Really? 65K? I've never seen promotional material that realistic. 6 years ago, they told my brother (a softwear engineer) he'd be pulling in six figures! My wife got the same from her geology program.
Who is "they"? It's pretty easy to just look up the stats, which aren't as rosy as claimed:
http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads
"They" were the Department of Software Engineering at the University of [redacted]. Same with the geology major; the department of earth sciences at the university of [redacted]. It's great that Stanford is posting these now, wish every school would do the same. (I notice MY major isn't on there, even though Stanford is a major source of graduates.) Unfortunately, the page you listed has never been archived by the Wayback Machine, which makes me wonder how long it's been around. I note that even this level of transparency gives the impression of full employment, which even for Stanford grads seems unrealistic.
Double unfortunately, what realistic stats you can find get discounted by all and sundry. When the "experts" at the guidance counsellor's office, the universities, your parents & mentors are all telling you the same thing-- that you'll can only succeed and get into the upper-middle-class if you study what you love--it's hard to lose your trust in them and put it into a dissenting set of figures you find online.
If anyone cares, here's how the general malaise of our generation hit me, since I don't think I'm by any means exceptional:
I seem to recall a vague awareness that less than 1 in 3 physics majors* got research positions in government or academia (which was the general goal of all of us in the program). I very nearly went into engineering instead, because of that. I was talked out of it, my ego puffed up by the assurances of the whole damn town that
of course I would be in the top 30%, and how could you get anywhere in life if you don't take a risk like that? And it's such a
hard major, it's a
STEM: there will be oodles of awesome jobs in industry, even if you stop at a BSc.
Oh, Mea Culpa. What got me was the incredible hubris to assume I'd make the grade, and that my 17-year-old self could be 100% certain of setting on a course that would take 10 years of post-secondary education to complete. Hubris is the seed of tragedy, for me, and probably everyone else in my generation. (And everyone, ever, according to some Greeks.) Hubris, and the gullibility to believe in these mythical fallback jobs, when
nobody could name a single one. Now I'm taking my shiny MSc into a call centre for thirteen loonies an hour.
Still, when you're dealing with kids who've been coddled every damn day of their lives, you have to forgive gullibility, I think. The hubris, well, yeah. I was a little shit and I'm paying for it. (OTH, make the focus of raising a child how exceptionally special they are, and you've got to own up a bit of responsibility for that hubris, too. It doesn't diminish my load of guilt, but adds to my parents' and teachers'.)
tl;dr: Mea culpa, it was hubris and gullibility. Probably the same for everybody.