Every generation of students gets handed one sure thing.
In the 1980s, it was "learn Japanese." Japan was the second-biggest economy on the planet. Japanese companies were buying Rockefeller Center, Pebble Beach, and entire movie studios. At one point, real estate experts calculated that the grounds of Tokyo's Imperial Palace were worth more than all the land in Canada. Canada! The whole thing! Every guidance counselor, every magazine, every uncle at Thanksgiving said the same words: the future speaks Japanese.
Then Japan's bubble popped, the economy flatlined for over a decade, and a lot of people who'd spent four years conjugating verbs for a career that no longer existed had some thinking to do.
After the 2008 financial crisis, the sure thing was law school. Applications exploded as students ran from a terrible job market toward a "recession-proof" degree.
Three years and six figures of debt later, they graduated into the worst legal hiring market anyone could remember, competing for jobs with actual laid-off lawyers.
And for the last fifteen years? Learn to code.
The Numbers Nobody Wanted
You already know where this is going.
Recent computer science grads now face roughly 6 to 7 percent unemployment, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, well above the average for new college grads. Philosophy majors are getting hired at less than half that rate. Art history majors — the official punchline of every "what are you going to do with THAT?" lecture — are currently out-employing the coders. Somewhere, an art history major is smiling politely at Thanksgiving dinner and saying nothing. Respect.
Here's how it happened. The number of computer science degrees more than doubled in a decade, from about 52,000 a year to over 112,000. Universities kept cranking out graduates at record speed right as tech companies cut hundreds of thousands of jobs and AI started eating exactly the kind of entry-level work that used to be a new coder's first rung on the ladder.
The "safe" degree became one of the riskiest bets in the graduating class. Not because computer science stopped mattering — it didn't — but because everyone showed up at once as SaaS companies realized that they had overhired for several years.
Everyone's GPS Says the Same Thing
Here's the mechanism, and once you see it, you'll see it everywhere.
You know what happens when there's an accident on the highway, and everyone's map app finds the same "shortcut" through a neighborhood? The shortcut is now a parking lot, and you're idling past someone's mailbox at four miles an hour. The route wasn't wrong. A shortcut only works if everyone else doesn't know about it.
Career advice works exactly the same way. By the time a path is so obviously great that every parent, counselor, and LinkedIn post agrees on it, millions of other students have already turned onto that street. The advantage isn't gone because the field got worse. It's gone because you all arrived together.
I've spent 20 years investing in startups, which means I've spent 20 years watching very smart, highly educated, and highly motivated adults make this exact mistake with millions of dollars. We have a name for it: chasing the trade. When you buy whatever went up last year, it often ends the same way, and the people who do it never think they're the herd. Nobody ever thinks they're the herd. That's the whole psychology of herds.
Morgan Housel, in The Psychology of Money, describes the trap as "taking cues from people playing a different game than you are." That senior engineer posting salary screenshots? Different game. She's ten years in, with a network and a track record. You're picking a major. Her signal was never your signal.
Now add the part that makes it extra unfair for students. When you pick a major at 17, the bet doesn't begin to pay out until you're 22 or older. Wharton psychologist Adam Grant calls locking in that early on a recipe for identity foreclosure — committing to a self you haven't tested. "Choosing a career isn't like finding a soul mate," he writes in Think Again.
Your ideal job may not have been invented yet, and the future you who'll do it doesn't exist yet either. You're finished with college and navigating with a map that's four to six years old in a job market that redraws itself about every eighteen months.
And the advice your parents give you? That's based on what worked for people who graduated a decade ago, with more recent clickbait thrown in for confusion. Old data and dramatic headlines aren't the building blocks of good strategy.
Nostalgia + Instagram Reels ≠ Good Career Prep Advice
Economists even have a name for the boom-bust loop: high wages attract a stampede of students, the stampede graduates, wages drop, students flee, a shortage appears, wages rise, and here comes the next stampede. Petroleum engineering ran this loop. Pharmacy ran it. Law ran it. Computer science is running it right now, live, in front of you.
Herds are excellent at telling you where the opportunity was.
Before You Burn Your Python Textbook
Deep breath. This is not an argument against studying computer science.
The same New York Fed data shows computer science grads who land jobs earn some of the highest starting salaries of any major, and they're far less likely to end up in jobs that don't need a degree at all. The government still projects software developer jobs to grow about five times faster than average over the next decade. The field is fine.
What's broken is the sentence. "I'm majoring in computer science because it's guaranteed" was always a bad sentence, even when it sounded true. "I'm majoring in computer science because I love building software and I'm good at it" was always a great sentence, and it still is. The major was never the problem. The autopilot was.
And here's the plot twist the safe-major crowd never mentions.
Harvard economist David Deming has shown that the salary head start STEM majors get fades steadily after their first jobs. By age 40, humanities and social science majors have basically caught up. Two reasons. Hot technical skills expire like milk as technology moves on. And the skills everyone calls "soft" — judgment, communication, adaptability, working with actual humans — compound like interest, quietly pulling people into the leadership roles where careers and incomes actually peak.
So, the "impractical" skills appreciate, and the "practical" ones depreciate.
The Actual Safe Bet
So if the safe major is a myth, what's the move?
Stop asking "which field is safe?" and start asking "what makes me hard to replace in any field?" That's a different question, and it doesn't have a one-word answer like "coding" or "nursing" or "Japanese." The answer is a stack of things you carry with you: fluency with AI tools, judgment about when to trust them, originality a machine can't fake, adaptability when the ground moves, and the human skills that make people actually want you in the room.
Those travel. A major doesn't. The Japanese majors of 1989 who'd only learned Japanese were stuck. The ones who'd learned how to work across cultures, negotiate, and adapt? They were fine in Japan, in China, in whatever came next.
Study what genuinely pulls you in, and get scary good at it. Excellence in something you chose beats mediocrity in something the herd chose for you — in every market, in every decade, no exceptions.
NYU professor Scott Galloway puts it more bluntly: "Don't follow your passion, follow your talent." Same destination, different door. His argument isn't that loving your work doesn't matter — it's that mastery is what creates the love. Get great at something, and the craft, the recognition, and yes, the money will make you passionate about it. Notice what neither of us is saying: "Pick whatever the herd picked."
And the next time an adult confidently tells you exactly which major is the guaranteed ticket, smile, nod, and ask one question: "If everyone in my graduating class takes your advice, is it still good advice?"
Watch their face. The herd never has an answer for that one.
Discover more insights in my book, Indispensable: A Student’s Guide for Thriving in the Age of AI.
Published by Damn Gravity, Indispensable takes a practical look at how students can develop the habits, skills, and mindset they'll need to thrive as technology advances.
