One of the many idiotic ideas that reappear in our public schools in new verbal guises is the idea that the school should be preparing young people for the world of work. Such choices are premature by at least a decade. Some of the best liberal arts colleges allow and encourage their students to take two years of general education in college before deciding what subject to major in. Such choices are too serious to make without some solid basis. You may be fascinated by chemistry experiments in high school, but that is very different from saying that you can master the difficult analytical skills required for majoring in chemistry in college.
Every college has students who enroll in pre-med programs and end up majoring in sociology.
I didn't even know what an economist was and had never heard of a think tank, such as the Hoover Institution, where I have worked for 20 years. Nor is it at all realistic to expect school teachers to have any such encyclopedic knowledge of the thousands of occupations out there today, much less what the trends are for various fields in the years ahead, when these 8th graders will be working adults. The high rates of obsolescence of jobs and skills dooms any such efforts. It is worse than that. They test for attitudes as well as aptitudes.