Education Department or equivalents sure do set targets at least for professional degrees, at least here in Finland. For others a bit less so and universities h

Education Department or equivalents sure do set targets at least for professional degrees, at least here in Finland. For others a bit less so and universities have quite a bit of autonomy on what the exact subject fields are. One easy "market" way of doing some selection is to drop subjects which don't get enough applicants. A lot of education doesn't necessarily produce "value" in short term bean counter sense, but are very important to for example retain culture and knowledge. Also, to apparently great shock of many, there are a lot of people who don't select what to study based on what is "more likely to enrich then later on". Most people don't care much about being rich, and the ones that do are probably quite miserble.