If you take the cartoon literally, you might think it's a moronic thing to say. After all, people with an English major are stereotyped to have one of the least advantageous, useless degrees, and who end up having to settle for a sub-par job because no one would hire them. But obviously, this cartoonist is trying to point out exactly that -- with the ridiculous amount of job offers (all of them), the call from the president, and loads of cash Jacob ends up getting.
The message of the cartoon shows a bigger problem, to be honest: the point of college. The current equivalent of a college degree is that of a high school degree about a hundred years ago. In other words, a college degree by itself is essentially worthless. It's something that everyone is expected to have, not something extraordinary that will allow the owner of the degree to obtain a valuable job. That hook that many employers will find extraordinary is a PhD.
Now, to get a PhD it obviously takes time and effort. If you think about it, it takes at least four more years of your life to have the necessary resume in order to apply and be a fighting candidate for a higher-end academic job than in the past.
But even forget about this aspect. Though it is important, the bigger issue is the one most people think about when applying to both college and grad school: money. To be even semi-viable for a decent job one must get a college degree. But unlike a high school diploma, (again) the equivalent of a college degree in the past, a college degree is much, much more expensive. And to top it off, colleges haven't gotten any less expensive -- there is no such thing as a free public college. Which means that more people are going to college, only to get a degree that won't give them much and end up with a pile of student loans. And those that want a fighting chance at a top-tier academic job must go to grad school, which means even more debt.
What's worse is that some of these people, with their fancy grad degrees, still have trouble finding jobs. A substitute teacher of mine in high school, who had double majored in Russian and Chemistry and earned her PhD in Chemistry, had trouble finding a job as a college chemistry professor, and instead was hired as a Russian professor at a college. My aunt, who graduated with a PhD in biochemistry from Yale grad school, had trouble finding a job as well (though she did end up finding one within the research field).
Maybe my point is that the education system -- including and especially higher education -- needs to be changed. There needs to be a way to lower the college price tag while still keeping schools open, as well as a viable method to shorten the amount of time spent in grad school (if possible). If it were achievable to start a number of free colleges, that would definitely help with the first problem, even if it would not directly lower the price tag of all the colleges in the nation. For the second, more schools with a joint PhD-college could be opened. I have no idea if they even have one for PhDs, but I do know that there are joint medical school-college programs, like the six year program of UMKC. And although people currently don't have a clear solution for remedying these problems, one can look forward to the future.
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