I know people with music degrees
who make >£150k a year.
The going rate for an in-demand conductor or opera singer is four or five figures per show.
If you take the time to visit the Royal Academy Summer Show, you'll see art for sale for five figures. And plenty of sales.
Arts courses are brutal on failures - unlike engineering, where you can be utterly mediocre and still make something approaching a passable living just by turning up every day and poking at a keyboard to produce crap that barely works.
Oh - and on a typical iPhone game, the art person will earn more than the code monkey. Especially considering you can hire in coders for < £10/hr.
If anyone is offended by this, consider what the world would look like with *no* art or design - no music, no architecture, no car design, no product design, no literature, no public or private art of any kind.
Doesn't that sound like a really appealing place to live?