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Tuition Should Be Lower For Science Majors, Says Florida Task Force
Hugh Pickens writes "Jordan Weissmann writes that a task force commissioned by Florida Governor Rick Scott is putting the finishing touches on a proposal that would allow the state's public universities to charge lower tuition for studying topics thought to be in high demand among Florida employers including science, technology, engineering, and math. The hope is that by keeping certain degrees cheaper than others, Florida can encourage students into fields where it needs more talent. For some, it might seem inherently unfair to send dance majors deeper into debt just to keep tuition low for engineers, who are already poised to earn more once they graduate, but task force chair Dale Brill says tax dollars are scarce, and the public deserves the best possible return from its investment in education and that means spending more generously on the students who are most likely to help grow Florida's economy once they graduate. Brill also argues that too few young people consider their career prospects carefully when picking a major. 'We're trying to introduce some semblance of a market dynamic information in an environment where there is none,' Brill says. 'Most students couldn't tell you what they pay in tuition. In economics, pricing is all we have to determine and work out supply and demand. So, when the consumer is completely separated from the cost of a product, then the cost rises.'"
Remember when everyone was supposed to become an aerospace engineer and then the industry collapsed in the early 90s?
I know this is a huge shock, but if you made higher education more reasonably priced, maybe we would have more reasonably priced services in fields where you have to pay 10+ years of schooling.
Changing the cost of tuition is going to lead to some really nasty battles in the school and political systems. Easy solution: make the grants available for STEM students. My out of pocket tuition was zero because I had scholarships and grants and worked hard.
I have the hiccups.
There's a difference between a free ride and a less expensive ride. Most people don't have the luxury of having their parents helping to pay, and just saying " take a loan " is what caused prices to rise as much as they have : Schools know the gov't is giving out the loans, so they raise prices without fear. Pretty much handing money over to the schools. It's hard for prices to stabilize if the consumers are given infinite buying power.
By that logic you are going to find the most well-educated, hardest-working scientists in states that have been dominated by conservatives. I guess that would explain why Alabama is such a scientific powerhouse.
I don't support the next generation getting the free ride, particularly for students who are the most likely to have no trouble paying their loans back! This is silly popularism striking again.
The only solution I see that satisfies this belief, is a two-fold change:
1) Gov't backs loans up to different amounts based on the undergrad degree or area of study. Just pulling some numbers out of the air, say you major in liberal arts, max student loan is $40K. major in STEM, max student loan in $60K. major in something that feeds into business/law/medicine, max student loan is $80K. Grad degrees will work similarly.
People will moan and groan, but the bottom line is corporations already set the value of various degrees - it's called the average starting salaries they pay. If students on permanently on-hook for their loans (can't be shed in bankruptcy proceedings, etc.) then the natural response is to limit the loan amount based on the field of study.
2) Universities will also moan and groan, but fundamentally they aren't pricing their products fairly. Not throwing liberal arts under the bus, but every college I've heard of charges the same per credit hour, no matter what the class. Yes there are different fees for private vs public, in-state vs out-of-state, but a 3 credit history class costs the same as a 3 credit science class. Ergo, a natural change, reflecting the actual value on the degree (which is again as stated in #1, what corporations actually pay for holders of those degrees), is to charge different amount for courses. Pulling numbers out of the air again, liberal arts classes will cost $500 per credit hour, stem classes cost $800 per credit hour, whatever it works out to.
As for your attitude towards the next generation - honestly ask if your attitude scales up to serve the entire nation.
If you want Americans to study STEM, you need to provide jobs for them. Why get a degree in engineering just to train to your H1B replacement, or to have you job offshored.
As somebody who was once an H1B (or the way I like to think of myself: a human being making his living), I noticed how recently there is a lot of anti-immigration sentiment on Slashdot. Referring to somebody by their immigration status is just not nice. It seems H1B is the new buzzword here spoken with attitude described for "Okies" in The Grapes of Wrath.
College educated people who come to USA to work really don't deserve that kind of attitude. They go there either because they like America enough or because they can't make decent living elsewhere and both causes are respectable.
I respect that you may think immigrant engineers are lowering your hourly rate and robbing you of the job you were entitled to, but please keep in mind that it's a sign of proper upbringing to value all people equally regardless of where they were born.
You just had your elections and neither one of two major presidential candidates talked in support of labor rights and collective bargaining. If these issues are not important enough for Americans, then it would be nice to refrain from bashing "H1Bs" whenever they get a chance.
