Depends on the career. Nurses start high but salaries do not grow much at all.
Lawyers often start low and grow tremendously.
Your comments have nothing to do with my point, nor the point of this article. It's as though you offered them just to counter me...
The point of the article was that they were creating a tool that would help prospective students understand what they might make in a typical job, with a degree in a particular field. Yes, there are many permutations of how this might occur, but the bottom line is that some starting point of salary must be assumed.
In fact, if I were making the tool, I'd have a variable that allowed the would-be student to select a career path. it might have different trajectories, such as slacker, typical, and ambitious, representing how the student might achieve different levels.