Here's a position I hold (perhaps irrationally):
Students entering colleges are making decisions about the future, and they are not suited for such decision making on their own.
First — in my experience, forecasting is more art than science. Students leaving high school are making forecasts about their next four years, and perhaps about their careers. For example: leaving high school I wanted to be a music teacher; and since high school I have been amazing at doing the exact opposite. If I made forecasts like that in my current job, where I forecast revenue, I would be out of a job.
Second — colleges are expensive. And expensive in terms outside of tuition. Consider the time, energy, and stress required to source, apply for, and wait for decisions for colleges. What opportunities are lost because of the search and admission costs? The time spent in college pursuing a degree that may not pan out to a desired career, what opportunities are lost because of that investment? What high school student considers opportunity costs (much less debt) as a function of their decision making?
John J Conlon and Dev Patel, researchers at Harvard, came out with a study — What Jobs Comes to Mind? Stereotypes about Fields of Study. Here’s an abbreviated excerpt of their conclusions:
"Across multiple survey samples, time periods, and elicitation methods, we find that U.S. undergraduate students greatly oversimplify the college-to-career process. Students appear to stereotype majors (“Art majors become artists,” “Political science majors become lawyers”), exaggerating the share of college graduates who are working in their major’s stereotypical job....
We show that this bias appears important for understanding students’ choice of major and has potentially important welfare consequences as it boosts demand for risky academic paths... our results may help to partly explain several striking and perhaps puzzling facts about students’ human capital decisions. For example, more American undergraduates are currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in journalism than there are journalists in the entire country. Psychology majors outnumber accounting majors in the United States, and yet there are eight times as many accountants as psychologists. Students take on considerable debt to fund Master’s programs with appealing but unlikely associated careers (e.g., film studies)...
Ex ante, of course, rational mechanisms could have fully explained these patterns: e.g., students with correct beliefs might rationally pursue certain career paths which, though very unlikely to pan out, they feel are worth the risk (e.g., journalism or film), or students may realize that certain majors (e.g., psychology) provide a general education not intended for use in any particular sector. Our findings suggest that mistaken beliefs may also contribute to these patterns: certain fields of study may appear especially appealing because students believe they lead to attractive stereotypical jobs with exaggerated likelihoods. These human capital investments carry substantial monetary and opportunity costs, and therefore it may be beneficial to find ways to help students make better informed decisions or to steer them toward less risky academic paths."
My takeaway: people entering college are bad forecasters and don’t consider enough the opportunity costs. Okay, let’s say a person is real with themselves about their ability to forecast the future and want to maximize their time, what would that person do?
I see three steps.
Identify your obsession and invest your time into it. Make the costs related to college search about finding teachers (future mentors) who are obsessed about what you’re obsessed about and go to those schools.
Say you find and go to one of those schools from step 1: Develop a portfolio of work centered around your obsessions and use that to enter the job market — obsessed candidates have a comparative advantage over candidates not obsessed.
Once you’re out of school, find a company that obsesses over what you obsess about and makes a product that leaves ripples upon ripples of social good — apply there! Make a career, and make a life.
Perhaps my take is contrarian — but also — perhaps that Harvard study may suggest that we need to find ways to better set up tomorrow’s leaders and innovators. Said more simply: what got us here won’t get us there.