Posted in the dunk tank because I expect to be dunked on.
So I got in a discussion with a friend that someone they knew was hardworking because they were doing a degree in music theory on a PhD track while also juggling multiple jobs. I was impressed with all the jobs this person was doing, but I said that music theory as a degree is absurd and most liberal arts degrees are related to professional bullshitting (re: writing useless essays about a specific quality of something) than they are about something socially useful so I didn't find that aspect impressive at all. In my eyes, the socially useful thing about a music theory degree would be applying this idea to make good music, or to teach others about it. Notably, music theory is not about engineering a stage for good acoustics, nor is it about building instruments. It leads to nothing tangible, but rather is a sort of meta-analysis of music as a whole. Its possible to receive a music theory degree while making bad music. And bad music and good music is wholly subjective, its possible to put on a very musically skillful display and have no one like it, or not be interesting enough that a good swath of people enjoy it.
Compare this to, say, an architecture degree. There can be artistic expression in architecture, but its incredibly important to put people through a degree program for rigor to avoid architectural deficiencies which can kill people. The point here is that any sort of rigor drilled into someone in a music theory PhD pipeline has questionable benefits, and is likely a waste of time and labor. However, it is possible that it would be useful to have music theory certifications that are relatively quick, cheap, and potentially free to get to help teach musicians music theory to improve their art, maximizing social benefits. And I think that is something that can be applied to a lot of liberal art degrees.
Maybe this is colored by the way my grandma taught me about Socialist Czechoslovakia. There were benefits for artists, but people could only get free/subsidized degrees if they went to do something very practical such as architecture, engineering, science, and so on. Which is why so much socialist art is baked into something practical, like housing.
I think that's probably much less true in medicine than elsewhere in STEM, since MDs regularly publish or participate in research, and research is more likely to be performed by non-PhD techs and researchers. But anyway, it's true that a lot of "liberal arts" research is done by masters students.
Anyway, the teaching skills of PhDs isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the complex social institutions that "choose" faculty members and how it does so. The researchers that can get the most citations is not the set of researchers that care the most about performing novel and groundbreaking research or guiding research towards what will help people the most. Lots and lots of perfectly well-credentialed clout chasers; lots of people turned away from academia that would have been able to be incredible researchers if only allowed to do so on their own sociocultural terms. My point is simply that many brilliant researchers will be in "liberal arts" categories of study (which are flawed categories anyway) and many poor researchers will be very successful in STEM.