Should Florida decide that certain college majors aren’t worthy of the full four years of Bright Futures support? Here is one consistent way it could be done – but it might make some of the idea’s advocates in the Legislature unhappy.

The Florida Senate is presently considering a proposal to reduce Bright Futures scholarship awards from four years to two for students in majors that the Board of Governors decides do not “lead directly to employment”. One hopes that if this bill is approved by the Legislature and signed by Governor DeSantis (which now seems unlikely) that there would be a consistent framework applied to deciding which majors do not “lead directly to employment”.

I humbly suggest that the type of employment matters. If a major leads directly to a job that ordinarily does not require a bachelor’s degree, then that is not a good thing. So perhaps the statistic that the Board of Governors (BOG) should consider to decide whether a major should not be granted the full four years of Bright Futures support should be the underemployment rate – that is, the percentage of graduates who are “working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree”, according to the New York Fed.

If the BOG indeed used this statistic, then the chart below – a ranking of college majors by underemployment rate (once again from the New York Fed) – would determine which majors would not be allowed four years of Bright Futures support. Among the majors with the largest underemployment rates, there are some that you’d expect, and some you might not. In fact, some of the most underemployed majors might make the leaders of the Florida Legislature profoundly uncomfortable.