Bill to save bucks, not injure higher education

Louisiana yanking taxpayer dollars from select universities for select programs isn’t as deleterious to the concept of higher education at it might seem at first glance.

Republican state Rep. John Wyble has prefiled HB 229. The bill would prohibit allocations of state dollars in any form from going to low-earning outcome programs of study at state schools, as well as those from any local government, beginning in the summer of 2027.

A “low-earning outcome program of study” is defined by guidance from the federal government made at the beginning of this year. With the data it had in hand, it calculated the average earnings (over four years from several years ago) of a school’s graduates in various certificate programs, undergraduate majors, or graduate degrees, and declared those whose average fell below the average high school graduate’s salary for certifications and associate and bachelor degree awardees, or below the average college-degreed or certified salary for graduate degrees, would fit this category. In Louisiana, the former mark is around $32,200 and the latter about $51,000 in that time period.

The federal government is promulgating rules that will disallow federal lending to students in those programs starting in a couple of years, arguing that these return too little in value to sink taxpayer dollars into them. The bill, which makes an exception for general studies majors where the concentration isn’t on the list, simulates the same idea.

A knee-jerk reaction would be that the measure emasculates the humanities and liberal arts, given the universal recognition that jobs often obtained by theses graduates, without any specific science, math, or specialized skills, tend to be on the lowest end of the college/university graduate. The more conspiratorial-minded would add that because faculty members and their students in these areas tend to be the wildest-eyed leftists ideologically that this is a way to defund partially the political left’s overwhelming influence in academia.

But a review and actual understanding of what is going on here necessarily dispels such suspicions. In a review of such programs nationally, only about five percent get gigged, in part because the dollar levels of the cutoff are so relatively low (computed on a state-by-state basis). Further, these failures concentrate in a very few areas with a high degree of proprietary schools, about half in fact, involved.

Finally, many programs are immunized from receiving the moniker because they don’t graduate many and, precisely because these majors (such as those with identarian focuses) impart so few useful skills and/or do little to encourage critical thinking skills that end up pushing their degree recipients to menial and/or intermittent and informal employment, their graduates are difficult to track from whom to draw earnings information, as well as the reporting of these (for privacy concerns) is suppressed. So, when all is said and done, almost no majors at public senior-level institutions nationally were identified as fitting this bill, and the same for graduate or professional degrees

This is reflected in the case of Louisiana. I tried going through every state school’s offerings and discovered with the latest data available no bachelor or graduate degree programs that didn’t make the cut. In fact, few certificate, vocational, or associates degree programs didn’t, either. And what few didn’t almost all fell into very predictable categories given the national data: cosmetology; business operations support and assistant services; culinary arts; and health aides/attendants/orderlies (after decades of personal experience with this category, I could have guessed easily this one).

So, were this bill to pass it’s not going to can swaths of masters/doctorate awardees teaching in art, history, philosophy, etc. because of their programs going away and leaving a gaping hole in university offerings, nor is this an exercise in running off the public payroll leftists who in their research and classrooms badmouth America, conservatives, and Christian white males. In Louisiana at least, they’ll still be around although some vocational instructors might find themselves out of a job. (Note: the numbers released only are preliminary, so this could change.)

Thus, this bill merits passage not only because it will save taxpayer dollars, but also because it will steer students away from potential waste of their educational dollars as they either choose to forgo higher education in an employment area of interest or they choose a more potentially productive field of study.