Salary.com did not do any scientific analysis to come up with this. What Salary.com did was pick out the top three careers for each major that they thought were most closely related to the field; then they used the median salary on those fields to try to calibrate ROI. This is faulty, however, because it is not a reflection of the work actual psychology majors are doing - it’s only a reflection of people’s stereotypes of the kinds of jobs that social science majors get. For psychology, they happened to pick out “human services worker,” “career counselor,” and “bereavement coordinator.” What even is a “human services worker”? The closest thing that the BLS has for that is “social and human service assistants,” which are jobs that require a HS diploma. I looked at several other of the majors and they make the same poor assumptions and errors elsewhere (a sociology degree does not qualify one to become a social worker, nor does a religion major qualify one to become a chaplain).
I would argue that there is, since the science of management and organization is built on psychological principles. At Columbia Business School, for example, many of the professors are psychologists with psychology PhDs doing psychological research. That’s true of many business schools across the country.
The unemployment rate of psychology majors (9.2%), English (9.8%), and history (9.5%) < 5 years out of college (9.2%) actually isn’t all that much higher than that of mechanical engineers (8.1%) or computer science (8.7%) at the same stage; it’s actually lower than information systems majors (14.7%) and economics majors (10.4%)
Actually the majors with the lowest unemployment rates are nursing (4.8%), elementary education (5%) physical fitness & parks and recreation (5.2%), and chemistry (5.8%). Not your traditional business/finance/engineering.
https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/9t0p5tm0qhejyy8t8hub
As for the question at hand, in a theoretical sense I think a general studies major can be good - I also see it like the “Great Books” curriculum at St. John’s or Shimer, or an extension of the traditional standard education at colleges and universities in the 18th and 19th centuries in the U.S. Some students don’t have a strong idea what they want to major in, and other students just want to explore a variety of things and get a good, well-rounded education that teaches them about a lot of things. But I do think those students will be at a disadvantage on the job market - but because the degree in and of itself is worthless, but because some employers have come to expect college students to have specialized in a specific area in college.