FL: More Meat Widgets Now

Blogging at Bridge To Tomorrow, a blog focused on "a strong K-20 pipeline for physical scientists and engineers," Paul Cottle noticed something about the latest output from a semi-obscure feature of the oversight group for Florida's university system. The Board of Governor's regularly adopts a list of Programs of Strategic Emphasis, and Cottle noticed that something has changed.

Prior to this week, the Programs of Strategic Emphasis list included a broad range of degree programs in STEM fields and other fields of particular interest to the state, including teaching degrees and certain business degrees like accounting. The idea was to encourage universities to educate students in fields where they could easily find jobs after graduation, regardless of where those jobs were.

That is no longer true.

Now the list is driven by the imperative to supply “critical talent to support Florida’s economy”. The list was driven primarily by workforce demand data from within the State of Florida. Giving students opportunities to compete in national and international job markets is no longer valued.

Being able to find gainful employment has always been important for young humans, but there is a difference between putting student needs first and prioritizing the demand of business for more meat widgets. While those two needs will always be related, they also include a basic conflict. When a business wants to hire ten twiddle masters, it's in the business's interest for State U to turn out 100 people with twiddle mastery degrees, but that means that 90 of those grads are going to be stuck. 

The PSE list, according to the state's power point, provides students with a "positive return on investment" for the degree and supplies Florida with "critical talent to support Florida's economy." This is higher education as advanced vocational training. And if that's the aim of college, then we can expect the same attitude toward K-12.  And while that slide at least pays lip service to students, another slide lists the key stakeholders whose "input" was incorporated-- "Staff from the Governor’s office, legislature, universities, key agencies, & the private sector." 

Cottle provides one stark example of whose priorities are being emphasized here:

One example makes the impact of this shift abundantly clear. According to the New York Fed, as of February 2023 the college major with the highest early- and mid-career median wages nationally was chemical engineering. But Florida doesn’t have large chemical companies like Texas, Louisiana and other states do, so chemical engineering is not in the new Programs of Strategic Emphasis list. So since chemical engineering is not important to Florida’s businesses, it should not be important to Florida’s universities.

Florida apparently intends to address its meat widget shortage by reducing students' ability to look for work elsewhere. But that fits, as Florida is among the states looking for ways to roll back child labor laws, because businesses need meat widgets to get to work as soon as possible, so let's not worry about their wants, needs, safety, etc. 

I wish this weren't a harbinger of things to come, but it sure looks like one. Narrowing education to simple job preparation. Undoing child labor laws. Insisting that people ought to be getting married and making more babies. Bitching about how people don't want to work these days. Even stout resistance to a universal health care system that would decouple health care from employment. All fit with news of and panic about a labor shortage, which may be inevitable just because Boomers are getting old. But business needs meat widgets, preferably easily replaced and therefor cheap ones. And as with most terrible things, Florida is out there in front.