Clojure is hardly bougie or a circle jerk considering it's focus on pragmatism. The first programming language taught in both my highschool and college was PLT-Scheme (now Racket), which is arguably more bougie than clojure considering its' academic focus as a PL research language.

Zero people dropped out in HS. In college I'm pretty sure you're going to have people dropping out of the intro course for programming no matter what language you choose when it's taught in 60-100 student lectures with professors and TAs that have been steeped in CS so long they no longer remember what being a beginner is like.