Is egyptology a pyramid scheme: Self-perpetuating university programs My friend got a degree in egyptology, but can’t get a job, So he’s paying more money to get a Phd, so he can work teaching other people egyptology.  In his case college is literally a pyramid scheme.

Copied from here, but I have seen the joke elsewhere as well.
My personal experience is that neither the university nor most university professors care to evaluate whether their curriculum has a lot of applicability/use. (Some professors claim this is not a goal or cannot be measured in any way; while many universities claim their programs are also very practical, but if you read the actual claim it is very much PR with little scientific measurement.)
Has there been any academic research into which fields satisfy the following criteria:

Most of the people who complete the university program do not find placement in the field.
There is some (perhaps not conclusive) statistical evidence that the program gives no benefits in the actual field (not the field the program was in) where these people eventually start to work in. E.g. it can be useful to study theoretical math even if you end up programming, as your logic may improve. Perhaps this could be measured with a control group of people who had similar backrounds to those who got into the math program but did not apply to get in; how different is their success in the same field?

P.s.: Does egyptology really fulfill these criteria?

Edit: Added the word perhaps.
Partial and tangential answer, but no other answers so far, so here goes:
For the first part of the definition (people who complete the university program do not find placement in the field), data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates may be useful, particularly &quot;Postgraduation plans (e.g., work, postdoc, other study or training) - Type and location of employer&quot;. Papers that use this dataset may compare by field.
The &quot;no benefit&quot; part could be studied by regression discontinuity around the admission cutoff, but the small sample size of fields like egyptology makes it low-powered.