I don't know. I've been trying to set up rules of thumb on this and I keep finding holes in them. A lot of "specialists" in the humanities could be replaced by books.

On the other hand, who writes those books?

It's hard to put a finger on what I'm talking about. In my view, there is no such thing as completely useless knowledge, but I can clearly visualize the kind of academic I'm talking about, and knowledge isn't what he's selling.

Mostly these people talk to each other, not to people who need what they know.

Do you need a Masters Degree in art to be an artist? How many famous artists in history had academic degrees in the subject? And how many simply sat down with a master who was already a skilled artist and began to learn?

There's nothing wrong with someone getting a degree in Medieval French Literature, but it should be clear to a prospective student that it's not something that's going to find a lot of use outside the insulation of academia.

I haven't gotten this all nailed down yet. Glen Reynolds had some back-and-forth on his blog that was useful, but still not the whole picture.

One good insight he has:

...when your college education costs as much as a Ferrari, then either (1) you need to be really rich; or (2) it needs to show a return on investment. If college were as cheap as it was 50 years ago, that wouldn’t be as significant a factor. But it’s not.

So there's another side of the question. I don't know what the Greek philosophers used to get paid to teach students. But I do know it shouldn't cost tens of thousands a year per student to learn philosophy.

I think higher education, like too many other things, has become an institution whose prime function is the care and feeding of the higher education system. The rest of the problems may fall from that.