EDUCATION: Texas Governor Rick Perry’s plan to overhaul the state’s public higher education system will do nothing more than turn education into a business and source of profit for the state.
By Isabel De La Garza, Senior Writer
During a presidential debate last year, Rick Perry remarked that he wished to shut down the Federal Education Department and thus open up management of education solely to the states. His quest for the states to have jurisdiction over education has not diminished. As governor of Texas he aims to make many drastic changes to the public higher education system.
First, Perry would like to implement a $10,000 cap on the cost of a BA. Why? Perhaps he would argue that this would make college more affordable and accessible to the common man. However, his plan to make universities money-driven seems to counteract this justification. He basically seeks to cut all programs that do not make any money. To do this, he intends to cut down on academic research, base professor salaries off of student evaluations and change students into customers, essentially making universities money-makers for the state.
With this policy, many students would have to take more vocational training and online classes in order to diminish the collective cost of classes and still be able to complete their degrees. Additionally, most of the liberal arts classes and professors are the least profitable, according to Texas A&M University. This would remove many of the general education classes that do not directly apply to any specific professional degree, and exchange the more theoretical professors for active practitioners in a specific field. This is not necessarily a bad thing for the economy, as it would create more productive individuals who seek to apply their knowledge rather than gain knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It would also, however, cause more competition in the professional sector as there would be far fewer individuals with arts degrees.
The most nonsensical part of Rick Perry’s plan is that he really doesn’t need to intervene at all. More and more students are looking to college as a means to create future financial gain, not as a place to learn and shape themselves as individuals. They turn from recreational majors they enjoy to profitable majors in order to garner more wealth and to satisfy their unforeseen desires. They do not want to think about ethics, logic or philosophy, and they will in turn reshape education accordingly. Eventually, this will change society to a collection of savants with particular prowess in one field and a lack of depth and knowledge about any other fields: a society with a diversity of fields, with an utter lack of cooperation and understanding between them; a society not worth the sum of its parts.