Choose competitive universities, choose hard and well rewarded degrees - all is well.

Follow your passion and you might squeak by.

From The cost of studying the arts at Oxbridge in The Economist.

Sceptics of higher education often complain that universities offer too many frivolous degrees with little value in the workplace. Since elite universities tend to produce higher-earning graduates than less selective institutions do, you might expect them to teach more practical courses. Yet data from Britain’s department for education show the opposite. Undergraduate students at prestigious universities are more likely to study purely academic fields such as philosophy and classics, whereas those at less choosy ones tend to pick vocational topics such as business or nursing.

What could explain this seeming contradiction? One reason is that employers treat a degree from a top university as a proxy for intelligence. This means that students at elite institutions can study bookish subjects and still squeak by financially. The median Cambridge graduate in a creative-arts subject—the university’s least lucrative group of courses, including fields such as music—earns around £25,000 ($32,400) at age 26. Economics students from less exalted universities, such as Hull, make a similar amount.

Yet even though Oxbridge students can pretend to read “Ulysses” for years and still expect a decent salary, they end up paying a large opportunity cost by pursuing the arts. That is because employers reserve the highest starting wages for students who both attended a leading university and also studied a marketable subject. Cambridge creative-arts graduates earn £11,000 more at age 26 than do those from Wrexham Glyndwr University, whose arts alumni are the lowest-earning in Britain. In contrast, Cambridge economics graduates make £44,000 more than do those from the University of Salford, where the economics course is the country’s least remunerative.

Many gifted arts students would struggle to crunch numbers. But for those who can excel at both, the cost of sticking with the arts, in terms of forgone wages, is steep. Cambridge creative-arts students have a-level scores close to those of economics students at Warwick, but earn about half as much. That is tantamount to giving up an annuity worth £500,000.

It is a little garbled. If you are studying the arts, there is about a 30% premium to studying the arts at Oxbridge rather than your no-name university.

If you are studying economics, there is a 300% premium to studying at Oxbridge rather than your no-name university.

If you get into Oxbridge and choose economics, there is a 300-350% premium over your just-as-bright fellow alum who chose arts.

Higher intelligence has very little impact on your earning power in the arts. Higher intelligence has a big impact on your earning power in Economics.

If your goal is productivity maximization, then choose the best university and the highest paying STEM degree.

Choosing easier schools and easier degrees, no matter how smart you are, precludes you from maximizing income.

The unstated conclusion is that by choosing your university and choosing your degree, you are, on average, choosing your income. Since smarts and degree choice have such a dominating influence (300%), the unstated corollary is that concerns about disparate impact based on race and gender (usually at most 5-25% when controlling for intelligence) are effectively noise in the system. Be smart AND choose a good degree and everything else follows.

Squeak by and going for the easy A and "all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."