Perhaps that is true. Humanities & arts majors have very high social intelligence, which often lands them into management positions, but then both they and the company start suffering from the Peter's principle, and the results have been devastating throughout history of mankind, as good networking and personal skills are woefully inadequate at solving hard problems which require lots of knowledge, creativity and logic.
Those who do not study history, and do not learn from it (as is ironically often the case with history majors) are doomed to repeat it, and re-invent it, poorly.
Still, engineering mindset aside, how do you explain that so many people with college degrees are poor, while the engineers don't feel that pain?
The vast majority of challenges organisations face are wedded in how they interact with society. If a groups not working well together, is it knowledge and creativity that's the problem, or social and value clashes between members. The vast majority of day-to-day management challenges fall into the latter category, so no wonder management attracts people that are interested in "social intelligence" and we tend to be interested in what we're perceived to be good at.
Having studied both in arts and sciences I would say that both approaches have advantages when applied in the real-world, and limitations. I don't believe (or know of any evidence) that "Arts" people are more likely to suffer the Peter principle. It's a function of seniority that you lose information versus specialists in an area - so if anything it's connected with bombastically believing you're right rather than what degree you did.
The smartest people and the stupidest people study humanities.
If you're very intelligent, you can do very well with a social science or humanities degree. In fact, you will do better than with a STEM degree—the highest positions in society are dominated by people with non-STEM degrees.
On the other hand, it's very easy to end up un(der)employed if you're not particularly intelligent and got a humanities degree. Meanwhile, your equally intelligent peer who got an engineering degree is doing just fine as developer or technician.
