I think the problem is young people feeling that they need to go to University straight after college, I actually don't think this should be the norm at all. It would be much more prudent to have at least a year after college in employment, I think this can hugely help people understand quite what sort of career they may want to pursue. Obviously some people have a clear idea of what they want to do in life, in this case there is absolutely no such thing as a terrible degree; if you want to become a writer, a journalist, perhaps an editor, then an "English degree from London Met" would be a quite reasonable choice.
The problem is when people do an "English degree from London Met" without any clue as to what they want to do with it. So they leave university with their degree, end up in admin or retail and because they already have a degree they are pretty much eliminated from going back to university and taking a degree in a subject that would help them towards their genuine career goals. In other words if you do an English degree, and end up with some crappy £15k job, and then a few year later think "hmm, I would really like to be a computer engineer", well there's a fair chance that your decision to take a degree in English has directly ruined your chances of pursuing that career, and that your often rash and arbitrary decision to study English has done more damage than good.
So my point is this; any degree can be hugely useful, but if you lunge into a degree without any semblance of a clue as to what you may want to do with it, that is a 'terrible degree', not the course itself, but the course in the context of your career.