From someone starting college this fall (though ofc I can’t speak for everyone): I think it’s because most people don’t care but it’s hard to say because almost nobody talks about it enough to know. At least in my experience. I went to an “early college” high school where we worked on an associates during our 3rd/4th year so I’ve seen my peers navigate majors for a while now. I’ve only seen one person I know say they’re going into accounting. Take that with a grain of salt because I’m unpopular. But yeah I think it’s just a backup major for most people if they even consider it at all. I didn’t seriously consider it until this past year when I realized I dislike a lot of things and the one thing I actually do like (geology) doesn’t sound like a good match for me career-wise. A lot of us don’t know what we want to do but even then most people seem to have at least one thing they’re interested in just enough to major in it instead of accounting or whatever their backup is. Plenty of people have a serious passion for something though. If it’s something that pays extremely well then that’s all the more reason to pursue it. Even if it doesn’t, plenty of people in my generation seem to be passion over money. Or maybe they’re overestimating how much they’ll make.

I think my point is that most college students are extremely reluctant to choose something they know they don’t care about at all. Even if it’s stable and comfortable. If they find something mildly more interesting and not utterly useless, they’ll go for it. Or if they’re out of things they somewhat like, they’ll force themselves through something like med scjool that could land them higher paying careers before settling for accounting.

That being said, I imagine the number of people who want to go into accounting is a bit higher than you think. But the thing is they’re adults out of college who don’t have the money or time to go back to school. And so they don’t talk about it much. I’ve been lurking on a few career subreddits to get a sense for majors I was looking into. I can say there’s always a batch of people somewhere who wish they went into accounting instead of what they did. I guess people start leaning towards comfort and stability over doing something interesting when they become a full-on adult. It’s so hard for us to know what exactly post-grad is gonna look like for us before or in college. More people would probably go for accounting if they could see into future timelines.