Not really. A degree in Ancient Chinese Literature or Drama and Theater Arts will not get you through many doors.
You'd be surprised.
Many jobs don't really "require" a college degree in the sense that you use any particular skills you obtained in college, but a lot of jobs REQUIRE a college degree just to get through the first pile of resumes.
It's a simple first cut. If you have 50 resumes on your desk, and 35 of them have a college degree and 15 don't, that's an easy way to narrow it down. It may mean that you're missing out on the best candidate for the job, but if you're a hiring manager and you pick a BAD candidate without a degree when 70% of your applicants had degrees, you'll get more scrutiny from your bosses than if you hire a bad candidate with the right credentials. As they said in the old days, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM...
I'd say this might be even more of a thing as we've moved to more online and automated hiring platforms like indeed.com. Let's say you're looking to post a job and you're in a meeting discussing requirements... How much pushback will you get for saying "well, maybe we should restrict it to those with college degrees, which will probably limit our applicant pool to the best"? None. So then you put that as a filter on the job, and you only see resumes with a college degree.
My wife dual majored in history and cultural anthropology. She's the office manager at an internal medicine practice and has been working in medical offices since before she graduated (did so part time and summers during undergrad).
Right now, if she was looking for a new job in the medical field, she's far enough along in her career--not to mention being a rock star at her office--that she'd have about 100 references and would get her foot in the door anywhere in Orange County in a second without relying on online applications. But if we moved to Austin and she wanted to get an office manager job and *didn't* have a degree? She might have a difficult time getting her resume noticed even if the rest of her work experience and qualifications were stellar.
Those humanities degrees probably won't help you
perform a job in any better way than having an additional 4 years of work experience from 18-22 would do so, but I think it gives you a leg up on
getting a job than 4 years of work experience w/o a degree would give you.