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Originally Posted by jdr0317
we both agree that changes to college financing are needed, but one thing that would inevitably happen if we restrict loan access to "safe" investment students is a sharp drop in lower end students enrolling
Not necessarily. The best way to do it is to make sure the people who pay have the students' best interest. The problem with student loans (and other related issues like secondary markets for mortgages) is that the decision makers aren't financially liable for bad decisions. Want to admit students who can't handle the cirriculum (or can't pay the mortgage)? No problem - someone else is ultimately picking up the bill. I have no problem with colleges simply waiving tuition for any student whose family makes less than $100,000 (most if not all Ivy League colleges do that now) - they're basically saying, hey, we'd rather a qualified poor student attend than get an extra $30k from an unqualified rich student. I think everyone wins.
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The top current groups of majors is, per NCES data:
Business: 19.2%
Health: 11.4%
Social Science/History: 8.8%
Psych: 6.2%
Bio: 5.8%
Engineering: 5.2%
Visual & Performing Arts: 5.1%
I will concede the point that health professions is the major field that's growing the fastest (from just 6.1% at the start of the millennium to 11.4% now). But when there's still more communications and journalism majors than computer science majors, you have to wonder where the former group ends up in 15-20 years.
No question communications and journalism majors are going to be at a competitive disadvantage in 15-20 years. But that in part if not in whole comes from a technological transformation of those fields.
Pitching business types 20 years ago meant pitching someone with a business degree. Pitching today means convincing a technical expert who also has business experience. Journalists 20 years ago got away with simple explanations of how cancer is bad. Today, the articles that are written require explaining why CD47+ renal carcinomas are worse than CD47- ones. More and more often, they have technical skills PLUS journalism skills.
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it's not like you have to send your kid to Berkeley; you could send them to an engineering focused school, where the political environment is subdued.
I think Berkeley has to have one of the greatest perception-reality gaps in terms of its liberalness.
1. Engineering is one of the largest departments at Berkeley. I believe Google hires more Berkeley grads than any other school (more than Stanford, more than MIT), on account of the school's overall size and high percentage of engineers.
2. You are correct in terms of technical majors being relatively moderate and relatively apathetic politically. You missed that Asians are also relatively moderate and relatively apathetic. Look at various votes in Berkeley or even California as a whole - Berkeley grad students voted to unionize by a really small margin, basically cut 99-1 for in the humanities and 75-25 against in the sciences. California BANNED gay marriage by statewide referendum in 2008. That is, despite the number of people who will vote Democrat in a head-to-head race, what you really have is a huge pool of non-white people who are moderately liberal to slightly conservative.
3. The school administration is, like any other bureaucracy, moderately conservative. Contrary to popular belief, both the university and the city of Berkeley allowed Milo Yannopoulis to give his speech/performance/whatever, even in the face of protests. The day of, the city - not the university - had to cancel because the protests were getting TOO violent. The only difference between this and any other town where a controversial speaker applies for and receives a permit is that in this case Milo wanted his speech to be canceled. When I was at Berkeley 20 years ago, there was a fairly large movement to kick all protests off the campus - while people are ranting about paid protestors in 2017, the student body at Berkeley was ranting about them in 1997. Why were all these protests - which have always included a violent fringe - be allowed to happen on campus when few if any students were involved?
This isn't to say Berkeley isn't liberal. It's still a pool of young people drawn primarily from one of the most liberal states. But on a scale of -10 to +10, -10 being someone liberal enough to get invited to be on Fox News, I'd put the median student as a -3 or so, and if you select for the politically active ones, probably -5. Any other university would probably be -2 and -3, respectively. The only reason it has such a liberal reputation is the amplification of the very vocal -10s.