Depends on the degree. My 2 kids both have ISU degrees (humble brag). One in EE and the other in Psych. Guess which one is making bank, and which one is feeling hopeless?
This even depends.
Does an EE degree install more useful skills in a student for when they become a worker? Or does a student taking on the challenge of an engineering degree in school symbolize they have more ambition, drive, discipline, and intelligence (especially related to quantitative reasoning) than somebody who takes on a lowly history degree like yours truly?
I suppose engineering majors
might be more likely to "use" their degrees once working, but I have known plenty of engineering majors at all stages of their career who end up in unrelated management, sales, and consulting jobs (all the while making good money and having good careers, usually, because their engineering degree got them a good first job that they could parlay into connections and move up the ladder from there).
In the same breath, technically arts majors
can end up "using" their degree in far more direct ways, like if somebody ends up a professional musician or academician.
I tend to think even with professional majors/degrees that the bulk of the value is still in the signal the degree confers, not with the course of study itself. My wife is a doctor -- one of those things you would
think you need special schooling for -- and she has told me maybe 1% of her biology undergraduate and maybe 10% of her medical schooling matters in her day-to-day job. She learned how to be a doctor "on the job" as a resident/glorified apprentice.
She told me her Spanish degree and being able to speak it... lots of undeserved populations out there that can use a physician who speaks Spanish, in this country and in others... was the most valuable thing she learned in college. Her career prospects and chance of getting into medical school were way better with her STEM degree, however, despite her finding the content of her arts degree actually installed more of a usable skill into her brain.