If you think that my point is that a society's cultural vitality can be measured by the quality of its investment bankers then I invite you to read the comment

If you think that my point is that a society's cultural vitality can be measured by the quality of its investment bankers then I invite you to read the comment again. I'm not making the point you were hoping to rail against. To explicate it a bit more, I'm saying that college major decisions are mostly a result of market forces, and a higher degree of social mobility (ie, competition for who gets to be rich in the next generation) forces college students to make more pragmatic choices. Fewer philosophy majors doesn't mean that people don't care about philosophy as much anymore, it means that it's no longer reasonable for 18-year-olds to expect that they can spend four years contemplating Kierkegaard and then have a skills-heavy job waiting for them once college is over (in which they'll be taught the necessary skills via OJT), so long as they start the process from a highly-enough-ranked school.