College, and arguably High School, should be teaching that your salary will ALWAYS be between end points.
An employee is never paid more than what it costs to replace them.
A person will never work for anything less than what they are willing to accept.
I went to a public high school in the 1950s and, in addition to science classes bereft of human evolution, had no classes in economics. Although, to be fair, since I didn’t do well in geometry, I was put in a course of business math. That was almost as good as economics. In later years, someone asked someone else why there were no economics classes in K-12. The response what that economics, the study of scarcity, was too depressing.
That was my generation’s version of participation trophies and self-esteem. We just didn’t discuss it.