I'm not claiming that I had hifalutin ideals; I knew that money was important, but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow.
I just wasn't prepared to hear "I'm just here to get a good job" from most of my peers. Some, I would expect, but not most.
No matter how hard you work, or how talented you are, the very top is something we cannot guarantee to anyone. So it's pretty rational to look at a career path, a set of life decisions, by looking at average cases, not just the very top.
Going out there because you are curious about the world, and ending up doing something where only the very top percentiles do well is only a great story if you win. I know a girl that went with those lofty ideals into psychology, along with a high IQ. She now answers phones at a call center. Two PhDs in biology: One is teaching English in Japan, because she couldn't bear a 20+ year post doc path, getting paid less than half of what I made in my first job out of school. My brother, top of his class in biology too. Got a Phd with honors. But he was born in the wrong country, and his best job offer is for a position that asks him to do 10+ hour days, rotating into the night 1'3rd of the time, all for 850 euros a month. Welcome to a country with over 20% unemployment.
So it's really easy to think it's important to have curiosity as long as you also pick a profitable course of study too, or are quite lucky. Otherwise, it's the same mindset that can dig you into a hole.
Picking a career just because of the money, and not getting any love for it as you go is a road to failure too: Many people drop out of programming for those reasons, and few options are more profitable on average than programming. But I can't blame people for keeping an eye out of the available options. I know I did: There were many things I thought I would have enjoyed doing, and I picked one that also looked profitable. I can't say I regret it.
The kinds of failures you're describing are exactly what you get when the default morality is "Make as much money as possible".
You can say it's currently maladapted to expect more, and that's possibly true.
That doesn't mean it's an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.
I agree, but I think the social failure is that we tell people to "do what they love" and "follow their dreams" instead of "do something important" or "do something where you can make a difference".
The things that, say, English majors do are probably as objectively important as the things I do at work, but the field is overcrowded to the point that the value added by each additional entrant to the field is significantly reduced. So it's hard to find work that pays well for English majors (at least if they stay in their field).
Another thing is that "do something you love" misses is that you should find a career that you love. If you love your college experience but hate the jobs available to you afterward, that degree may not be a net positive.
Why not move?
I don't know when you went to school, but now you can satisfy that curiosity with the Internet. The reason for school is to make connections, and have proof of experience for your resume.
It wont.
For most people, a library solves that more efficient and cost effectively than a university, at least to the level that they care about.
It would be nice if university were cheap enough to be an answer to curiosity, but as it stands,
I've remembered that for 35 years.
There are certainly other factors to consider than just salary, but to dismiss that consideration as "prostitution" is absurd. Money may not buy happiness, but it buys everything else. I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, all of which money can buy in abundance.
But I was lucky to pick a field with high pay and lots of good employers, so I have the luxury of choosing both.