They did say "degree in history" rather than "job as historian" though.

Exactly. The number of people in the US workforce who have a history degree is a little over a million (https://datausa.io/profile/cip/history).

Undergraduate degrees are easy to get. Having a psychology degree doesn’t mean you’re a psychologists, a history degree doesn’t mean you’re a historian, and a math degree doesn’t mean you’re a mathematician.

The extremely large majority of people go on to work regular jobs that have nothing to do with their degree and lose much of the information they learned, if it was even substantial at all.

All the unemployed historians now feel oppressed, thanks.