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Notes -
This is a tautology, but the reason they come out with a liberal bias is because these people are in fact worthy of the individual rights liberalism suggests exist inherent to every man simply because they naturally do this.
Not all who claim to be liberals are actually liberal, though- hell, that's why progressives call themselves "liberal" in the first place! The problem for true liberals post-1980 or so is that, because socioeconomic opportunity started to dry up around that time (as compared to the '50s-'70s), society started selling those rights with the belief they'd be rewarded with other things that, while they feel good to have, are less aligned with the truth. Short-term moral gains at the expense of long-term advancement: affirmative action, gynosupremacism/feminism, [inorganic at the time] gay marriage, further destruction of negative rights (parental rights, self-defense rights, "freeze peach", free association), etc.
So progressives dressed their corruption in the skinsuit of what liberalism was and carried on with the slogans. And this worked, for a time; the transition kept otherwise low-information liberals believing that they had inherited the movement, and so did the details of being for things like feminism and non-straight sexualities.
Around 2013 there was a Great Awokening... but it wasn't the progressives that woke up, it was the liberals realizing they needed to take back their own label. They found natural allies in the enemies of the progressives (which is why the average liberal is seen as "right-wing"- classical liberalism is a conservative view now) because they know, and knew, that liberals oppress them less than progressives will.
I think that for any student in a liberal arts degree (including those who are only capable of that, and assuming this education is an accurate assessor of intelligence- the people for who that is not true tend not to emerge as progressives) progressivism is a natural adaptation because these people are in massive oversupply, and their policies are a natural reflection of this fact. That's why they need the absurd amounts of illegal immigration- after all, the easiest way to correct a problem of "too many chiefs, not enough indians" is simply to import a shit-ton of indians (literally, in many cases). As we might expect, academia was simply ahead of the curve here, because they were championing this stuff 20-30 years before this would become apparent to the average citizen.
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