There really needs to be dis/incentives for choosing one’s major. I majored in Neuroscience and looking back it was a colossal waste of time and money. I don’t remember most of it, and it was all just acquiring an existing knowledge base which I could have done by independently studying a few textbooks.

Meanwhile I still remember the basics of calculus from AP calculus in high school and it has become useful to me. I strongly regret not majoring in something skill-based like math or engineering because those are things that are much harder to teach yourself without mentorship, they tend to stick with you longer, and they make up the foundation skills for so many other areas.

But I had no disincentive for choosing neuroscience. I was attracted to the subject and so thought it was reasonable to major in it, not taking into consideration its long term value. If a neuroscience degree came with a black box warning or student loans weren’t so easy to get with that degree or if there was a social stigma to choosing useless degrees then maybe I would have been nudged toward math or computer science.

Anyone can study neuroscience in their spare time but it becomes increasingly difficult to spare the time to learn something like quantum field theory in your own time outside of college. Already having a strong math background would make self-teaching complex mathematical subjects like that do-able. Whole swaths of human intellectual achievement are effectively out of reach to me due to my limited math skills.