Florida Republican lawmakers, including the Governor, are setting their sights on extending the corporate-driven mode of education that now dominates K-12 education, to higher education.  Indeed, with their strong business backgrounds they want to exert their expertise by having universities offer a $10,000 Bachelor’s degree and decide which degrees are of most worth.   I checked the University of Florida (UF) website and clicked through to the page that estimates the cost of attending UF.  Estimates for attending the university for 2012 – 2013 are $20,580.  Florida lawmakers would have to figure out how to cut the cost by 50% at the University of Florida for their plan to work.

But wait.  The major universities (there are 12) can not cut 50% from their costs to offer a $10,000 degree!  So the Florida College System, made up of 28 colleges, will be asked to offer $10,000 degrees.  I went to several Florida State college websites, and found that for a four-year Bachelor’s degree, the costs presently are about $2,000 per semester, or $16,000 to graduate.  Now keep in mind, this is just for tuition and books.  No consideration here for housing, food, clothing, insurance, and other fees, such as for medical, science or technology labs.  I suppose that the tuition could be reduced, but at what costs?  The loss of faculty positions, or the increase in the size of classes would be obvious effects.  Perhaps these universities would outsource their courses to educational firms that offer online courses.

What degree programs are of most worth?   The esteemed legislators want to “steer” students toward degree programs that are based on the demands of the “free” job market.  On the list includes degrees in science, engineering, mathematics, health care, and of course technology.  Not on the list includes degree programs such as Anthropology, American history, French, Gender and Woman’s Studies, Native American Studies, Theater and Performing Arts, Psychology, Linguistics and Greek, and African-American Studies.  Presumably those degree programs that are of most worth are those that the legislators think will promote more jobs and make for a strong economy.  Who can argue with that?

Many can and should.

Certainly universities should be subject to the financial realities created by the Great Recession.  State education budgets, K – university level, have been slashed billions of dollars over the past five years, and unless the economy continues to show growth, there could be additional cuts.  But the reasoning behind the effort to create 10K courses,  and give special treatment for job-related degrees  is directly related to the domination of corporate and business-like thinking in which education should be treated like a business, and be subjected to same practices, values, and arrangements that we see at Costco, Walmart, Target, and Sears.

Henry Giroux informs us of the dangers in this “ideological hegemony.”  In his book On Critical Pedagogy, Giroux speaks about the politics of authoritarianism and how the rise of this force has inflicted harm to education in a democratic society.

Lawmakers Determining Curriculum?

How can we trust lawmakers to decide what students at university should study when poll after poll shows just how ineffective and self-serving politicians have become?   As Giroux reminds us:

education is fundamental to democracy and that no democratic society can survive without a formative culture shaped by pedagogical practices capable of creating the conditions for producing citizens who are critical, self-reflective, knowledgeable, and willing to make moral judgments and act in a socially responsible way.

To Giroux, teaching and curriculum have been reduced to being nothing more than a skill, technique or disinterested method.  He writes that

Within this dominant educational paradigm, young people were at one time and are now once again shamelessly reduced to “cheerful robots” through modes of pedagogy that embrace an instrumental rationality in which matters of justice, values, ethics, and power are erased from any notion of teaching and learning.

This is an  outrageous proposal.  Politicians would be in the business of predicting the future by claiming that students should be tracked into different majors that will lead to jobs that will serve the economy.  It’s hard to argue against the idea that a college education would lead to a job.

But what job?  Who is to decide which jobs are more important?  Do we really know what majors will lead to specific jobs?  And by the way, why couldn’t a major in English land a job in a technology firm?  Or how about a student who majored in languages including Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic working in a science-related field?

The last group to lead us into the future are partisan politicos whose main goal after being elected is to control and exert power, and get reelected.

The Wall Street Journal reports that for the first time, the percentage of jobs in science or engineering fields has declined for the first time since 1950.  More specifically they wrote that just 4.9 percent of all American jobs were in science or engineering fields in 2010, according to new Census data, down from 5.3 percent in 2000.

Over on one of the Discover Magazine blogs, the author of The Crux cautions us to be wary of claims that there is a shortage of scientists and engineers.  He suggests that the problems that we face in society that science and technology related, are not solved by producing more scientists and engineers.  Many firms are moving their R&D efforts to other countries because scientists and engineers there work for less.

Politicians are very good at ignoring data and information that does not support their opinions.  For example in Florida, the political class claims that there has been a decrease in students going into Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) related undergraduate degrees, and as a result there will be an impending disaster in the job market.

But research at Rutgers that looked at three generations of students that went through the STEM Pipeline (graduate high school, enter a STEM major in undergraduate school, get a job in a STEM Field, and keep the STEM job ten years out), shows that the pipeline has been steady and flowing.  Their study looked a the STEM pipeline and found that there is no evidence of a long-term decline in the proportion of American students with relevant training and qualifications to pursue STEM jobs.

Enabling politicians to chisel the curriculum of higher education and to rank degree majors based on consumer culture and the dictates of the free market is an assault of public higher education.  Higher education, according to writers such as Henry Giroux, should be affirmed on the basis that in order for freedom to flourish in a democratic society, students have to be educated for “the task of self-government.  Giroux integrates the works of John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and C. Wright Mills in his conception of higher education and reminds us that education is essential for “individual agency and public citizenship.”  But as Giroux and others explain, there is an assault on public education, K – university (see William H. Watkins’ new book).  Giroux writes:

Within this impoverished sense of politics and public life, the university is gradually being transformed into a training ground for the corporate workforce. As universities become increasingly strapped for money, corporations provide the needed resources for research and funds for endowed chairs, exerting a powerful influence on both the hiring of faculty and how research is conducted and for what purposes. In addition, universities now offer up buildings and stadiums as billboards for brand-name corporations in order to procure additional sources of revenue while also adopting the values, management styles, cost-cutting procedures, and the language of excellence that has been the hallmark of corporate culture.

Education, K – 12 and university level, is about dreams, hope and fulfillment, not about the “narcissistic, privatized, and self-indulgent needs of consumer culture, and the dictates of the free market,” (Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy).

Florida professors and administrators need to defend higher education as a “democratic public sphere.”

What are the implications of the corporatization of high education?  Whose interests are being supported by the Florida legislators’ desire to peddle the market model into higher education classrooms?