Editorial: Anthropology majors should not pay more than physics majors

Pennsylvania and Florida share more in common than warm January weekends.

Both have conservative governors who have sought to reform creaky systems of higher education. Both have created advisory commissions to study the problems their state’s universities and colleges will face in the future.

The final report from Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s efforts was issued this November. It was vanilla as far as government reports go: It merely suggested that state systems embrace technological change and adapt to a challenging environment of student debt and declining enrollments.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s commission, however, was not so placid in its recommendations. The report recommended that higher education institutions push any necessary tuition increases onto non-STEM disciplines. Only students majoring in things other than science, technology, engineering or math would need to pay more, thereby, insuring that economically necessary students don’t feel compelled to leave the state. The plan would incentivize “good” student behavior.

As you can imagine, this has not sat well with some.

Shortly after the report’s publication, several University of Florida professors began a petition on change.org, urging the governor not to act on these recommendations, calling them just another “trendy ‘market’ solution” to a critical problem.

The professors are not alone in voicing discontent. Others have called the proposed law off-point. More unabashedly market-oriented commentators are less harsh but still generally oppose this specific proposal.

Debating the economic grounds of such a law might be beyond our pay grade, but as actual consumers of higher education, we can debate the practical grounds of a law.

We don’t think it will work.

After all, students already take finances into consideration. With nine of Yahoo! Finance’s 10 top-paying majors belonging to STEM fields, it’s hard to attribute a lack of interested students to a lack of financial incentive. Most students are well-aware of the higher earnings: It is not only at graduation that art history majors realize they face a more challenging labor market than electrical engineers.

It’s just simplistic to think a differentiated tuition structure will accomplish what much larger wage differences haven’t been able to. Research shows decisions to enter STEM fields are much more complicated than calculations of potential wages.

In a working paper, Xueli Wang, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to find that exposure and success to math at an early age is far more predictive of STEM enrollment than financial motivations. This makes sense: Waving money in front of a high school senior’s face does little if that student doesn’t feel that he or she has the skill set to succeed.

There are numerous other problems with the plan: It decreases flexibility to change majors (something 50 percent of us do) and further stigmatizes the humanities and social sciences.

We hope this idea stays in Florida. We’ll keep the warm temperatures but not the education policies.