What incoming college freshmen consider important parts of their future lives isn't a good metric of anything useful. The percentage of freshman who want to be doctors doesn't say much about the current or future number of med-school applications, but rather it says being a doctor is culturally idealized and popular at the moment.
I've noticed that there's a class of people who enter college looking to major in whatever they see as the most lucrative field. In years past, they've targeted pre-med, pre-law, pre-business-school, computer science in the 90s, and econ/banking in the 2000s. Now that we always hear about tech entrepreneurs being worth big bucks, that's suddenly the "major-of-the-month", soon to be displaced by something else when another field explodes into the public conscious or when we get Bubble 2.0.
I've noticed that there's a class of people who enter college looking to major in whatever they see as the most lucrative field. In years past, they've targeted pre-med, pre-law, pre-business-school, computer science in the 90s, and econ/banking in the 2000s. Now that we always hear about tech entrepreneurs being worth big bucks, that's suddenly the "major-of-the-month", soon to be displaced by something else when another field explodes into the public conscious or when we get Bubble 2.0.