[wfoweoi]

> So, what’s a smart person to do to avoid pauperism?

Entrepreneurship should not be a generally advisable path for young people. It's high risk and requires some uncommon traits (resilience, resourcefulness, and hard work more than being "smart"). If you're leading average college students into entrepreneurship you're causing a lot of unnecessary misery.

Individuals have a lot of control over their economic value through their choice of what they study. There are still large portions of the student body which choose majors where empirically the graduates end up working in low paying service jobs. If you're choosing what to study, it should be a function of both what appeals to you and what is economically valuable. The average student seems to only consider the former, which leads to lots of people who think they are increasing their economic value in college, but are not (at least not by much).

(Some universities put out great empirical data on the economic value of majors, e.g. https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2015Majors)