An English major should not pay more for a college degree than a computer science major.
Yet this will soon be the case at many Florida universities. Gov. Rick Scott’s task force on higher education reform recommended that tuition be frozen in strategic areas — engineering, the sciences, certain health fields — and allowed to rise in other majors. This recommendation translated into the Career and Professional Education Act that Scott signed it into law in April. Thus, the $10,000 bachelor’s degree was born.
It’s hard to argue with the idea of reining in college costs to reasonable levels. What discussions of the $10,000 degree leave out, however, is that these reduced-cost degree programs are available only for certain state-identified majors, while tuition for other majors rises to subsidize the cheaper degrees.
Because of unintended consequences that would arise from this plan, Georgia’s Board of Regents should not follow Florida’s lead. Few dispute that state universities need to be creative in this tight budgetary climate, or that they should ensure that students graduate with the skills employers want. But pegging students’ tuition to their intended major is not the answer.
For one, this is impractical. Eighty percent of college-bound students have not yet decided on a major, and fully half of those who do declare a major change their minds — sometimes more than once — before graduating.
Second, it is foolish. Encouraging students to follow career paths that they are unfit for or uninterested in will not give the results Georgia wants. Students who drop out because they are failing, discouraged or bored do no good to the state’s economy, employers or universities. A smart and motivated student engaged in a field of study about which she is passionate is far more likely to succeed than a student who chooses a major based primarily on tuition costs.
Third, the tiered-tuition plan wrongly devalues majors that are associated with less direct career paths. History majors rarely become practicing historians, but they do acquire essential skills and abilities that benefit future employers. These include facility in writing, researching and thinking outside the box.
Steve Jobs made Apple into a leading technology company, but he chose to attend (briefly) a liberal arts college and focused primarily on creative arts courses. The lesson is that stressing technology courses is an important — but not the only — means of increasing participation in emerging fields.
Georgia’s universities want to serve employers and business owners in the state, create a workforce with the skills employers need, and make tuition affordable to motivated students. The better way to accomplish these goals is to get businesses involved by forming industry-university partnerships that would provide competitive scholarships for students funded by business owners.
Competitive scholarships and internships will ensure that students graduate with the skills they need to find jobs, and that employers will get what they want in a workforce. This plan also stresses a career path over a college major. For example, a pharmaceutical company might sponsor several scholarships. Chemistry majors clearly would be attracted to this career option. But an English major who could compellingly describe why he would be an asset might be equally valuable to that company.
This plan would give students the freedom to pursue their interests. It would also encourage students from majors such as philosophy or history to think carefully about how they could position themselves in a future workforce, and to imagine how their academic skills transfer to a workplace environment.
As the Georgia Regents look for creative solutions to funding woes, partnerships with leading Georgia corporations are one attractive option. Why create another layer of university bureaucracy when corporations can help to fund an initiative that will help them find qualified workers?
Ensuring that graduates have jobs and that state-based corporations have qualified employees is laudable, but a tiered-tuition scheme is not the best way to achieve that goal.
LeeAnne M. Richardson is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University.
