I think the situation is more complicated than what the average salary is for a given degree, or even what career opportunities a particular degree opens up. I was a liberal arts major (Religious Studies) and through a winding path ended up becoming a programmer. I knew at the time that I wouldn't be able to do much with my degree, but sometimes people pick degrees because of things besides career options and earnings potential -- and I would argue that these decisions can still be classified as perfectly rational at the time. I thought I'd work any sort of job to pay off my thankfully small student loans and then become a monk, but life turned out differently. Now you might say that my story is an unusual exception, but I think that similar thoughts (minus monasticism) drive the hearts of most liberal arts majors.

We need to consider that in the current educational system we are asking young people who are in the midst of trying to understand the world and their place in it to make a decision that very few are equipped to decide, but which they generally cannot delay, and with which they will incur great cost. And the effects of making this decision will last their entire life -- I myself know that it's possible to "pivot", but extremely difficult to do so.

Furthermore, there's no guarantee that a job even awaits those who pursue high paying degrees. For anyone who graduated in 2008, those with degrees in finance or MBAs will suffer the consequences of ill timing the rest of their life. Likewise with those who graduated with CS degrees during the dot com crash, or with advanced degrees focused on AI during the AI Winter. Sometimes things completely beyond our control result in what seemed like a prudent decision falling apart.

So my point is that our current educational structure is not well suited towards producing people who are resilient to disruption. And I mean disruption in a few senses: graduating when the market for their skills crashes, studying for a decade to get a degree in something that is beginning to be replaced by automation (I know one M.D. in a particular field who is preparing for this), and so on. It of course takes some time to acquire the skills to perform any particular job, and it might be unrealistic to expect someone with a family to even have the time to work and retrain at the same time. I know places like Udacity have things like "nanodegrees" and Coursera has certificates and whatnot, but I remain unconvinced that there are enough, say, web development jobs to meet the demands of both the unemployed and the recently graduated. And once there are too many web developers, what will they retrain to (and what will be the mobility and growth potential of us current developers)?

My comment is starting to turn into a blog post, so I'll try to wrap it up now. Ultimately I think that disruptive forces -- whether economic, automation-driven, or something else -- will only increase over time, and will exacerbate the already existing problems, causing significant social upheaval because we do not equip people to function in such an environment, but rather try to train them for their lifelong job, which is a thing that no longer exists. And I guess that I just ended up stating one of the motivations behind a liberal arts education (as opposed to something like a trade school where you generally focus upon one particular set of job skills) without even intending to end up here: it's not necessarily that you need to know art history or music theory in particular, but that in expanding the scope of your intellect and the modes of thought you are capable of, you will be much better prepared to learn what you do need to learn and to think critically about it.