I don’t think any field I listed - or journalism - is universally “bad” to go into. Some young people are thriving in all of these careers. (And @Mjkacmom , congrats to your daughter!)
At the risk of veering off-topic, I’ll answer the question, hopefully without writing a book.
I graduated from BU with a dual BS/BA in PT and psychology, in the late 80’s. Today, a clinical doctorate is needed to get the same license. Today’s starting salaries are only about 10% better than what I got paid back then, when adjusted for inflation, so the exploding cost of the necessary education (3 additional years of educational expenses, multiplied by the exponentially higher cost of each year in school, plus the opportunity cost of the three missed years of gainful professional employment) is not really paying off in earning power.
Nor is the investment in a more-sophisticated level of education really paying off in terms of a more sophisticated level of practice; if anything, the average patient receives a more “cookbook” approach to treatment than in the past, because the ever-intensifying demands for efficiency and productivity often preclude taking time for creative approaches, learning and cross-pollination in the workplace, and lengths-of-stay that allow going beyond the basics.
Much of the argument for the entry-level doctorate was around the assertion that PT should be an autonomous, direct-access profession, not requiring a doctor’s prescription. But now the DPT is standard and there are more gatekeepers than ever; not only do third party payers still require a doctor’s referral, but they also employ non-clinicians to second-guess, abbreviate, interrupt, or outright deny the treatment plan that an MD prescribed and the DPT developed. In my last job, I very nearly spent as much time begging for authorizations as I did treating. Patients would wait weeks for re-authorization, often after only 1-3 initial sessions, and then they’d be back to square one before I could see them again.
That’s before we even get to questions of temperament and cognitive style. It can still be a great profession for people who are suited to multitasking, snap decisions, and interacting with more than 20 patients a day. (The full-time productivity standard at my last job was 25/day.) Those people exist, and God bless them, but that’s not me. Today’s equivalent of me should stay in engineering school… not that quality of life in the tech workplace hasn’t deteriorated too.
This is why I don’t bring the subject up much; I just end up sounding like a Negative Nancy. I really just wanted to make the point that folks in many professions feel the same way as the veteran journalists who would warn this student off.