Why not? The whole point is that yes, the kids are struggling to choose a major, and a large number of the time they make a bad decision. If their ability to receive funding was dependent on what they chose to study, then the idea is that more students will choose more productive and beneficial majors.
And the problem you pose is easily solvable. They have to re-apply for loans every school year. Maybe pretty much everyone gets funding freshman year before they declare, but when they re-apply for sophomore year their major is taken into account. If you switch majors mid-year, then when you re-apply the following year, you get evaluated. Or if you received funding for a given year, you are not allowed to switch your major during that year.
EDIT: It's really not all that different than home loans being determined by income, credit history, etc. If you are going to ask for a $500k home loan, you better have the income to pay it back. If you are going to ask for a $100k student loan, you better have the projected/expected future income to pay it back.
For any meaningful discussion on this subject to take place, we have to first specify what we mean by "great coders". The skillset required to win programming competitions is very different than what it takes to build maintainable & scalable production systems.
If you've been investing in index funds for the past 20 years, your 401k is certainly worth more than what you put in. Hell, even if you invested two lump sums right before the dot-com bust and the 07/08 recession, you're still net positive. The markets are currently at all-time highs.
> The McKinsey study focuses on U.S. and Western European stock and bond markets and doesn’t take investments in emerging markets into account, largely because of a lack of reliable long-term data.
Wouldn't that imply that their predicted returns are much lower than they'll most likely be? Assuming that majority of growth over the next X years will come from emerging markets, if they're leaving emerging markets out of the calculation then their estimates are going to be low.
And the problem you pose is easily solvable. They have to re-apply for loans every school year. Maybe pretty much everyone gets funding freshman year before they declare, but when they re-apply for sophomore year their major is taken into account. If you switch majors mid-year, then when you re-apply the following year, you get evaluated. Or if you received funding for a given year, you are not allowed to switch your major during that year.
EDIT: It's really not all that different than home loans being determined by income, credit history, etc. If you are going to ask for a $500k home loan, you better have the income to pay it back. If you are going to ask for a $100k student loan, you better have the projected/expected future income to pay it back.