There's an old joke...
An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, and an AI researcher were asked to name the greatest invention of all time.
The engineer chose fire, which gave humanity power over matter. The physicist chose the wheel, which gave humanity the power over space. The mathematician chose the alphabet, which gave humanity power over symbols. The AI researcher chose the thermos bottle.
"Why a thermos bottle?" the others asked. "Because the thermos keeps hot liquids hot in winter and cold liquids cold in summer.", said the AI researcher. "Yes - so what?" "Think about it.", intoned the researcher reverently. "That little bottle - how does it know?"
Don't forget Baumol's cost disease: if one part of the economy gets a lot more productive per labor-hour, then wages in other parts will go up to compensate. I don't think that the number of employees per patient in a hospital or the number of employees per student in a university is lower today than it was in the 1980s, even if hospitals and universities have improved in other ways.
In terms of food prices in particular, what I've heard is that prices at the grocery store and in restaurants depend much more on the cost of labor than on anything else. Grocery stores themselves operate on razor-thin margins, and changes in the price of wheat and other "raw materials" have only tiny effects on grocery store prices. Most of the actual expense of putting food on grocery store shelves comes from the cost of food processing (turning wheat into bread, cutting up dead animals into cuts of meat, etc.), which is a fairly labor-intensive industry.
I can't speak for humanities degrees, but if you're going to an engineering school, you're almost certainly going to need at least some of what you learn in college in order to work as an engineer. (To paraphase a saying, half of what you learn as an engineering student might never get used in a real job, but you can't predict which half!) Furthermore, programming is unusually easy to self-study compared to most STEM disciplines (no need to learn differential equations!), and it's a lot easier to show you can work as a programmer by writing and demonstrating your own computer program than it is to demonstrate that you can work as an aerospace engineer by building and demonstrating your own airplane.
I imagine the same thing is true of other professional degrees: you're not going to become a physician or nurse without first attending the appropriate institutions.
Also, if you're like my brother and have "make a fuckton of money" as a major life goal, "be a smart person and attend a prestigious college" opens up a lot of doors to ridiculously high paying positions. He's not "unicorn startup founder" rich, but he is a multimillionaire who has been paid more money in a single year working at a hedge fund than my father, a retired professor of electrical engineering, made in his lifetime. (I wouldn't trade lives with him, incidentally - I don't want to have an 80 hour work week, and video games are cheap.)
Sometimes, you might as well solve the Rubix Cube by peeling the stickers off and sticking them back on.
TvTropes calls this Cutting the Knot, after the story of Alexander and the Gordian Knot.
Do things like major surgery or bomb defusal have those kinds of constraints?
Strong upvote because I really, really hate quackery.
I gave in and made an account on the X-parrot but I only use it to read things I'm linked to in other sources. (I have been pseudo-ideologically opposed to participating on that service since it first started.)
When my brother was trying to meet girls on social media sites about twenty years ago, after going through early PUA stuff and throwing out some of the nonsense, this was his the message decided to use as his cold opening:
Why did the apple like the banana?
Yeah, it's a dad joke; the punch like is "Because it has appeal!" It worked, though; there were enough girls that were curious enough about the punchline to respond to a message from a stranger in order to hear it.
I wrote a two paragraph argument for AI risk a while back. Does it work?