Here is an article from the UK on this topic. Of course, the choice
of college major and career should not be guided solely by money.
The cost of studying the arts at Oxbridge High-scoring students leave £500,000 on the table by eschewing economics
The Economist
January 26th 2019
...
Yet even though Oxbridge students can pretend to read “Ulysses” for years and still expect a decent salary, they end up paying a large opportunity cost by pursuing the arts. That is because employers reserve the highest starting wages for students who both attended a leading university and also studied a marketable subject. Cambridge creative-arts graduates earn £11,000 more at age 26 than do those from Wrexham Glyndwr University, whose arts alumni are the lowest-earning in Britain. In contrast, Cambridge economics graduates make £44,000 more than do those from the University of Salford, where the economics course is the country’s least remunerative.
Many gifted arts students would struggle to crunch numbers. But for those who can excel at both, the cost of sticking with the arts, in terms of forgone wages, is steep. Cambridge creative-arts students have a-level scores close to those of economics students at Warwick, but earn about half as much. That is tantamount to giving up an annuity worth £500,000.
Who can afford such indulgence? The answer is Oxbridge students, who often have rich parents. At most universities, students in courses that lead to high-paying jobs, such as economics and medicine, tend to come from wealthier families, partly because such applicants are more likely to have the examination scores necessary to be accepted. At Oxbridge, however, no such correlation exists. History and philosophy students there come from richer parts of Britain, on average, than their peers studying medicine do.
