So as someone who teaches at one of the elite universities everyone is always saying students should be aiming for, I want to talk about how this take is wrong, disingenuous, and displays a shallow understanding of class.
First of all, anyone decrying this doesn't understand what media studies is. It behoves students to learn how to analyse media at a high level actually. The ability to analyse why a particular piece of media has been produced, who it serves, and who has funded it is critical.
This is a skill that is clearly and obviously lacking in a lot of older generations. Everytime you see a QAnon conspiracy get shared you are seeing something from someone who could have used some media studies in a past life. Good on these students for identifying that.
Also young people spend a lot of time online. Being able to engage critically with the online landscape is extraordinarily important just on a personal level. Online literacy is a language and one which a lot of older people don't speak, so....
Second of all as a historian I can tell you that the skills taught in media studies are transferable. Essentially students are taught a lot of the tools for analysis that we teach but applying it to new media. Fine. Can you learn that in history? Sure! But as long as you do IDC.
Third of all, yeah I think that more students should learn foreign languages. I speak a bunch of them and am very much pro language acquisition, but the A Level system forces students into very narrow boxes very early on and they have to make choices.
You don't get to complain about useless degrees that will never make anyone money constantly (a message being cramped down the throats of students by the media, ironically) and then demand that they learn French. Modern language students are constantly ridiculed for their choices
And this is where it ramos up into bad class analysis. Your man here thinks more students should be studying the classics than Sociology and that the class system entrenched this. Sir, students are constantly told that the classics are "useless" and to study STEM. 
The government is constantly on television saying it is going to take away places from subjects it finds superfluous and attempt to funnel students into "useful" STEM degrees and you are out here saying it is the end of the world of they don't have a working knowledge of Phaedo.
I am a Latinist. I genuinely wish all my students had the time to learn Latin and read the Odyssey. Of course I do, but if that is something you want we need to scrap the GCSE and A Level system and allow kids to take more than three subjects during highschool.
Lastly as a working class person who speaks a lot go languages, and has a solid grounding in the classics I am going to let you in on a little secret about what that does for your prospects: nothing. Nothing at all. In fact posh people resent it when you know their Latin is bad.
We can't take A Levels out of the rest of society. Until we can students have to do the best they can with what they are offered in the narrow confines of the landscape of late capitalism. I agree with them that understanding when the news is trying to grift them is important.
Takes likes these show a total disconnection from what young people are going through. We have to meet them where they are, which is the middle of a pandemic with a government that has a track record of bald face lying to an uncritical lapdog media. Media studies seems good.
Anyway if you did media studies and want to take some history I, for one, would be delighted to have you in my class. (I will probably also encourage you to take a foreign language, too. Just I won't lecture you about it like a douche.)
Media studies would also come in handy, for example, as it helps people to understand that all the gammon in my mentions tweet the way they do because Sandra has left and turned the kids against them.
