This has nothing to do with what major or direction high school students want to pick. I'm talking about the decision of where to go to school, and specifically highlighting the fact that uninformed kids/parents (at least in my case) picked the more expensive, private university because all signs pointed to that being the correct choice.
The answer here is to push lower cost, public colleges to kids who don't know what they want to do (or to even to those that do) instead of accruing 40k/year of debt trying to figure it out. The idea of going to a public school was out of the question when I was applying, when it very much
should have been a key option.
A lot of this is simply that life is risky, and completely unforeseen circumstances can drastically change life outcomes.
I went to an expensive private college. My parents racked up over $100K in debt between my sister and I. Neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do when we went. Our parents were just like "Go to the best college you get into, and we will figure out the money."
The debt was paid off in full 4 years after graduation.
And the real reason it worked out were a variety of circumstances that could totally not have been foreseen when we matriculated. I flunked out of physics twice, and in my scramble to pick a new major and graduate, picked...computer science. And used a lot of the time I spent avoiding my physics homework to learn a bunch of cool programming languages, make contacts with real programmers on the Internet, and pick up internships. So when I barely-graduated, I already had a job lined up at a financial software startup that I'd interned with twice. If I had not flunked out of the physics major, I would likely be just barely finishing my Physics Ph.D now, having lived on $20K/year for the past 7 years, and would be coming into an uncertain job market with few marketable skills, no work experience, and a lot of debt.
My sister happened to go to school in Houston, at a school where her geology department had close ties to local oil majors, and so ended up with a bunch of oil industry internships before graduation. She had two of the majors bidding against each other for her after graduation, and got a lucrative job that way.
The interesting thing is that we both went into college knowing very little other than "Go to the best college you get into", and came out of it with that being the right choice but for reasons completely different than what we thought they'd be. A degree helps, but skills and contacts help more. Maybe the right move for entering students these days is to go to the best college you get into, but think carefully about what you want to do afterwards and put yourself in situations where you can rack up advantages for getting there afterwards.
The answer here is to push lower cost, public colleges to kids who don't know what they want to do (or to even to those that do) instead of accruing 40k/year of debt trying to figure it out. The idea of going to a public school was out of the question when I was applying, when it very much should have been a key option.