If you ask a hundred Florida parents what the purpose of the state’s public universities should be, ninety-five of them will tell you that the universities are there to provide their students with world-class educational opportunities.
So it’s discouraging that this week the Florida Board of Governors shifted the State University System away from a focus on broadening high quality opportunities for students and toward an emphasis on feeding employees to Florida businesses.
The Board of Governors adopted a new list of “Programs of Strategic Emphasis”, which is used to allocate the performance-based funding pool to the SUS institutions. The statistic used in the calculation to distribute money from the pool to each university is the number of degrees granted in fields on the list as a percentage of the total number of degrees granted by the university. So the list has teeth.
Prior to this week, the Programs of Strategic Emphasis list included a broad range of degree programs in STEM fields and other fields of particular interest to the state, including teaching degrees and certain business degrees like accounting. The idea was to encourage universities to educate students in fields where they could easily find jobs after graduation, regardless of where those jobs were.
That is no longer true.
Now the list is driven by the imperative to supply “critical talent to support Florida’s economy”. The list was driven primarily by workforce demand data from within the State of Florida. Giving students opportunities to compete in national and international job markets is no longer valued.
The power point slide shown below is from the presentation to the Board of Governors Strategic Planning Committee this week. The list of key stakeholders doesn’t include students or their families, and the focus is on “Florida’s most critical workforce shortages”. The word “students” doesn’t appear until the last line.
One example makes the impact of this shift abundantly clear. According to the New York Fed, as of February 2023 the college major with the highest early- and mid-career median wages nationally was chemical engineering. But Florida doesn’t have large chemical companies like Texas, Louisiana and other states do, so chemical engineering is not in the new Programs of Strategic Emphasis list. So since chemical engineering is not important to Florida’s businesses, it should not be important to Florida’s universities.
The bachelor’s degree program in physics has fallen off the Programs of Strategic Emphasis list, despite the remarkable versatility graduates of this program have in our technological economy. However, the doctoral program in physics is still on the list.
The change in the Programs of Strategic Emphasis list will not change the direction of the State University System immediately. Instead, it will be like turning the helm on a cruise ship – it will take time for a change of direction to become obvious to the state’s students and parents. Nevertheless, that change is underway, and it will curtail the educational opportunities offered to Florida’s students in the near future. That is a tragedy.
Bridge to Tomorrow 