State senator puts dimmer on funds for Bright Futures

Florida ain’t got no need for English majors. Waste of money.

Philosophy majors? What could be less cost effective than some brainy intellectual trying to make sense of the world? At least that’s the philosophy behind a bill approved Tuesday by the Senate Education Committee.

Pointy-headed students pursuing squishysoft degrees in art, literature, photography, communications, fashion design, theater, theology, feminism, Black studies and journalism (of course) would see their Bright Futures scholarships reduced by half. Instead of funding the 120 credit hours required for graduation, Bright Futures would pay only for 60 hours toward such unworthy pursuits. Full rides would be limited to coursework that “leads directly to employment.”

“As taxpayers we should all be concerned about subsidizing degrees that just lead to debt, instead of the jobs our students want and need,” sponsor Sen. Dennis Baxley (yeah, him again) stated in a news release. “We encourage all students to pursue their passions, but when it comes to taxpayer subsidized education, there needs to be a link to our economy, and that is the goal of this legislation.”

SB 86 requires the state Board of Education and the university system’s Board of Governors to compile a list of majors deemed acceptable for full scholarships along with those that aren’t based on corresponding job openings, salaries and whether those occupations complement Florida’s economy.

Lest you dismiss the bill as just another soon-to-be-forgotten publicity stunt contrived by some wing-nut legislator, consider that Senate President Wilton Simpson himself has blessed the proposal. (A corresponding bill has not yet been introduced in the House, but — no worries — that body has a sizable wing-nut caucus.)

If the kids want the money, they’ll need to abandon the humanities and switch over to something like engineering — petroleum, nuclear, aeronautical, electrical, computer or marine engineering would do. According to PayScale.com, 11 of the top 25 highest earning bachelor degrees come with “engineer” attached. (Most of the other high-earning degrees sound just as geeky — not an art history major in the bunch.)

Women scholars will be the biggest losers. According to the Society of Women Engineers, just 21 percent of the engineering grads in 2018 were women. Out in the working world, just 13 percent of engineers are women, in part because 30 percent of women engineers leave the famously sexist profession within 20 years. Wonder if the Board of Education/Board of Governors will consider that women engineers earn 10 percent less than their male counterparts?

Obviously, Bright Futures recipients counting on full-ride scholarships would need to re-think their academic interests. And invest in pocket protectors.

Colleges, for middle-class and poor students in need of financial assistance, would be re-engineered, so to speak, into vocational training mills, churning out workers who fit the needs of Florida’s corporate interests. Arts and the humanities majors would become the purview of students with parents wealthy enough to pay full tuition.

SB-86 would also reduce scholarship money according to the number of college credits high school students earned in Advanced Placement classes. AP students, who put in all that extra work while their friends were frolicking their way through high school, might wonder why they bothered.

The Baxley bill also undoes the promise that Bright Futures will pay either 100 percent of the credit hours earned by the highest achievers coming out of high school or 75 percent of those students who qualify for Bright Futures’ second tier. Instead, funding for the scholarship program, which distributed $618 million last fiscal year, would depend on the vagaries of the state legislature.

The Florida Lottery funds Bright Futures. When voters, by a 63 percent majority, approved the “Florida Education Lotteries” constitutional amendment back in 1986, they assumed that the net proceeds would be deposited in the State Education Lotteries Trust Fund. Not noticing the fine print, we assumed we could trust Tallahassee to invest education trust fund money into education. Naïve us. That big pot of money is just too tempting.

The Baxley bill would also cause collateral damage, beyond devaluing the humanities. Notoriously underpaid college grads work in Florida’s public sector. No way, under a formula that takes salaries into consideration, that would-be schoolteachers, social workers and other college-educated public sector workers would qualify for 120-credit hours of financial help from Bright Futures.

Not unless we re-brand teachers. We’ll call them instructional engineers.