State Auditor Shad White has released a report arguing for changing the way taxpayer money is spent at Mississippi’s public universities.
The report, which was teased by the state auditor last week and promptly met with scrutiny from skeptics, suggests that the state should prioritize certain college majors over others in terms of their economic impact in Mississippi.
“It’s part of my job as state auditor to show you how your taxpayer money is spent and whether it’s being spent wisely. In this case, it is not,” White argued on Monday.
The report states that Mississippi taxpayers send public universities the same amount to educate both an electrical engineering major and an anthropology major, but the return on investment from one is more advantageous to the state than the other.
It points out that electrical engineering majors, on average, earn roughly $71,000 per year in their first jobs in Mississippi, while anthropology majors earn less than a third of that. The report also indicates that the engineering major is more likely to seek employment in Mississippi than the anthropology major.
Critics of White’s position on the matter have questioned the auditor’s motives in issuing the report while also maintaining that the auditor’s metric for determining which majors should be prioritized is flawed.
“Earning potential is one of the worst metrics I can imagine for shaping education,” Mississippi College English and Philosophy professor Steve Price wrote on X. “But then, this isn’t about educating all the people of Mississippi or meeting the wide-ranging needs of the state.”
The report is part of a series on brain drain and its cost to the taxpayers from White’s office. It notes that Mississippi has a severe labor shortage, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in some specific professions such as healthcare and business.
White’s team asserts that taxpayer money should go to create more of those graduates and fewer graduates with degrees that are not as useful to Mississippi’s economy.
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