I've already suggested here that recent humanities graduates are as satisfied (or no more dissatisfied) with their careers than students with more evidently marketable fields of study.
But just what is practical? Consider classics, which was the first academic field challenged by the search for relevance, over 100 years ago, when Harvard's loosening and eventual abolition of its Greek admissions requirement provoked an academic scandal.
Maybe the university's critics were on to something. In England at least, the tradition of the classically educated spy is alive and well. A good agent, especially today, needs a deep understanding of other cultures that requires immersion in their sources. Peter Jones argues in the Spectator:
Unlike any other school discipline (to my knowledge), [Classics] makes two powerful demands on its pupils almost from the start: first, the intensive study of language, culture and history as a single, indivisible package, on the grounds that one cannot understand any one element without the other; and second, the unconditional commitment to the study of the primary sources, in the language in which they were originally composed.
The tradition is, on Mr. Jones's evidence, alive and well in the British intelligence agency MI5.