To UFF Senators
More STEM Majors Won’t Solve Higher Education’s Problems
November 1, 2012, 1:44 pm
Charge art-history majors more for
their degrees than biology students? Yes, according to the new draft proposal of Gov. Rick Scott’s Florida Blue
Ribbon Task Force on State Higher Education Reform. The panel proposes to keep
tuition flat for degrees in “strategic areas of emphasis,” which include
science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields; health professions;
“high demand” education fields; and (oddly) globalization; while raising it in
all other areas.
This has a certain logic to it: Why waste taxpayer dollars subsidizing
students who study “useless” subjects in college, like philosophy or history?
Why not encourage them to go into practical fields, like science and engineering?
But this proposal is misguided on multiple levels.
First, the folks pushing STEM
degrees clearly haven’t talked to a lot of biology majors.Or chemists. Sure, everyone knows the petroleum
engineers are raking it in. But even after Ph.D.’s, many STEM folks are stuck
in postdoc hell, and midcareer, the median salary of a biology major is more
than $13,000 a year less than her counterpart in political science. Heck,
she even comes in almost $4,000 behind the much-maligned film major. Besides,
if this is about encouraging students to go into—and I quote—“high-skill,
high-demand, high-wage degrees (market determined),” why give the subsidy to
STEM? Why not give it to finance majors ($23,500 above the poor biologists) or
economists (almost $34,000 above)?
Second, there’s no reason to think
this would help Florida economically. If the state wants to align higher
education with the needs of business, it should take a look atsurveys of employers, who indicate, year after
year, that what they most want from college grads is “the ability to
effectively communicate” and “critical thinking and analytical reasoning
skills”—classic hallmarks of a liberal arts education. And studies like Academically Adrift show that it’s the
humanities and social sciences, as well as the natural sciences, that lead to
measurable improvements in critical thinking.
The task force also attempts to
make the state higher-education system align more closely with metrics of
success identified by Complete College America, whose platform has been embraced by the National Governors Association. As
the name suggests, these are heavily tilted toward increasing retention and
graduation.
Of course, if you reward an outcome, you do get more of it. And if
governments decide they’re rewarding completion, what they’re going to get is
completion—colleges shoving students on through, whether they’ve learned
anything or not. Having more college graduates with degrees that mean less is
hardly going to help Florida or any other state.
If Florida wants to do something
that will have returns in the long run, it should be taking a much different
approach. It needs to be making college more rigorous, not demanding that more
students graduate no matter what. As time-use studies have shown, full-time college
students average only 27 hours a week on classes and studying, a 50-percent
drop from 40 years before. And grade inflation means that 43 percent of those
students will receive A’s, which means they have less incentive to work hard in their classes.
Florida should also ignore the old canard that what we desperately need is
more scientists. Sure, a STEM program can provide an outstanding education, and
it’s hard not to admire STEM’s reputation for rigor. But students also learn
communication and critical thinking through a good old-fashioned liberal-arts
education of the sort that has become a bugbear for politicians.
To make rigor possible, Florida
needs to provide plenty of remedial support, via community colleges, for
students who aren’t ready to handle a challenging curriculum after high school.
States like Connecticut are simply declaring that students should enter college ready for
college-level work, and ending remedial classes at community
colleges. But wishing doesn’t make it so, and declaring that students should
complete their associate’s degrees in two years whether or not they arrive at
college literate or numerate is the real waste of taxpayer dollars.
Finally, Florida and other states
need to support a professoriate with the autonomy and security to keep
standards high. As any casual reader of the Chronicle forums
knows, all too often administrators pressure faculty to pass students or excuse
them from cheating in the name of retention. At least tenured and tenure-track
faculty have the job security to resist such inappropriate demands. But in a
higher-education system where two-thirds of faculty are not tenure track and
earn a median of $2,700 a class, and where faculty are rewarded based on student evaluations that are significantly correlated with grades, how
many are in a position to push back?
But this is not the direction that
Florida is going. Governor Scott has argued for greater reliance on student evaluations while cutting $300-million from Florida’s universities
this year alone, and has announced that he’s looking to Texas as a model for
the future. In an environment like this, giving a discount to STEM majors isn’t
going to make one thin dime of difference.
Elizabeth Popp Berman is assistant professor of sociology at the State
University of New York at Albany.
Ed Mitchell
Executive Director
United Faculty of Florida
FEA, NEA, AFT, AFL-CIO
850-224-8220 Fax: 850-222-1767
(813) 240-9301 - Cell
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