Just get a STEM degree and it’s hard to do poorly afterwards.
Wait until the winds of the economic climate change their direction again; until this moment, celebrate and post such texts on HN that will become bad advice.
I got a BS in math and physics, then continued for a PhD in physics. Today I work for a company that makes measurement equipment. We have engineers from most of the traditional disciplines, but they tend to be silo'd, and happy to avoid math and theory. Unavoidably, understanding (and proving) how the product works involves a combination of mechanical, electronics, data processing, statistics, and so forth. My long term role is to be the person who understands how the product works, not only acquiring domain knowledge but creating it.
The deal is that physics isn't an exclusive guild, and there are people in other disciplines with similar inclinations, but they're as rare as physicists. So I can't tell you why you need a physicist at the exclusion of any quantitative engineer with 30 years of experience. I can't promise that you'll get rich at it. I just try to help people and learn new things.
My PhD was sure a very nice to have, but never a life changer.
Would I do it again? Probably yes because of the tremendous joy research brought me (and free time for parties!).
Did I recommend it to my kids? No, they are better off with me specific studies.
Of the 100 or so people in my MSCi physics degree programme there were:
About 40 who went on to do PhDs ... of which about 30 are now academics, the rest went pretty evenly into the categories below, just a few years later
20 went on to some kind of elite professional services: investment banking, consulting, law or into large corporate management graduate programmes
10 are teachers, tutors, or have some other allied role
10 are civil servants or work for think tanks or other NGOs
20 have jobs in tech in various capacities
Start an internet payment, space exploration, electronic vehicle, tunnel boring, or direct brain-computer interface company.
The mean ROI on a bachelors in physics is probably the highest in STEM.
Apparently, they're also popular on Wall Street
Mandatory SMBC link: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Historically, the most successful examples in each of those industries have a physics degree. I cannot explain the causation.
Elon Musk also drives the mean for physics majors way up.
It was supposed to be a joke, which maybe people missed, about how Elon Musk was a physics major and how mean values on power law distributions are distorted greatly by the outliers.
So I have n clue what the median is, but I assume, like all income and wealth distributions it follows a power law distribution.
I just think there isn't nearly enough jobs in the field compared to the amount of people who are graduating with math degrees. There's only 27,700 actuaries in the US - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/actuaries.htm
They are a libertarian thinktank, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's a lot more data than we've had in this thread so far.
TLDR: Engineering pays, computers pay almost as much, art and music are usually a net negative (over 42 working years).
Looking at math, 88% of graduates will earn a 42-year ROI of <=$1,000,000, which means most of them are earning an additional $24k/year on top of what they could've expected to earn without a degree ("counterfactual earnings": https://freopp.org/how-we-calculated-the-return-on-investmen...). Only 3% of math majors should expect a negative ROI (i.e., they would've been better off NOT getting their degree). By comparison, 68% of art & music majors will have a negative ROI on their degree.