No, all of society (including the most free-market of conservatives) sees value in learning about art, philosophy, history -- in fact every single one of them at some point will have paid to learn about art, philosophy, history etc (even if it's just going to the theatre or buying a book).

The debate from their perspective is simply that you only seem to see value in learning about art in education if someone else pays for it for you, but not enough to pay for it yourself.

The question of "the value of your education" can never win the argument against privatisation/optimisation of education, because the more "value" there is the more the consumer ought to be willing to pay for it.

The reasons for keeping education largely public and unoptimised are outside of that -- avoiding competition on price (richest-student wins), that the lecturers have a by-product that is useful to society (mulling problems where we don't yet know whether they have value or not and the market cannot price them), getting students from multiple backgrounds to bounce off each other (avoid social silo-isation by discipline) etc.