> majoring in Underwater Basket Weaving was not a great idea from a financial point of view
I've met many people in places like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs (i.e. "elite" high paying jobs) with degrees from Oxford or Cambridge in Philosophy, English, Arch & Ant or Theology (in "decreasing usefulness"). Many more than, say, graduates in accounting or business administration from Manchester University, although a few might make it. Hell, I know a Harvard philosophy major who co-authored a very useful Haskell library.
My conclusions from anecdotal evidence:
- these universities, regardless of degree, encourage very hard, focused work, and teach and encourage critical thinking; both critical thinking and hard focused work are useful in all jobs;
- people overestimate the "technical" portion of most jobs, and how easily it can be taught (a law conversion course takes a mere few months in the UK, and banks routinely train thousands of fresh unqualified graduates every year);
- people overestimate the marketability of skills taught in most "useful" degrees especially outside its area of specialisation (e.g. is a medical major more qualified a strategy consultant than a philosophy major?);
- you gain access to a vast alumni network and its reputation (which includes world leaders, the CEO of the companies you apply to, etc.);
- the selective nature of admissions sends the market a signal about your "intrinsic" quality.
(edited to be more readable on mobile)
Obviously, if you want to become a specialist and you are sure of it, it is a better idea to study that field in the best place you gain admission to. But that has not been true of the vast majority of my former classmates.
In fact I watched a strange inversion whereby those who were certain they wanted to be engineers are now at McKinsey or banks and those who were certain they wanted to make tons of money in business are now working in "hard" engineering jobs (structural engineering, fluid dynamics for car companies, etc.).