Why don't wealthy students protest tuition hikes?

ucbalumnus
Sat, 19 Nov 2011 02:18:19 +0000

nick_scheu:

Interesting points. I’ve seen some discussion of charging more for science and engineering type majors since the cost of instruction is higher, but I’m not sure I agree. As I see it, too many students are liberal arts/humanities/social science majors as it is (I’m one of them).

If the point of a public university system is to give more people college educations, and if the point of that is to promote economic growth, it stands to reason that the system should promote the majors that are most in demand. Right now, that’s engineering, the hard sciences and the like.



However, the most popular major at Berkeley is Molecular and Cell Biology, which consistently has poor job and career prospects at the bachelor’s degree level in the career surveys (lower average pay than many social studies majors), even though it is likely a high cost major to teach (due to labs). And then Integrative Biology is also very large. Simply because the biology majors are sciences does not mean that the state is getting as good a return on its investment in teaching those majors as it is for some other majors in the social studies.

One could argue that, from the state’s purely economic point of view, cheaper to teach majors like Applied Mathematics and Economics with better current job and career prospects should, at the current time, be encouraged over the biology majors. Of course, using that criteria (as opposed to strictly cost of instruction criteria) to set fee levels by course or major choice could be dicey since the demands of the labor market can change over time.

Also, as it is now, certain majors (like most engineering majors) are capacity-limited, so there is no reason from the state’s purely economic point of view to increase the incentive for students to major in them.