A Wayward Plan in Wisconsin

Benjamin Rifkin:

Having been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 15 years, I follow the news from the state closely, and was very disappointed to read about Governor Scott Walker's plan to make significant changes to state funding for education. Governor Walker said a few things about K-12 education and education in the technical college system, but he also said this about how the state should judge the performance of its public universities:

In higher education, that means not only degrees, but are young people getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just the jobs that the universities want to give us, or degrees that people want to give us?

This approach is wrong for four fundamentally important reasons:

First, economically, the "Walker Plan for Higher Education" seems to be premised on increasing the efficiency of the pipeline from higher education to the economy. But the assumption made by Governor Walker that the state can predict which programs of study would be most beneficial for the state's economy is false, as demonstrated by some spectacular counterexamples.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 3, 2012 2:56 AM
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