Mississippi State Auditor Report on Brain Drain

While I think we should go to the Iowa method of state funded higher education, this is a good start.

Right now, Mississippi's college funding is student based. Auditor is pushing for it to be program/stay in Mississippi based. When its student base, colleges are incentivized to just create cheap programs to get more students (gender studies-type).

When its outcome based, the schools are incentivized to invest in their programs that lead to better jobs in the state.

Ultimately there needs to be four colleges in Mississippi:

Ole Miss - the flagship institution with the law and medical schools
Mississippi State - the agricultural, mechanical and technolgy focused institution
Southern Miss - a regional school with a commitment to the Gulf Coast region
Jackson State - an urban HBCU

MUW and Valley are worthless. They cost more to keep open than they produce. Close them.

Alcorn State and Delta State should be extensions of State focused on their respective regions and mainly agriculture based.

Mississippi should focus on trade schools and becoming as attractive as possible for manufacturing, I'd look to South Carolina as a model. The problem isn't college majors it is that there isn't much in the way of money and opportunity in the state to keep people.

My son could have gone to MState a lot cheaper than A&M and it wasn't even a consideration. A ton of folks from Mississippi leave because there just isn't much in terms of opportunity there. So focus on making opportunity.

Have to deal with the reality of who you have there. It's a state with a bad education system and that isn't getting fixed anytime soon. It's never going to be a state that people look to first in terms of where to go. So make it better. Use the large amount of folks who are willing to learn a trade as they don't expect to go to college.

The good news is there is a lot or reshoring happening and if Mississippi can find ways to market itself they can take advantage of that. The location isn't bad geographically. You don't really have cold weather. COL is very low. Look to make it into a Blue Collar mecca.

The reality is that most of those kids at Ole Miss majoring in garbage are rich kids from OOS who are just looking for a Frat scene and then to leave and work for Daddy or one of Daddy's friends anyway. If you want to get ROI focus on trade schools and let companies know you have lots of skilled and semi skilled talent they can hire to build things. Go recruit people from Michigan to teach those trades not Texas where those kids are gone the moment they graduate.

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This is Mississippi specific, but interesting to all. State Auditor doing work on eliminating worthless college majors

LINK

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Wasting his time but keeping his name out there in his run up to the governorship. I doubt IHL will even read the report and the IHL nor schools have any interest in reducing enrollment by eliminating worthless degrees. Sounds good but that's not how these schools want to operate. Ole Miss will get just as much tuition from a gender's study major as an engineering major. The difference is the engineer will be able to pay off his student loan whereas the gender's major degree will not. What kind of job do they get anyway?