Reagan hasn't been president for close to 40 years and died more than 20 years ago. At what point do we accept responsibility for this instead of blaming dead presidents?
You might be surprised just how durable the effects of 40-year-old decisions are. You can actually see changes to the very degree completion-rates, when partitioned by field of study. Particularly, education and physics fields (as classified by NCES), have absolutely cratered from the mid 70s to the mid 80s, while business fields became dominant. And if you need data, I actually published an entire (and entirely too long) essay, analyzing the NCES data from 1970 to 2011 (a sequel post for 2011 to present is planned), yesterday[0][1]. Healthcare tends to boom and bust[2] in cycles, and those cycles are _inversely_ correlated with engineering, informatics (the most elegant term for what we call "computer and information sciences"), and business.
[2]: In both the economic sense, and in the completion-rate sense, because those two things are correlated. And they have been correlated since the 1980s, because a lot of the healthcare industry became de-regulated and more profitable as a result, since at least 1978 (when hospitals were de-forbidden from making profits).
[0]: https://galacticbeyond.com/two-percent-programmer/
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260620162923/https://galacticb...
[2]: In both the economic sense, and in the completion-rate sense, because those two things are correlated. And they have been correlated since the 1980s, because a lot of the healthcare industry became de-regulated and more profitable as a result, since at least 1978 (when hospitals were de-forbidden from making profits).