When baby boomers were getting these same degrees they mostly led to well-paying middle management careers. There was a transition stretching across Gen X and Millennials where degrees like "social work" steadily lost value as supply of these degrees gradually outpaced demand, and wages slowly stagnated.

Gen Z seems to be much, much more aware of this issue and as a result the number of STEM majors in colleges have exploded. Although it does also seem like the rigor has gone down acutely.

I'm getting my second bachelors in Computer Science now, my first was in Chemical Engineering 12 years earlier. The amount of rampant cheating and seeming inability for the schools to "fail" a student is completely foreign to me compared to my first degree, which took me 8 years to achieve across three schools, so I definitely got a somewhat decent sample of school cultures.