TU: Legislature should keep hands off four-year college degrees
Times-Union Editorial
What would you call a proposed law change that would limit the ability of Florida state colleges to thrive and decrease educational opportunities for working class students?
Well, if you had any sense of shame, you certainly wouldn’t bill it as “The College Competitiveness Act of 2017.”
Yet that’s exactly how some Florida lawmakers are branding proposals to cap the number of students enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs in state colleges like Florida State College at Jacksonville.
It’s contemptuous stuff by the lawmakers behind this effort.
And it’s troubling reality their cynicism appears to be succeeding.
The effort to hamstring the state colleges — backed by Senate President Joe Negron, among others — is continuing to make steady progress through the Florida Legislature.
It’s troubling because you could write a pretty thick college textbook detailing all of the things just plain wrong about the so-called college competitiveness act.
But here are just three of the more obvious flaws:
• It smacks of sheer elitism.
It would largely prevent community colleges from broadening the degree programs they can offer students and narrow their focus to providing lower-level, workforce-oriented curriculum — a move that lawmakers defend through a bizarre theory that the current arrangement dilutes the prestige and distinctive aura of Florida’s four-year universities.
“Elitism should not play a role in determining academic opportunities for students in Florida,” said FSCJ President Cynthia Bioteau during a recent meeting with the Times-Union editorial board.
She’s right.
•It will severely reduce the options for working class students looking to pursue bachelor’s degrees at an affordable cost.
The beauty of state colleges like FSCJ is that they have been providing students — a huge number of whom are in their late 20s to early 30s and juggle academics with work and family responsibilities — with a wide range of bachelor’s degree programs at relatively affordable cost.
Without that resource, many working class students will be forced to take courses at for-profit schools and possibly incur high debt in the process.
• It’s just not needed.
The fact is that Florida state colleges already operate under tight but reasonable restraints that exist to prevent them from creating bachelor degree programs in random, reckless fashion.
Before a state college can create a bachelor’s degree program, it has to get approval from a partnering nearby four-year university — and that means first gathering and providing exhaustive data to justify the request.
In FSCJ’s case, it must receive permission from the University of North Florida before it seeks to add any bachelor’s degree program.
And the relationship between the two schools on that issue has been a collegial and productive one.
Right now, FSCJ offers 13 bachelor’s degree programs.
Is that a meaningful number?
Sure.
But it’s a mere fraction compared to the more than 40 two-year associate degrees that FSCJ also offers.
And there’s been no unnecessary duplication or overlap in the degree programs that FSCJ offers and those provided by UNF.
In short, the present system — one that puts an emphasis on state colleges and universities working together, not against each other — is working well enough.
And neither state colleges nor universities will truly benefit from having this heavy-handed legislation forced on them by clueless legislators in Tallahassee.
The lawmakers should step back and step away from this bad idea that, if made law, would be even worse public policy.
Legislators too often tinker in areas they know nothing about.
Education policy is a prime example of conceit in Tallahassee.
It doesn’t help Florida’s students.
It doesn’t help Florida’s state colleges.
It doesn’t help Florida’s universities.
“The College Competitiveness Act of 2017” sounds more like the punchline to a joke than an accurate title for this proposed law.