The deeper issue than the mere popularity of college majors is that their popularity already includes a certain level of weeding-out. Graduating classes in engineering and computer-science are not small because people are too foolish to go into engineering but but because, by and large, people lack the talent and capability for engineering.
And even worse! If we somehow made every college student into a competent software engineer, it would only glut the market for software engineers.
The notion that an economy will naturally come to an equilibrium of full employment at livable wages, and that poverty is thus a failure to adhere to the will of the market, has simply proven itself empirically false. It's a falsified hypothesis, and we have to throw it out and deal with the consequences of its falsity in a sane way.
There simply may not be good jobs for everyone, and any anti-poverty policies we want to make need to start from that as their basis.
The deeper issue than the mere popularity of college majors is that their popularity already includes a certain level of weeding-out. Graduating classes in engineering and computer-science are not small because people are too foolish to go into engineering but but because, by and large, people lack the talent and capability for engineering.
And even worse! If we somehow made every college student into a competent software engineer, it would only glut the market for software engineers.
The notion that an economy will naturally come to an equilibrium of full employment at livable wages, and that poverty is thus a failure to adhere to the will of the market, has simply proven itself empirically false. It's a falsified hypothesis, and we have to throw it out and deal with the consequences of its falsity in a sane way.
There simply may not be good jobs for everyone, and any anti-poverty policies we want to make need to start from that as their basis.