Choosing a major without pay data, the return gap can reach double

After the same four years at university, nurses, social workers and teachers graduate on a starting salary of HK$36,000, while a building-services engineering graduate gets just HK$18,000, posted to a construction site facing air ducts and water pumps, the two differing by nearly double. Many who have been through it say secondary-school students have almost no reliable salary or prospects data when choosing a major, and often imagine their future from whether a subject name contains words like engineering or management, only to discover after enrolling that a so-called engineer is really a site assistant for the first few years, far from the professional image they pictured.

The core problem is the heavy information asymmetry between study choices and career returns: each programme's real starting salary, promotion track and industry ceiling are scattered across different channels with no neutral, readable consolidation; even where later switching paths exist, such as nursing conversion schemes or a social-work master's, the information is just as fragmented, leaving students and parents unable to make a grounded judgement at 17 or 18. The result is an avoidable gap: for the same tuition and the same years of youth, returns can differ by double, and the most pivotal choice of major is made precisely when information is scarcest and the subject name most misleading.