Actually, someone who supports decreasing the loans available for non-remunerative degrees may believe that wealth of parents is a good metric to decide who gets to be an unemployed professor manque.

And actually, since wealth of parents is already a major factor in whether a person makes irresponsible decisions that end in unemployment, that's kind of OK.

No one has a right to be a professor. That doesn't exist. The market for them has evaporated. But we have enormous institutions concealing how bad the market so they can keep cranking out graduates. They're largely doing that with government funds. US citizens should oppose that. I know I do.

If colleges lowered costs for useless degrees, they would at least be doing graduates the favor of burdening them with less debt.

> Also, let's keep in mind that when you dump every liberal arts major into engineering and computer science, engineering and computer science graduates stop being hard to find and become worthless.

When you dump every liberal arts major into engineering and computer science, most of them wash out.

> most of them wash out.

Having taught a fair share of liberal arts majors in intro CS courses, I am absolutely certain that there is essentially no difference in skill between people who choose to major in CS and people who choose to major in the liberal arts.

At least the ones who self-select into taking intro CS courses.

No. Most liberal arts majors either doubled in a "harder" field, or minored in Education/Business/etc. as a back-up option. The Edu and Business major and minor required a CS course. So most of the liberal arts students ended up either minoring in a STEM field or else taking CS1.

If anything I would assume the opposite of a selection effect.

I, personally, double majored in philosophy and computer science. I think the upper level CS classes would have washed out most of the philosophers, but I agree that the intro classes were fairly accessible.

Liberal arts majors (especially art majors) probably work harder than CS majors in many cases. I still think they would wash out of a STEM major. Not for lack of intelligence, but just because they're not wired that way. They'd be miserable in higher level classes.

Lots of CS majors also aren't "wired that way" (lots of gamers who've never been good at math or science but are "good with computers", kids who hear the jobs pay well or are enamored with prospect of striking gold, etc.). I've tutored a lot of juniors who have trouble in an algorithms course because for loops are still difficult for them.

I don't think these people are more well-represented at the beginning of Liberal Arts programs than at the beginning of CS programs.

This may be less true about some of the less "hot" STEM fields.

Any college offering an engineering degree that wants to maintain their ABET certification also has to graduate a certain number of their students; pumping unqualified or uninterested students into these programs leads to watering down of curriculum - further making the degree worthless.

It's an interesting choice though. Wealth of parents is not a fair metric. But on the other hand, letting the demand-side have its pick of the lot and leaving the chaff to rot is wasteful and cruel.

I got to thinking about this a while back when learning about Patton. You could say he was born to be a general- a wealthy, military family, extensive military education. Most of the rest of the world, from the moment he was born, never had a chance to be what he was. But you can't give that lifetime of military education and training to everybody, and isn't that OK? You might like to be fair and give everyone the same chance, and maybe there's a guy out there who would have been even better with the same opportunity, but can we afford to do that?

It's a similar story with racing drivers and many athletes.

Edit: It occurs to me one can point to the failure of communism to determine how many potatoes should be grown, as a reason why we should not try to predict the number of professors that will be needed. I'm not sure where to go from here. Perhaps the next question is, have we gotten in the way of the invisible hand, the traditional savior from this kind of problem? If so, what next?

>If you are offering elimination of credit availability as a solution...you believe wealth of parents is a good metric...

Perhaps a better solution would be merit-based grants. If you graduate in the top 10% of your high school class, Uncle Sam will foot the bill for the equivalent of in-state tuition/room/board. As long as you keep your GPA above some threshold, we keep paying for 4 years.

This seems unworkable.

Why 10% and not, say, 90%? Or 100%? (100% and maintain a GPA seems the most workable.)

What about someone in the 50% range who decides after 10 years in the workforce to go to college? With no second chances, this is the tyranny of the Permanent Record.

What about someone who gets a GED to graduate early, to start college early; or someone who had to drop out to support the family and then get a GED finish high school and go on to college? What of home schoolers?

I can also envision school swapping. If I'm at the border of 10% in a very good school, then in my last semester (after the submissions for college have gone out) of school I could switch schools to an academically poorer high school and have a much better chance of getting the grade. It's worth $40,000 in tuition money, so some people will do it.

Or in my case, I took a lot of classes in high school, including some that were dual-enrolled with the local community college. While AP calculus had an extra boost in the GPA calculation, my differential equations class did not. What luck it would be if by taking more advanced, unweighted classes I happen to be below the 10% mark, filled by those who maximized GPA instead of education.

Or we could just give back a bunch of state-level funding to state universities on the condition that they use it to reduce in-state tuition, fees, and room/board costs, then let the academics admit people according to academic merit.

And then, just for kicks, we could fix our public school system so as to remedy the disgusting inequalities that show up at the college-admissions level before they have a chance to happen.

I believe Texas had a system like this for admissions. The top X% (I forget what number X was) of students in the senior class of each high school were accepted. This created some strange side effects where students were effectively punished for going to a high school with better students.