I don't agree with your classification of careers. At least in the private sector, a high earning career is generally one that provides more service than a low-earning one, in return for which the worker is paid more. By training for high-paying careers, students are not only helping themselves but helping society.
I don't quite agree that high paying careers
generally provide more service to society than a low-earning ones. As one example of a very high-paying career, bankers have done a tremendous amount of damage to our society in recent years, and very little good to society at large. They draw heavily on graduates in physics, which may be why physics is on the list of high-paying majors. Ditto for mortgage brokers as a highly-paid group that made a lot of trouble for us. Creating marketing/advertising campaigns for stuff that people don't need can be very lucrative, but this job does not provide what I would call an important service to society. This list goes on.
Compare with these private sector jobs: nursing, veterinary medicine, or teaching at a private school. Each job requires education and provides a critically important service, yet they aren't known as lucrative careers. Whatever debates we've had here about our education systems, I suspect we'll all agree that people don't go into teaching for all those stock options and those huge annual bonuses.
Other low-paying private sector jobs that provide essential services to society: garbage collection, vegetable or fruit picker, janitor, employee at recycling plant, etc. etc.
Seriously Bostonian, where would we be without even one of these groups? With respect, when you make sweeping statements about the greater service value of highly paid jobs as a general rule, you come across as perhaps dismissing the value of people or jobs that lack what I will call glamour.
<3 <3 <== Loving disagreement.At the same time, if we're going to define "service to society" as packaging mortgage securities or as a job creating software designed to get kids to pester their parents to cash in so they can buy penguin points or rainbow gold for some online game...well, maybe we need to re-think our definition of "service to society." But this is just one quixotic loudmouth's opinion!
