It's not that the degree completely lacks value, so much as the bulk of the value is in the individual who was pursuing the degree and society mistakenly assumed that if everyone got a degree then everyone would attain the value of being someone with a high IQ.

But obviously they had some value because most people didn't pursue them for fun.

They pursued it because it was the literal only path to learning more about microtransistors or whatever weird esoteric shit they were into. No books at the library on it, just some university course offered by one of four guys in the whole country who knew anything on the subject that they didn't already know. But you can't just throw any random student in there and expect them to be the same kind of person who was ending up there organically. The guy who ended up there organically goes on to do weird vector math and make Quake, whereas the average student goes on to make spreadsheets.

It's not that the degree completely lacks value, so much as the bulk of the value is in the individual who was pursuing the degree and society mistakenly assumed that if everyone got a degree then everyone would attain the value of being someone with a high IQ.

But obviously they had some value because most people didn't pursue them for fun.

They pursued it because it was the literal only path to learning more about microtransistors or whatever weird esoteric shit they were into. No books at the library on it, just some university course offered by one of four guys in the whole country who knew anything on the subject that they didn't already know.