1/3 isn't that bad in the late 80s/early 90s at the UT Austin CS department. Only ~30% graduated at the time. The orientation was literally "look to your left and looked to your right only one of you will graduate." They weren't joking!
I live in Austin.
In the 1980s, there was a building boom that collapsed.
Austin had 23%(!) apartment vacancy in 1990 after a collapse that started in 1985.
It wasn't until about 1993 that prices returned to 1985 nominal values.
At the time it wasn't code changes that caused this but excessive lending by Savings and Loan banks. You can research the S&L crisis that required a federal bail out. This cause massive bankruptcy and the creation of an entity all the Resolution Trust Corporation to sell all this near worthless property for pennies on the dollar. This affected all of Texas and also Louisiana and Arizona.
For Austin this was great as a whole as rents were ridiculously cheap for 10-15 years and it was an economic and cultural catalyst, drawing in hordes of young people from around the country.
The Proton CEO is not "backing Trump and Vance." He wrote something positive about a narrow policy Trump supported that's favorable to little tech over big tech. That's it. It's certainly possible that someone you detest can still occasionally support a particular policy you think is good.
Related: when UT Austin computer science dropped Haskell for Java for it's first course in 2001.
Dijkstra on Haskell and Java
https://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java/
"A fundamental reason for the preference is that functional programs are much more readily appreciated as mathematical objects than imperative ones, so that you can teach what rigorous reasoning about programs amounts to."