I was with you until the last sentence, which packed a low and somewhat unfair punch. There's plenty to do with an English degree besides writing poetry. Law is a typical exit path. So are lucrative positions in media, entertainment, publishing, journalism, and public policy. To excel at these fields, one needs to be pretty smart. It's a different kind of smart from the kind you need in technology jobs. No question about that. But one is not inherently superior to the other. And practitioners of one path are not incapable of pursuing the other.
There's a trend towards convergence, however, and formal logic has had a profound effect on the English curriculum in the last several decades. Hofstadter, Tarski, Quine, Levi-Strauss, et al., are becoming required reading in forward-thinking English curricula. Your typical English course isn't going to touch the type of logic discussed in your typical CS course. But advanced linguistics is, more or less, formal systemics. Unfortunately, you can encounter a fair amount of fluff on the way there.
English education is in need of an overhaul, and it's starting to get one. But there should be no battle between the humanities and the sciences. Instead, we should do a better job bringing the average in the humanities up to par and rigor.
We should also do a better job coaching students on career paths before we ask them to choose majors. If you're studying English because you like reading books, and you have no clue what you want to do when you graduate, you're in for a tough road ahead. If you're studying English because you want to get into Yale Law School, or write for the New York Times, or become the next Michael Lewis, that's great. (But in that case, you'd better be good.)
Ultimately, what matters isn't the content of the two paths, but the application of them. CS is a directly practical degree. You can put to work what you learn almost immediately and unambiguously. You can trace a more or less direct path between the input (education) and the output (skill). English is more indirect. You can learn extremely valuable skills in an English program, but those skills aren't immediately applicable to any particular job. That's because English is a really old curriculum, which predates the modern job market. If you want to make something of an English degree, you'll need to develop skills above and beyond what you learn in the classroom. Generally speaking, schools don't do a great job teaching those ancillary skills. And so the English degree is not, in itself, sufficient for positions to which it's very well suited.