Pricing Out the Humanities
November
26, 2012 - 3:00am
By
History professors at the
University of Florida think their courses are plenty valuable, but they don't
want them to be among the most expensive. And they are organizing to
protest a gubernatorial task force's recommendation to charge more for majors
without an immediate job payoff -- a recommendation that the historians fear
could discourage enrollments.
History professors
have organized a petition
against one of the more controversial recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Task
Force on State Higher Education Reform: differential tuition that could be
punitive to the humanities. They've garnered more than 1,300 names in a week,
including those from places far beyond the Sunshine State.
"We, the undersigned
faculty, have dedicated our careers to the common good of the State of
Florida," the petition reads. "We believe that the institutional
goals of our universities are not in conflict with state goals. We also know a
great deal about the vital connection between higher education and a
responsible and productive citizenry; in fact, this connection is at the very
center of our profession. We trust that Governor Scott will recognize the
pressing need for meaningful faculty input into future deliberations concerning
the future of higher education in the State of Florida."
Quoting the task force's
language on differential tuition, petition co-creator Norman Goda said, “The
theory is that students in ‘non-strategic majors,’ by paying higher tuition,
will help subsidize students in the ‘strategic’ majors, thus creating a greater
demand for the targeted programs and more graduates from these programs, as
well.”
Established in May by
Governor Rick Scott, a Republican who has said he wants to run Florida’s
education system more like a business, the task force includes legislators,
businesspeople and educators appointed by various parties. It finalized its recommendations earlier
this month. The governor is now reviewing the report, which divides reform into
three different but interlinked areas: accountability, funding and governance.
Recommendations for
accountability include a call for more metrics to determine university success
and performance, while those for governance include allowing the state
university system’s Board of Governors more control over funding (currently the
state legislature holds much of that control). Funding recommendations call for
non-uniform tuition among the state’s 12 universities and a further look into
differential tuition among degree programs.
Although several models
for differential tuition exist in higher education, the model endorsed by the
task force would aim to hold in-state tuition rates for “high-skill, high-wage,
high-demand (market determined strategic demand) degree programs” steady for at
least three years, making them potentially more attractive to students than
other majors. Although the task force report doesn’t officially recommend
strategic majors, it names several possible categories previously identified by
the Florida university system’s Board of Governors, including 111 in science,
technology, engineering and math (STEM); 28 programs in globalization; and 21
in the health professions. (Such degree programs currently account for 37
percent of degrees granted within the system, with a 21 percent increase during
the past four years). Core humanities disciplines did not make the list.
Task force chairman Dale
Brill, Florida Chamber Foundation president and Scott’s appointee to the group,
said the recommendations were based on “logic,” rather than research into which
degree programs have proven to be the most beneficial to individual students
and state economies. Defining “strategic” and “non-strategic” programs
ultimately will be the work of the state legislature, he said.
“The task force tried to
identify innovative approaches to spreading limited resources to drive maximum
benefit to the system,” Brill said. “Up until now, in that system, that money
is invested evenly across the board with very little attention paid toward
getting maximum return on that investment” for the 104 million taxpayers
contributing to it.
Brill said he wondered
why humanities professors felt targeted by a plan to improve the university
funding system, which would improve the university system overall.
“If you improve the
system without worrying about the professors in the system, in the end the
system has more resources to invest,” he said.
But Lillian Guerra, one
of Goda’s history colleagues at the University of Florida and a petition
co-creator, said the task force plan lays the foundation for second-class
degrees. Departments receive funding based on how many students enroll in
courses, she said, so decreased humanities enrollment would lead to less
funding for the department.
Damage to the department
would damage the university overall, she added. “In the short term, I think we
run the risk of demolishing our prestige as an institution, when so much of the
institution’s prestige has been anchored in liberal arts.”
Goda said that in the
long run, differential tuition could mean a less “richly educated” workforce.
Students in strategic majors also could suffer from lack of a well-rounded
education – something he said makes them “truly adaptable and employable over
the course of their lives.”
Robert Townsend, deputy
director of the American Historical Association, said the professional
association was making its members aware of the Florida professors’ petition.
“I think there’s general
agreement that it would not be helpful or positive for the history discipline,”
he said of differential tuition, adding that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker
recently announced
he’s making similar forays into reforming state higher education.
