Those departments (History, English, etc.) are generally "revenue positive" since the instruction is relatively cheap. As for the job prospects of those majors, while History and English majors don't have a direct career path like Engineering majors, they do find employment in a wide range of places.

I'm an engineering prof at VT, so you can consider me biased one way or the other (maybe biased toward universities and not wanting any change, although my liberal arts colleagues often consider engineering faculty biased against them), but my History and English classes were quite useful to me. I learned quite a bit about critical reading, reasoning, and writing that I use in my research and teaching today.

As a bit of an aside, the UW system has had some serious issues recently with big budget cuts, etc. They have been poached/raided by other schools (including VT) that have hired away some of their most successful faculty (although, others at UW with large active research grants parlayed those other offers into substantial raises despite the huge budget cuts at the universities). I certainly wouldn't advise any of my PhD students or post-docs to accept an offer at UW-Madison over other places these days (whereas 10 years ago, that would have seemed like a super place to go).

Just my $0.02.