The future of higher education is not so sunny in Florida. The Blue Ribbon Task Force, organized by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, came to policymakers recently with an audacious recommendation: to charge differential tuition for majors at state universities. Although the notion of differential tuition is promising in other contexts, such as at the University’s Commerce School and Engineering School, the plan proposed in Florida would charge the highest rate for humanities. This logic goes against the standard deployment of differential tuition and would threaten the academics at public institutions in Florida.
Differential tuition is a measure to ensure that students enrolled in a certain school or program pay a higher price than their peers. Such is the case at the Commerce School, where students pay $3,000 more in tuition annually. Similarly, in the Engineering School, students pay an additional $32 per credit. There are a number of reasons why differential tuition most often occurs in the fields of business and science. First, the classes in these departments may require technological or laboratory equipment, thus the students pay fees to cover the cost of their usage. Also, the professors in these fields often have skill-sets that are appealing outside of academia, and increased tuition allows universities to pay these faculty more to keep their competitive salaries. And finally, the estimation that students in these majors will eventually receive more earnings is used as justification by universities that are looking to squeeze their students a little tighter for revenue not provided by states.
In presenting its plan, the Florida task force subscribed to a different reasoning. The seven-person task force of political appointees divided all majors into those they found “strategic” and those “non-strategic.” The strategic majors are those that provide “high-skill, high-wage, high-demand (market determined strategic demand) degree programs,” and include no majors in the humanities but many in science and math. The task force then determined that it would be financially optimal for the state to charge a higher tuition rate for the non-strategic majors to decrease demand for those majors. This would entice more students to major in strategic fields. Most crucially, the tuition differential of the non-strategic majors would be directed to strategic programs.
This rationale, then, goes against the traditional line of assumptions about differential tuition. Instead of charging more for those programs that require more resources, the Florida task force suggests charging more for less expensive humanities majors and using the revenue to subsidize strategic programs. This, critics fear, would ignore the already overlooked and cash-strapped liberal arts all the while discouraging students from studying in the humanities. And why would they — under this program, students would be greatly incentivized to choose a cheaper and more “strategic” major.
The task force’s ideas, however, belie the actual value of liberal arts fields. Not only are there the standard arguments for the non-economic value of a humanities major, but employment statistics also reveal that the “non-strategic” majors are not drastically underperforming in the job market. Moreover, there is the notion of popularity — and though lawmakers may see a humanities degree as worthless, those students drawn to those fields in spite of the caveats should not have to pay any extra. Plus, if the humanities majors suddenly become more expensive, there could be fewer people trained in the ethical mindset necessary to administer law — a skill Florida legislators apparently need.
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