Taxpayers shouldn’t subsidize useless majors.
By Shad White WSJ.com Sept. 18, 2023
How much should taxpayers spend on the salary of a sociology professor whose expertise is in urban stand-up comedy? What if you could spend that money on someone who teaches skills useful for the economy, like nursing or engineering? For my money, I’d prefer the latter.
Consider an example. Electrical-engineering majors earn more than $71,000 after graduation in Mississippi—and therefore pay a lot in taxes—whereas sociology majors earn a third of that. The state nevertheless sends our public universities the same amount to educate the engineer as it does the sociologist. This makes no sense.
Moreover, human capital is mobile. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to invest in someone only to then watch him leave. More than 60% of anthropology majors will exit my state after graduation. The money spent on them could be educating in-demand agricultural economics grads. Because of this flight, Mississippi’s taxpayers have been subsidizing the economies of big out-of-state cities for years.
We should change how taxpayers fund public universities to remove the incentive colleges have to invest in low-skill majors. It’s more expensive for Mississippi’s universities to attract a top-notch computer-science professor than it is to hire the stand-up comedy expert. But because public universities get the same appropriation for students in both computer science and sociology, the colleges have no incentive to push high-skill degrees. We should change this by encouraging the degrees that are really important.
Aren’t gender-studies majors important, too? If universities think so, let them raise private funds. A taxpaying plumber shouldn’t have to fund it.
What about the benefits of reading broadly? If you love German literature, great. Go to the library and start reading. Or major in math and take some classes in German literature. Or earn a degree in it, but don’t ask taxpayers to help foot the bill, because you will likely need to leave the state to get a job.
Won’t this proposal destroy the creative class? Again, no one is abolishing creative majors. You can still major in rhetoric. Remember, though, that may not be wise. You may never be able to repay your student debt. And my state has produced great artists, from William Faulkner to Jimmy Buffett, who didn’t major in the art form they produced. No English or music degree necessary.
Let’s be honest about the ideological element, too. Most taxpayers in my state don’t want their money paying for programs that seem to be little more than indoctrination factories. Some tenured faculty are dedicating their entire life’s work to convincing students there are 58 genders. Mississippians don’t want to subsidize that.
Some states are starting to realize this dynamic. Texas passed legislation this year to change community-college funding to fit the needs of the state economy. It’s time for every state to consider the same for its public universities.
Mr. White, a Republican, is Mississippi’s state auditor.