More Info is Available about Which College Majors Pay Off, but Students Aren’t Using It

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956_:

More info is available about which college majors pay off, but students aren't using it:

When the University of Texas system teamed up with the Census Bureau to show how much money graduates earn, broken down by major and campus, the idea was to help future students make good choices.

College is, after all, a huge investment, with costs consumers often criticize and toward which many have to borrow. If they knew that one major results in higher salaries than others - or that graduates from one university earn more than those with the exact same degree from another - wouldn't they make the higher-paying choice?

Two years after the groundbreaking collaboration began, however, students haven't seemed to alter course, said David Troutman, the system's associate vice chancellor, who oversees the project.

[...] He and other advocates stress that they want students to continue following their passions. But they also want them to be aware that earnings vary widely among graduates, even when they have identical majors, from different universities and colleges, affecting not only their quality of life but their ability to repay their student loans.

That's a principal reason more and more information about job opportunities and salaries is being made available to students and their families, most recently by the federal government, which this month expanded a feature of its College Scorecard website showing the earnings payoffs of 37,459 majors at 4,434 colleges and universities.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.