Here’s some advice that I posted in this forum some months ago. I hope it’s helpful in this thread. I’ll shorten it.
It was one of my geologist uncles, a professor at Caltech, who gave me the best piece of advice about choosing courses (not majors) in college. When you get to college, he said, you’re going to hear about some great professor or great course that’s not in your major field of interest. But students will recognize the professor as a guru, someone who inspires students to think about the world in novel or deep ways. You may not get a good grade in it, but by all means TAKE that course!
This is the kind of experience that Steve Jobs had at Reed. He took a course in calligraphy, of all things. Even though he dropped out of Reed, he took inspiration from that teacher and subject to create the proportional space fonts that made the Mac famous. Obviously, Jobs wasn’t thinking about grades when he took the course (most students at Reed never thought about grades – unless called out because their work was unsatisfactory), but he was looking for ideas. And a course in calligraphy at Reed was a course in history and literature, not simply art and design.
I would like to encourage the parents here to encourage their children to take hard courses, to get outside their comfort zone in their coursework at college. Most students change majors at least once. The economy – the world at large – is changing. Prepare for a lifetime of creative endeavor (hopefully remunerative!), don’t just go to college fixated narrowly on a particular major.