University Proposes Tuition Based On Major 532
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has proposed "differential tuition," a tuition structure that varies based on your major. An engineering major for example, would now pay considerably more than an English major. Liberal Arts majors would presumably get their education for free. From the article: "Charging different tuition rates for different courses of study is a growing trend among public research universities across the country. According to research by Glen Nelson, senior vice president of finance and administration for the Arizona Board of Regents, only five institutions used the practice for undergraduate students before 1988. As of this year, 57 percent of 162 public research institutions did so, including the University of Iowa and Iowa State University."
samzenpus win (Score:2, Interesting)
Liberal Arts majors would presumably get their education for free.
I understand this was satire, but the unfortunate reality is that I can see an army of English and Art majors lobbying this battle for the win. Its getting closer to moving out of American time, for the tide of idiocracy is becoming to strong.
Re:Why not free? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sending somebody to college doesn't instantly make them smarter or more logical. As somebody who went to a state university I can assure you that many, many people come in smarter than they leave.
Why shouldn't they? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Such a great idea (Score:5, Interesting)
The "much more expensive" engineering students work their butts off in labs developing school-owned IP that the school can then license. The engineering grad students spend their weekends searching and applying for sweet grants, half of which goes straight into the school coffers. The engineering students will then go on to someday develop your next car, airplane, refrigerator, television, while you in 20 years will simply join your students on the quad for the sole purpose of perpetuating a useless major.
You cost less on the short term, but both to the school and to society, you net out to a loss; The engineers cost more on the short term, but actually make the school money, and improve our world (DOD contractors notwithstanding) with their careers.
Don't get me wrong, I very much value a solid liberal arts background for everyone, especially engineers; But if you don't take those underpinnings and apply them to a real set of useful skills... Why bother?
Re:Discouraging Science and Technical studies (Score:4, Interesting)
The solution is to artificially make top-level education available at the cost to provide that education, not at what the student is willing to pay. You'll end up having to subsidize it though so you can attract top-level professors away from schools making a lot more money per student. So this becomes a public university. Yes, that's right, a conservative slashdotter advocating public universities. In this case, you're using one market distortion (government funding for a public university) to try to cancel out another market distortion (a school essentially having a monopoly on students wishing to attend it).
You are dead on with this. I teach technical classes (Large GIS Database creation, usage and manipulation) on an adjunct basis. I have watched promising STEM students drop out or postpone their education due to a factor of higher costs and harder classes. They receive the same financial packages as a social science or liberal arts student, but have to pay more and have less time to work part time to support themselves. The original purpose of public universities was education for the public good, as a conservative as well, I see little public good in graduating 50 history majors for every electrical engineer. Yes the engineer will make more out of college, but they will also contribute more to the economy a through their work. The 50 history majors consume public resources for a degree that has little chance of landing them a job. Last time I had lunch with one of my history professors (which was my minor in college as I enjoy it), in an average year there is one history related position for every 2500 graduates - so I question the purpose of a public university wasting resources in such degrees. Should they offer degree minors and classes in areas like history? Yes. Should they spend money on an entire program, probably not. Take where I teach, a university of 16000 students, they have 11 full time history faculty and use 5 adjunct faculty to graduate 50 majors and 7 masters a year. If they were to scale back to a history minor and have enough faculty to cover general education and interdependent majors, they would need 4 full time faculty and a couple of adjunct. The savings could hire 4 STEM faculty (they cost more - 35k for a starting history PhD v. 70k - 80k for a STEM PhD) and would better serve the purpose of a public institution. I have no problem letting the small liberal arts colleges pick up the students that really want to study history as they graduate more than enough to cover what the market needs. This would require a shift in thinking about how public universities are run, but it needs to be looked at. It is my personal belief that societally, making STEM degrees cheaper to obtain is good for all parties involved and represents a solid investment by society.
Re:Such a great idea (Score:4, Interesting)
The engineering students will then go on to someday develop your next car, airplane, refrigerator, television, while you in 20 years will simply join your students on the quad for the sole purpose of perpetuating a useless major.
The observer bias regarding areas of education here on Slashdot is really something to behold. In general I've seen 'liberal arts' described as the study of comparative literature, shake spear, latin etc. Generally liberal arts are 'soft', do not lead to jobs, never invent anything or bring in university research. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter horseshit.
We shall for a moment accept the Slashdot definition of liberal arts as not including things like math and science (more accurately in academia it just means 'not vocational'), so if we just look at a 'school of arts' we have fields such as the study of all languages and linguistics (my areas), politics and international studies, criminology, design, economics, psychology, environmental and developmental studies, journalism, sociology just off the top of my head.
The amount of people studying the sorts of things which incense slashdotters so much, the Latin majors etc, is actually pretty low. Vitally, arts-type degree holders often go into jobs in the workforce which are not directly related to their degree. The idea that this made their degree useless is, well, quite depressing really. The fact is, these graduates didn't get a job in spite of their liberal arts degree, they very often get jobs because of it.
Yet there's also a very great deal of direct interest in a number of the arts fields. You may not believe it but every academic conference I go to, companies queue up to entice us to internships and employment. At a recent conference in my area, I was struck by the number of tech companies (I specifically recall Google and eBay) that had open ended invites for internships for anyone involved in the discipline, lamenting the fact there weren't more students in the field.
My field within 'arts' is extremely rich in research, practical applications, and yes, vocational opportunities. Yes, things you use on your web sites, on your phone, in your car. I was specifically drawn to it because it was apparent just how much further we had to go and how I might make a real difference. Believe it or not, modern technology doesn't just have 'science' bits under the hood, they have things that human beings control and that's where we come in.
It may bend your head to discover that a good number of people within 'liberal arts' also consider themselves scientists and very often work on issues imminently more practical than majors in mathematics. Yet despite that, you will generally not find people within the arts that are derisive about the studying the hard sciences.
Perhaps if more of you had a wider human-focused education then you would see that science does not live in a vacuum and university education does not have to be exclusively focused on the skills you need for your first job.
(The ex electronics engineer that went back to university to study 'liberal arts')