You can certainly find within the field of philosophy a subset that is useless (or counterproductive) in the actual world and therefore serves best as intellectual toys for the ivory-tower elite (whether they get there through academia or affluence).

But this isn't all that philosophy is.

Marx's philosophy is extremely accessible. It has huge problems because of its inattention to human nature, but the accessibility criticism is terribly wrong, and he had a considerable knack for foreseeing problems even if his knack for foreseeing solutions was not as good.

Locke and Rousseau are more difficult but intersect in crucial ways with the eminently practical issue of how to structure a society for the benefit of its people, and though they didn't get it perfect, given that the entire modern democratic world is based heavily on their ideas, it's exceedingly useful to either read them directly, or read summaries. It's tremendously practical to understand the intellectual underpinnings and also note that a variety of contemporary problems were foreseen and discussed.

Popper and Kuhn were extraordinarily important for refining the methods of science to be well-targeted at revealing objective truths. Even though they both are slightly too simplistic in their outlooks to account for the diversity of methods to test ideas with evidence (Feyerabend goes too far and forgets to keep hold of the essence of why it works at all), they set clear boundaries around what works and what doesn't, and provide an epistemological foundation that has allowed us to build our modern technologically-advanced lives.

Beyond individual philosophers, philosophical logic teaches one how to think: what patterns are always valid, or not, and (some of) the different ways in which to formalize knowledge. Philosophical ethics is not a source of answers to moral questions but is a powerful set of questions and limitations that, if you are unaware of, you will almost surely fall afoul of, leading you to wrong and unjustified conclusions.

And so on.

Philosophy can be profoundly useful. These uses are completely unrelated to who happened to come across them--and indeed, a lot of the insights, because they're generally true, have been made in many different cultures; it's just that the western tradition for the most part had the greatest surplus wealth to allow specialization, so people there were able to delve into these issues most deeply.

Of course, any given philosophy department may care more about fostering a playground where people can attempt intellectual dominance displays by seemingly understanding highly abstruse writings and adding more of their own, or whatnot. They may forget to temper counterintuitive insights with the question, "Okay, but how much?" and thereby go gallivanting towards nihilism while thinking they're enlightened rather than surrendering to unconstrained bias.

But this just means that you need to be discriminating. It's not guaranteed to be highly useful. But it could be, and in a lot of philosophy departments, whether you do mostly the useful stuff or mostly not is largely up to you: the core requirements contain a mix of useful and not, and the electives are broad enough so you can stick to comparatively useful parts if you want.