There's been a lot of news recently, but nothing really interesting. The insurance issue is where it was last week, since State Farm apparently needs a month to produce documents. Budget cuts are pretty quiet in terms of what what will actually be cut. I'll probably have more to say on that as we head into the committee weeks prior to the special session. So, I've debated whether to write this post on Hometown Democracy or Bright Futures. Bright Futures won, in part because of the recent push by Democrats on education (in regards to the FCAT).
Bright Futures got a good write up in the Orlando Sentinel (a paper I otherwise despise except for the insightful commentary by Mike Thomas). Thomas's argument is right on the money - standards are too low, and it holds down tuition at universities. He gets close to saying, but doesn't quite utter those controversial words, what Sandy D'Alemberte (former USF president) has said: Bright Futures is an entitlement program for the wealthy. That quote is from a piece in the Sarasota Herald Tribune that's a bit more inflamitory than Thomas's article.
Let me restate that to make it a bit more clear: Bright Futures is welfare for the adult children of rich and middle class Floridians. It literally is welfare - even if they have no other scholarships or loans, and have to pay tuition and other school cost out of pocket, Bright Futures is twice yearly welfare check for young adults disbursed by universities. It's means tested, too - they had to have gotten a 3.0 GPA and 970 SAT. Many students (I was one of them) got Bright Futures in addition to other scholarships and/or loans, which effectively means that Bright Futures prevents middle class students from having to work to have spending money while in college. In other words, just as conservatives have always criticized welfare programs, Bright Futures was an incentive for me and tens of thousands of other reciepients to not work. So again, just so its clear, Bright Futures is a means-tested welfare program.
That it's targetted to middle and upper class families is also obvious. While 3.0 and 970 aren't demanding, they're difficult enough that lower class families, who have more on their mind than their child's academic achievement (like paying rent, being able to afford enough food, the higher crime rates in their communities, dealing with second or third jobs, etc.) may find those standards out of reach. That's particularly true of the GPA requirement, which a student can fail to achieve because of just one bad year (which, again, can be caused by things other than the student's academic capabilities). The children of middle and upper class families- which is to say, socioeconomically blessed students - do better in school environments and are much more likely to meet those standards even if they aren't, from a different point of view, more deserving of a merit based award. So clearly, Bright Futures is not intended for getting impovershed or working class students into college.
Fine. It's okay to have an extremely regressive entitlement program, so long as there is a good purpose for it, and it is achieving that purpose. Proponents of Bright Futures, like Ken Pruitt, argue that Bright Futures is necessary to keep college students in Florida, where they'll provide a highly educated workforce and keep Florida's economy strong. Okay, that makes sense - a broad program to provide higher education and keep those educated to stay in Florida sounds like good public policy. It's also SOCIALIZED higher education, but okay, whatever. But does the program achive that goal? and is that goal worth the cost?
Whether Bright Futures keeps college educated students in Florida is a question for statisticians, but on the other hand, it's worked for me so far, and I'm willing to say its probably successful in that goal overall. Now, as to the cost. The obvious price tag is the $350 million it takes out of the budget. That's a lot. It's more than the state spends from its lottery fund on public schools. But still, if you're comfortable with socialized higher ed, maybe thats okay. The real price is what it's done to funding for higher education. That $350 million is, obviously, going straight to universities as tuition. It's money that students would have paid anyway, however, so it's potentially $350 million that universities (or any other education or public program) would have got anyway. This goes back to the argument of whether a regressive entitlement program is a good way to spend public money.
The other price paid is that increasing tuition - which universities need to do every now and then to be able to remain competitive with other universities in other states - means increasing Bright Futures expenditures. Since the legislature controls tuition (or at least, has controlled tuition - hopefully the BoG will get control of that in the future) and has to deal with balancing Bright Futures in the budget, it simply hasn't increased tuition for years. Which means that Florida's universities are underfunded - higher student-faculty ratios, larger classes, less research initiatives, etc. The important thing to remember here is that tuition needs to be adequate but fair - too high and it's regressive, so there should be resistance to raising tuition frequently, but too low and the universities wither. Bright Futures is putting downward pressure on tuition, and long term, that has been the greatest cost of the program.
As a regressive entitlement program, Bright Futures isn't worth it. It needs reform. That doesn't seem very likely, however, because it's wildly popular. Turns out that upper and middle class voters love welfare programs - like Social Security, Medicare, mortgage deductions, and Bright Futures. Anyway, Bright Futures needs to be reformed, and soon. I'd share my ideas, but really, I'm not sure what would make sense here - how to fulfill the original goal of the program (I mean, other than just making Florida Universities more attractive than out of state ones... which only requires generous funding and superior management). Thomas suggests splitting the money into two pools, one based on merit and one on merit/need. It doesn't change the fact that A) any entitlement program based entirely on merit is (as I just discussed) regressive and B) restricting the entitlement means reducing political support for the program. Bright Futures would not be so popular if it was restricted to, say, GPAs of 3.6 and SATs of 1250 or higher, and so it'd be much more difficult fund it as much as Bright Futures is now. And of course, any means-tested entitlement program that spends money on poor people is going to be controversial and unpopular - even if the standards are the same as they are now, with the additional requirement that the family not earn more than (for example) $40,000 a year.
So thats the sad truth about entitlement programs in the United States: if they benefit the middle class, they're popular; if not, then they're criticized as bad public policy by conservatives.
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