programming skills are useful for whatever field the student goes into. Either making models in physics or economy, creating art or managing office supplies in spreadsheets.
What about chicken catchers, how is programming useful to them ? And in case you wonder what a chicken catcher does, it's someone who catches chickens for a living (basically, their job is to drive to a different farm each day, go into a barn full of chickens and put them in cages for transport to a butcher). I know a guy who does that, I'd love to see you teach him programming. Note that this guy is not mentally handicapped by any definition; let's just say he's not very good at abstract thinking.
What about the people who work in the bread factory around the corner from where I live. There are guys who've been working there for 30+ years and all they do is prepare shipments of bread for supermarkets. Cart 1 for supermarket A, 20 loafs of white bread, 30 of full grain, etc. on to Cart 2, 15 loafs of ... you get the idea. What use is programming to them ?
Hell, I know people who actually have a BsC from a 4 year CS program who can't code to save their lives. And these are college educated people who actually had programming courses as part of their BsC. They could kind-of do the assignments in the course but only as long as the assignments looked similar enough to the material studied in class. They didn't actually understand what was going on, they were merely monkeys who knew how to repeat a trick. Most of them went on to some 2 year follow-up management program.
Hell, I've interviewed job applicants with supposedly 10 years of programming experience who I wouldn't let near a compiler.