Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but having gone to a similar university I suspect that the underwater basketweaving degree from Harvard will come with lucrative enough connections to make up for the lack of actual skills.
Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better.
That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.
But I don't think one enters Harvard committed to taking underwater basketweaving. At least as an undergrad, once you're there, I would assume that, like any college, you have a wide range of courses and majors to choose from, restricted only by needing to follow "X is a prerequisite for Y" structure and possibly being required to take some core classes. (The situation would be different for graduate degrees.) So if you're at Harvard and you decide to take underwater basketweaving, that's on you.
Hmm. I guess maybe there would be cases like "the school requires you to take at least N courses, and you don't want that much workload (or, more charitably, some of your courses are extremely demanding and you want to lighten the load on the rest), so you take some facile courses". Or cases like Feynman taking astronomy and philosophy to satisfy the humanities requirement. But I don't think there's any case where you'd need to major in underwater basketweaving... unless that is the easiest major and that's your criterion. I dunno, if they want an easy major, can it at least be something useful? Perhaps it's good in some sense if the genuinely useful majors are strictly separated from the easy ones? Hmm.
I think "Communications" seems to have that reputation, and a subject by that name does sound useful for being in a company (I have no idea what is actually taught in it). My brother-in-law said he majored in Communications because it had the lightest courseload, so he could work for Microsoft while attending school.
Sure, I agree with that. But the parent was talking about, well, the parents' motivation.
The parents probably recognize that, if their kid fails miserably at Harvard but manages to graduate with a questionably useful degree, they will still succeed because they'll still be able to flex their network to get a job of some kind with a salary.
Once you have a salaried position your life has a step jump in stability.
Exactly. People are not extremely attentive to social status & class-adjacent stuff out of foolishness. This stuff has always been extremely important to everything job/money related.
Human society, and the economy are not rational. Assuming that they are is foolish.
Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better.
That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.