goal is "selfish (from the perspective of society)" when the only thing you can criticize about it is that it isn't maximizing business value.
Business isn't everything. Sure, a society needs a functioning economy in order to survive. But that's a far cry from assuming "good for business" is the same as "good for society".
The latter is certainly more nebulous, though, and I can understand why you might wish they were the same thing. It would allow you to optimize society with simple quantitative measures instead of complex qualitative discussions about which sets of opposing goals have the better overall outcome. But the real world doesn't cooperate with such things. There are always going to be conflicts over goals, priorities, and even values. Resist the temptation to believe in an easy answer. Reality isn't easy.
There is no intrinsic benefit to society at large in pursuing a degree - only those degrees which enable one to contribute in some form, and even then the benefit only occurs if one uses the knowledge obtained to conduct useful work.
>Yes, society should absolutely tell business that it isn't as important as it thinks.
Businesses have the goal of generating some sort of value. Yes, that means that employees must make certain sacrifices with their time and future plans - that's why they get paid. But this conflict between the goals of a business and the goals of an employee exist regardless of whether we organize into business-employee relationships or not, because fundamentally any significant, communal goal requires these same sacrifices to be achieved. We won't have any engineers or doctors or programmers if everyone majors in English Literature out of a fundamentally selfish desire to learn something with significantly less benefit to society.
The same goes for the other listed pursuits. I'm not saying that one should dedicate themselves to their work - but the detriment to one's career that comes with pursuing these, again, selfish goals (from the perspective of society) is generally just, because it isn't fair to force others to allocate their resources to activities which do not benefit them.