Many colleges ask you to choose a major as early as your senior year of high school, on your admissons application. Yet there's a good chance you'll change your mind. The Education Department says that about 30 percent of students switch majors at least once.

Students get plenty of advice about picking a major. It turns out, though, that most of it is from family and friends, according to a September Gallup survey. Only 11 percent had sought guidance from a high school counselor, and 28 percent from a college adviser. And most didn't think that the advice was especially helpfuly. Manybe it's because much of the conventional thinking about majors is wrong.

People believe that for the big money, STEM always delievers. It's true that computer science and engineering top all the pay rankings, but salaries within specific majors vary greatly. "Students and parents have a pretty good idea of what majors pay the most, but they have poor sense of the hugeness of the differences within the major," said Douglas A. Webber, an associate professor of economics at Temple University who studies earnings by academic field. He points to one example: The top quarter of earners who majored in English make more over their lifetimes than the bottom quarter of chemical engineers.

Even English or history graduates who make just above the median lifetime earnings for their major do pretty well when compared to typical graduates in business or a STEM field. Take the median lifetime earnings of business majors, the most popular undergraduate degree. The typical graduate earns $2.86 million over a lifetime. When you put business graduates side by bise with those who graduated with what are considered low-paying majors, you'll see that those who are slighty above the median salary in their fields are not that far behind the business graduates. For example, an English major in the 60th percentile makes $2.76 million in a lifetie, a moajor in psychology $2.57 million and a history major $2.64 million.

It's also beileve that choice of college. But that's not true. In seven states-Arkansas, Colorado, Minnesota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington-students can search public databases for early earnings of graduates of institutions within the state. And those databases show that students who graduate from more selective schools tend to make moare money. After all, the better the college, the better the professional network opportunities, through alumni, parents of classmates and eventually classmates themselves.

These undergraduates are more able to pursue majors in lower paying fields because their networks help them land good jobs. Arts , humanities and social science majors are more prevalent on elite campuses than at second-tier colleges, where students tend to pick vocational majors like business, education and health. In all, more than half of students at less selective schools major in career-focused subjects; at elite schools, less than a quarter do, according to an analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight.

Students at selecitve colleges are also more likely to have two majors than students at second-tier colleges, who tend to be more financially needy and have to work, affording less time to double major.

One tip for double major: completementary majors with overlapping requirements are easier to cope with, but two unrelated majors probably yield bigger gains in the job market, said Richard N. Pitt, an associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt Unitversity who has studied the rise of the double major. "It increase your breadth of knowledge," he said.

The third myth is that liberal arts majors are unemployable. The liberal arts is a favorite target of politicians, but the competencies that liberal arts majors emphasize-writing, sythesis, problem solving-are sought after by employers. A 2017 study by David J. Deming, an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard, found jobs requiring both the so-called soft skills and thinking skills have seen the largest growth in employment and pay in the last three decades.

One knock on the liberal arts is that it's difficult to find a first job. But a study by Burning Glass Techologies, a Boston-based company that analyzes job-market trends, concluded that if liberal arts graduates gain proficiency in one of eight technical skills, such as social media or data analysis, their prospects or landing entry-level jobs increase substantially.

The long-held belief by parents and students that liberal arts graduates are unemployable ignores the reality of the modern economy, where jobs require a mix of skills not easily packaged in college major, said George Anders, author of you can do anything: The Surprising Power of a "Useless" Liberal Arts Education. In his book, Mr. Anders writes about graduates with degrees in philosophy, sociology and linguistics in jobs as diverse as sales, finance and market research. "one C.E.O. s see liberal arts graduates in action," Mr. Ander said, "they come aboard to the idea that they need more of them."

Besides, the popular belief that it's important to choose a major early is also false. Of students who said they felt committed to their major when they arrived on campus, 20 percent had selected a new major by the end of their first year, according to national survey by the University of California, Los Angeles. Changing majors can cost you a semester or two, especially if you switch to one unrelated to your first choice. To reduce that risk, several schools, including Arizona State University, Georgia State University and Lehman College in the Bronx, have created "meta-majors". "We have moved away from trying to get students to chooe their majors as they enter," said Timothy Renick, Georgia State's vice provost and vice president for enrollment management and student success.

Instead, all incoming students choose from one of seven meta-majors, representing large academic and work force fields, such as business, education and STEM. First semester, students gather in learning communities and register for a block of general-education courses within that meta-major. Programming is designed so that students get to know the differences between majors within the field. "Students in our business meta-major get to understand the difference betweem finance, accounting, management and marketing so they can choose their major from an informed perspective," Dr. Rencik said. They usually do by the end of their first year.