It's not about political correctness, it's about politeness and respect of other human beings who want the same thing as you do: to work and be respected for who they are, regardless of where they were born. I wish all slashdotters to never be in a situation where they have to choose between their work being valued appropriately (i.e. working in a foreign country) or not being referred to by their visa code.
P.S. I apologize for using your post for this rant.
And this is another way the middle-class gets fucked -- I've seen it happen again and again. Poor students get help because their parents make less than a magic number of income. Richer kids don't have to worry about money cuz parents rich. But the middle-class students who are college material but unable to secure scholarships are either stuck getting loans or becoming a significant burden on their parents(who aren't doing as well as you'd think, especially in this economy of layoffs).
And yeah, perhaps a student could work a full-time shit-job while putting themselves through school and graduate late and scraping by with rote memorization and a lackluster GPA instead of really learning, burned out, and missing out on what should have been one of the fondest personal and professional experience of their lives.
-- Ethanol-fueled
If you think being poor and getting help is better than being middle-class and having loans, then you have never been poor before.
You also seem to have very little idea about how the financial aid system works. The poorer you are, the more help you get. There's no "magic number" of income below which you get a bunch of grants and above which you get none.
Yes, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
I'm all for more interest in STEM, etc., but I don't want people going into it if they're not really interested, and I don't want businesses starting to fuck with higher education. It's also just bad economics, and favors large corporations who want a free check from taxpayers.
If businesses really want to increase demand for STEM classes, they would start paying them proportionally. Salaries would go up and people would start going into those fields to make money. I've seen it before, and it would happen again.
This is really all about corporations wanting to have more STEM graduates without paying them any more money. It's bullshit. Corporations essentially want the liberal arts students and universities to subsidize their profits.
If corporations want more STEM graduates, they should pay them the fuck more. Anything else is blatant fraud.
You'd be surprised how many Republican-leaning voters are not social conservatives at all ...I'd say 1/3rd of the total...
No, I'm just surprised at how little influence they seem to have over the party. Fiscal conservatism, that makes plenty of sense to me. Social conservatism makes absolutely no sense to me. But it's all the republicans seem to be serious about on at the national level, gay marriage and abortion. I thought after W that "Cut taxes, worry about cutting spending when it's someone else's problem" would have run it's full course. Yet even with the debt ceiling and other issues, the party wasted it in favor of attacking democrats, and the balanced budget amendment went nowhere with the GOP.
If you think being poor and getting help is better than being middle-class and having loans, then you have never been poor before.
No, but not having the incorrect ancestry and/or not having been born a male certainly doesn't hurt.
Apparently two wrongs do make a right.
Gay marriage is a non-issue. It's fluff to make gays feel like they aren't being oppressed and are just like everyone else. I think it's a waste of time, but I am not going to cry over it one way or another
Abortion, however, is about killing humans. You may or may not feel a woman's right to choose overrides the situation, but it's a very real issue. I don't understand anyone with half a brain not being able to at least understand that you don't have to "hate women" to think that you might want to think of a better way of providing for the health and safety of the mother that doesn't require killing viable humans. The reality that unintended pregnancy does disproportionately affect women does not mean that the human produced is any less genuine. In no other situation do we accept that someone else's death is acceptable as a solution for anything other than self-defense, including severe economic or mental distress.
In this day in age of reverse discrimination in high gear..t.hat is simply a fallacy.
Most every grant or opportunity offered by the govt (especially the Feds) is geared to minorities and women (if you are a minority woman, you are a goldmine).
Take a look at Federal Contracting. About the only way to land one, is to be a minority or female.
That's why so many bigger companies, in order to land Federal contracts, will "partner" with a minority woman, or even white women owned company, to apply for the contracts.
Usually the winning minority/female owned company, is merely a front for the deal, but these days, if you are a white male owned company, you stand virtually NO chance of landing a Federal contract.
And as far as just being male....have you seen the scary number of just how badly graduation rates for males in the US has become?
We've spent so much time and effort promoting women through the school systems, that we've gone overboard, and abandoned our young men....look at the college graduating stats.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Let me help you, some of us have no problem killing anything that is not and never was sentient. It's a very short and slippery slope from opposing abortion to opposing contraception.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'd have to agree. I'd rather see the 'state' fund interpretive basket weaving and make higher education open to as many people as can hack it. Yes, there will be waste - English PhD's waiting on tables and whatnot. That's OK, there is more to life than the paycheck.
If nearly universal post secondary education does absolutely nothing other than improve the general political discourse in this country, it will be absolutely worth it (and I think there are several other important advantages). You cannot help steer this society through the 21st Century with a 14th Century mindset.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And often against providing contraception that would prevent the unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
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