Our Observation

Education is meant to increase students’ knowledge and develop a more educated workforce. It’s not a profit center. But don’t tell that to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. He wants the state’s higher education system to have a better balance sheet. He wants it to run like a business.

Drawing from controversial policies implemented in Texas by Gov. Rick Perry to cut down on expenses and increase revenue in state colleges, Scott has called for numerous changes to higher education that could have drastic effects on the current model of how the system works.

One of Texas’ most contentious changes, and one that has already caused waves of bad publicity, is a pilot initiative at Texas A&M University that published a list ranking faculty members based on whether they cost the school more money than they made.

That list literally distilled the college professors’ value to a line item. The teachers who made the school more money were ranked higher. Those who cost the school money were ranked lower.

That type of scrutiny into increased profitability already has a model: for-profit universities. That industry has received plenty of publicity in the last few years — most of it bad — for maximizing profit while offering students quick, cheap degrees to fast track them to high-paying jobs. The only problem with that model: It’s not working. It’s working so poorly that many states, including Florida, have begun cracking down on “degree mill” colleges and universities that at times literally offer degrees in exchange for money and leave students jobless at the end, stuck with tens of thousands of dollars in loan debt.

And even the more reputable for-profit colleges and universities have become cash cows by sucking money from the government that could otherwise go to public universities.

The University of Phoenix, which has become the largest for-profit school in the country, pulls in 88 percent of its revenue from government funding and grants. Kaplan University gets 91.5 percent from the government, leveraging students as a means to a financial end. Students need federal loans, grants and scholarships to afford high educational costs. That money comes from the government and goes straight into the universities’ coffers.

And in the end, the students are left holding the bag.

The U.S. Department of Education released statistics in February that showed for-profit students tend to default on their loans at a far higher rate than public university students. In the U.S., only 11 percent of college students attend for-profit schools, yet 44 percent of all college loan defaults are from those students.

And the for-profit university model’s weaknesses don’t end there. Just as Wall Street CEO pay has garnered headlines for growing by leaps and bounds during a recession largely caused by the finance and mortgage industries, for-profit college CEO pay is on average 26 times that of public university presidents, according to the Department of Education.

Other changes to Texas’ higher education system seem innocuous on the surface but hide the potential for devastating effects nationwide. Perry has lobbied to have education and research funding split up on the budget, seemingly to increase transparency in how money is spent at universities. But in practice, the effects could be disastrous to educational research.

University research tends to be a consumer of funds, not a revenue generator. But it can also generate breakthroughs in technology and disease research that improve the quality of life for all Americans. Leaps forward in cancer research have come thanks to research funding which, if scrutinized merely as a red line item, could be the first to go when governors make the pitch to cut educational budgets beyond their already skeletonian levels.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the end result of those policies: an education system that thinks more about a short-term balance sheet and less about how our future depends upon it.