Or atleast that’s what some people in Florida think. The idea is to allow universities to charge different amounts for different majors. In general I am a fan of flexibility and when you have limited supply (hiring new teachers and building classroom capacity are both hard in the middle of a semester) and increasing demand (more students go into majors where there are higher expected salaries) then you have two choices. First, you can change quality requirements (students must have a GPA above 3.2 to be admitted to the junior and senior level classes) or charge more money for the oversubscribed majors.
However, in Florida the argument is that we should charge people LESS for engineering degrees than for English literature degrees. The article below discusses some of the drawbacks of the policy so I won’t elaborate on them here. One big assumption in the policy is that engineering students, once educated at a (presumably) cheaper rate than their rivals outside the state, will stay in Florida! I’m not convinced.
Credit to Christy Milliken, an attorney in Washington DC, for bringing this article to my attention.