Perhaps if the federal government got out of the UNCONSTITUTIONAL education / entitlement business, students would have the incentive to do better in these subjects?
But even at the elite private college I went to, students tended to gravitate toward fuzzy studies rather than math and science.
There's nothing wrong with that -- individuals made their judgments about what was best for themselves, and a lot of them weren't really chasing the biggest dollars (and if they were most of them headed to Wall Street).