Who the heck picks a major without knowing what job they want to get using it and other jobs it qualifies them for? WTF.
Yo.
I picked a major I'd enjoy, and learn from, and stretch my brain. (Actually switched to it--was Econ major, was sitting in bullshit business classes snoozing through and getting As, but enjoyed my basic philosophy class so much more, I became a philosophy major.)
The jobs one might get were irrelevant. I k ew a liberal arts major would make less money. I literally did not care. Not everything is about money.
If I could do it over, I'd do it again. In fact, I'd encourage myself to take that attitude even earlier. Money is so easy to make, I would base literally zero life decisions around it.
Why did you go to college anyway?
To learn, grow, expand myself as a person.
Not simply to make lots of money. If I wanted to do that, there's better paths than college.
But you had a plan. IIRC, you had a career that fit your life goal to RE, great. You didn't graduate, look around, and wonder "Hmm, what can I do with this piece of paper now that I'm sitting in mom & dad's basement with $25K in student debt?" My astonishment is that the people in the article had no idea what kind of jobs their degree qualified them to apply for.
Nope, none of that is true. No plan, no career that fit a goal of REing.
My senior year I heard of Teach for America, went to a presentation, and thought that would be a good thing to do (it's an Americorps program), to help kids in underprivileged situations close the achievement gap. I had no plan to teach and never expected to teach. Even when joining, I was expecting to do my two year commitment, then move on to something else.
Teaching, as a profession, is a pretty terrible one for ER. You get plenty of time off, yes (if you take it--we worked almost every summer), but the pay is terrible (I started at ~32k out of high school, and that rose--after 8 years' experience and adding a Master's Degree--to only 44k).
I ended up loving teaching so much though, I stayed with it for 8 years until we ER'd.
As I said:
I picked a major I'd enjoy, and learn from, and stretch my brain.
Consideration of career had zero to do with it, and, in fact, was the opposite (switched from a major where the career options were much more clear cut).
Just want to provide an example that not every person that picks a major without caring about monetary prospects is an idiot (or maybe you think I am now, and that's fine, too).
There are other considerations besides making money in life, and I'm glad I chose based on those. I enjoyed the hell out of my college classes, and I'd rather have 3-4 years of really thinking, learning, growing than 3-4 years of grinding to a career that pays well (a false dichotomy, I know, as they aren't mutually exclusive, but if your sole criteria is money, that may turn out to be the case). If my sole consideration was money, skipping college would have been the smart solution.
I went to college for non-monetary reasons, and did the same when deciding on my major, and am glad I did, and just wanted to provide an example of that, contrasting all the clueless people they show in news articles where they grab quotes to make them sound like idiots. :)