Good point, but in any case "I'm never going to use this" is hardly ever a valid excuse. Its consistent application would rule out almost everything we call education, save the narrowest vocational training. It's also self-defeating: if you don't learn it, then indeed you'll never have the opportunity to get a STEM-related, well-paying job for using it.
I could never understand some people's obsession with only learning things of immediate and obvious use. You should study math for much the same reason you study Shakespeare: to learn to think about things you had never thought about before, in ways that you had never imagined to exist.
Education should not be about immediate and obvious use, true.but at least it should be about long term use.
So when people learn history, for example, they should get some stories that help them define their national identity, in the long term. but if they just learn a bunch of dates that they forget a short time after the test, they just wasted their time.
Does math, as taught today, have long term value? for non technical people, i'm not really sure.
I could never understand some people's obsession with only learning things of immediate and obvious use. You should study math for much the same reason you study Shakespeare: to learn to think about things you had never thought about before, in ways that you had never imagined to exist.