In his Nov. 16
announcement, Walker said funding for technical technical colleges
and the University of Wisconsin System must be linked to
performance. "In higher education, that means not only degrees, but are
young people getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just
the jobs that the universities want to give us, or degrees that people want to
give us?"
Townsend said despite the
recent trend toward more seemingly job-oriented degrees, which isn’t
uncommon during slow economic periods, a history degree holds enduring value.
“There’s plenty of
evidence that history as a major sets people up for a lot of different
careers,” he said, including business. “You’re trained to think critically and
use evidence and write about it. There are [bosses] who prefer that to those
who are trained to do that narrowly, to think only about numbers, rather than
about numbers in wider aspects and making use of them.”
According to a Georgetown
University study based on 2010 Census data, recent history majors (ages
22-26) have a 10.2 percent unemployment rate, while more experienced history
graduates without an advanced degree fare better at 5.8 percent
unemployment. Overall, 9.4 percent of recent humanities and liberal arts
graduates and 6.1 percent of their more experienced counterparts are
unemployed. By comparison, 7.7 percent of recent life and physical science
graduates are unemployed, as are 4.7 percent of older grads; in computers
and mathematics, the rates were 8.2 percent and 5.6 percent,
respectively.
While the study does show
a link between STEM and other strategic degrees and lower unemployment, it
cautions that "occupations that are closely aligned with occupations can
misfire." Because of the decline in construction, for example, recent
architecture graduates have the highest rate of unemployment, 13.9
percent. By contrast, education, business, health care and the professional services
have been relatively stable employers of recent graduates with related majors.
Science advocates also
have opposed the Blue Ribbon proposal. Shirley Malcom, head of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science’s Directorate for Education and
Human Resources Programs, called differential tuition “a difficult call.” But
ultimately, she said, it pits different areas of an institution against each
other, “where we as STEM people need the rest of the knowledge that is resident
in the rest of the institution.”
Malcom argued for other
ways to promote STEM, such as direct scholarships.
Student groups also have
opposed the recommendation. José R. Soto, co-president of University of Florida
Graduate Assistants United, helped organize a recent joint-press conference on
the recommendations, along with the Gainesville Area Students for a Democratic
Society, and is helping plan a rally before the university’s Board of Trustees
meeting next week.
The doctoral candidate,
who recently defended his dissertation in applied economics, said differential
tuition could create a kind of brain drain away from Florida higher education,
in which the state’s “best and brightest” qualifying for scholarships out of
state leave to ensure a top-notch education. Additionally, Soto said, trying to
forecast the job market to determine which degrees will be most lucrative in
the future is misguided. “Any economist will tell you one of the hardest things
you can do is predict the market; if you take it farther than a [certain period
of time] in unknown territory.”
It’s unclear exactly when
the recommendations could be considered by the Florida legislature, or which,
if any, Scott will endorse. A spokeswoman said Scott “has made it clear he
thinks Florida’s colleges and universities need to be affordable for the
families of our state.” But the governor -- in-much discussed remarks last year about anthropology -- has seemed
skeptical of the value of a number of liberal arts disciplines.
William Proctor, a task
force and departing state House member who serves as chancellor of Flagler
College in St. Augustine, said, “It may be premature to try to size that up. It
won’t even get into committee hearings until [next year].” He also noted that
while there was interest in differential tuition among his former colleagues,
changes to higher education funding remain controversial in Florida. In April,
Scott vetoed a bill that would have allowed the school’s top research
institutions – Florida State University and the University of Florida – to
raise tuition.
Proctor also noted that
the task force’s final report only recommends holding strategic degree tuition
steady for a period of at least three years, while other differential tuition
models could be adapted later. Even within the task force, he said, there was
discussion as to whether to charge more for STEM and other strategic degrees
because they can be more expensive for the university. (Schools throughout the
country already have adopted that model, especially for degrees in engineering
and business).
Still, Guerra, who
specializes in Latin American history, said the proposals are disturbing seen
through the lens of history. “The Cuban state in the [1960s and 1970s]
began to promote technical fields and the hard sciences because those are the
fields believed to generate wealth for the collective aspiration, as opposed to
an individual meditation on ideas.”
