Trading majors (USA)

A US senator has said that university leaders should trade courses “like baseball cards” to make savings. Mike Haridopolos, president of the Florida Senate, warned the state’s universities of forthcoming cuts and told them to look closely at their programmes to decide which ones to eliminate to save money, the Orlando Sentinel reported. “Higher education reforms are going to come,” Mr Haridopolos said. “I would prefer that the college presidents sit around a table and literally start trading like baseball cards some of these majors.” In October, Rick Scott, Florida’s governor, controversially suggested that degrees in anthropology and journalism were useless in employment terms and called for state funds to be spent only on job-generating fields.

Source: The Times Higher Education http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=418417&c=1