Jackson Jambalaya

What an absolute waste on taxpayer money Shad! This is ridiculous! Now you are trying to dictate what type of college degree my kids can get in Mississippi? Jesus! What next? Are you going to try to totally eliminate degree programs that you do not agree with? Go home Shad! It is clear you are only capable of being a government employee who doesn't go after the real offenders!

That makes too much sense to be adopted in Mississippi!

In this case, one can wonder if Shad will spend money to do a report on his reports, only to find that this education report was a waste of money spent to state the obvious.

This is a waste of time for the auditor. This is legal public policy matter and not his. There is lots of public spending stuff that is not legal he should be tending to. Go get the real crooks.

The more Shad delves off into social commentary, the more ignorant he seems to come across. I assume I,being educated, am not be his target audience.

"I assume I,being educated, am not be his target audience."
Well said, professor.

The best education investment is to get any sort of STEM degree and then leave Mississippi.
Hell, I would venture that you should LEAVE THE USA because this place is rapidly becoming third world while Korea and several other Asian nations simply can’t stop booming and need STEM educated workers and are actively importing them. The standard of living in Korea is significantly higher than Mississippi and will soon be higher than the USA.

The first analysis should be an all-inclusive cost/benefit for college athletics.

September 20, 2023 at 12:50 PM, do you want to give that another try, Mr. Educated Poster?

Complete waste of time. The college board determines degree programs and budget allocations based on their biases, affiliations, and favoritism, not what is best for "taxpayers". Change that if you can Shad, otherwise stick to your job.

Wow, some of the comments on here are interesting. I somewhat agree that this seems off-topic for the Auditor unless he has already run out of bigger, more obvious areas to investigate.

Considering that state appropriations are the largest revenue for MS Universities (23% higher than total tuition collected), this is a statewide concern and a state government concern.

That makes it worth talking about and if the auditor is the only one that will talk about it and get us all talking about solutions, I guess that's the point.

I am not understanding how taxpayer money is financing an anthropology degree that the individual paid for themselves. At this time, we haven't had student loan forgiveness so folks are still paying for their own degrees.

Oh and as a guy who absolutely struggled out of the gate (like quite a few of us did), brain drain here is almost exclusively associated with the good ole boy system. Unless you know someone here you are going to start out making pennies, fight, and barely claw your way by, this lives under the guise of "paying your dues"

So what happens? people leave, they get decent jobs, they get promoted, and in some cases down the road they come back.

Its not any more complicated than that

The pandering is not well received. As previously stated this is a public policy issue not a legal spending issue and he has wasted government resources on this report so that he can get his plug in there about gender studies warping people's mind. I don't disagree college funding should be looked at but that is a job for the legislature not state auditor. He should worry about the avalanche of employees that are about to quit his office, already had two directors turn in their resignations this week.

Shadrack hates him some gender and race-based curricula bull$hit. Can’t blame him for that.

This report should be required reading for incoming freshman, in addition to legislators.

Shad is spot on about one thing. Universities love it when students select a major that will not support them when entering or trying to enter the workplace. They are referred to as "fillers"

Does he want to get rid of History, Music, and Art. I am not a fan of gender studies, but the liberal arts not in demand either. Universities are a place of learning not job training.

Hmmm like a degree in Political Science.... Oh Wait I know someone who has that one........

Is this more of that "low hanging fruit?"

This is just GOP political pandering and campaigning with tax dollars. I had hoped Shad, being a well educated millennial, would not devolve into a younger version of tatur tott or Pheel by campaigning to the ignorant majority in Mississippi. Oh well, can’t say I’m surprised.

Cut the budget of the Ole Miss law school? Is that what you mean Shad?
Just joking.

There's always fat to be cut from that bloated budget at JSU.

A more vernacular version of this appeared on the Op Ed page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday. When I turned to that page, I saw that someone named "Shad White" had contributed a piece, and I thought, "How unusual, there's someone else named Shad White." But yes, it was our auditor, and it was well written. I disagreed with much of it, but I don't deny its rhetorical heft.

Yet another area in a person's life that the republicans want to control. What happened to the republicans that wanted to get government out of a person's life? Oh yeah, they sold their souls to belong to the maga cult.

@1:35 - Can you explain why?

I don’t see how a university cares about a major if it’s funded the same; I think you still pay the same for STEM hours as anthropology hours, right? So, it’s more a question of how much the school can make on the “fillers.” Are the social sciences more profitable? These kids all have loans anyway. The folks that care about ROI are the private lenders that end up servicing the social scientists. (Unless we’re talking about donation capability back to the college, but these kids are thousands of miles away as adults.)

I like what Shad did, although it’s not typical state auditor stuff. He has given legislators great information to have when discussing higher education funding.

Nice waste of taxpayer funds, Shad, to float your entry into the 2027 governor's race

How many gender studies majors are there that attend MS’s public universities? I’m sure the answer must be a huge number for us to be using that as a basis to tell colleges what majors they can fund without penalty from Buzzkill Shad.

All this guy knows how to do is pander.

Hey Shad, communists favor STEM as well—just like you, you Commie!

why does every town in the state need a branch of a community college? we could save oodles of money by making community college technical training only..NOT COLLEGE TRANSFER COURSES!

merge several schools: Delta State into Valley. (MS Valley University takes over), and the W into State (State Taking Over.)

Evaluate cost/return of athletics at all the universities, and make adjustments where needed..even if it means giving up Division I status. MS is too small to adequately support the three D1 FBS and three D1 FCS AND Community College Scholarship football programs...

The biggest waste is that we subsidize out of state students by waiving out of state tuition. That’s why over half of Ole Miss students are from out of state and clearly have no plan to remain in the state after graduation…. Do a real investigation please..

Every college campus is covered in new buildings with endless layers of faculty and administration because they encourage students to incur massive and ruinous student loan debt without any regard whatsoever as to whether the kids will ever be able to repay the debts. Require the educational institutions to co-sign the loans and this bullshit will end summarily.

" I was educated once - It took me years to get over it."

Shad publishes this shit (on the taxpayer's dime mind you) as a deflection from his incompetency in going after the real culprits of corruption.

EVERYTHING he put out is really just an ongoing campaign of bullshit to keep his name in some kind of positive light, and Kingfish is his business partner who's glad to promote that stupid little prick on this side. Shad is a huge disappointment to Mississippians, but he's all in now with a family, etc. so he has to keep at it until his primaried down the river by savvy Mississippians....or the damn Feds hopefully.

Any degree worth having will not be an easy degree to get.

Being educated and being intelligent are not one and the same.

Shad did not waste his education. He understands the political value of
empty rhetoric. If there is one area of state government totally governed by school loyalty, rivalry, racism, etc. it is governance of higher edication. It is also the least likely to be systematically changed. But it sure is good for blowing hot air. Good move Shad.

With two kids in college, I have come to the conclusion that the university system is not there to educate the students. They get an education in spite of the university, not because of it. It has become a way of fleecing the students and their parents from ever increasing amounts of money. And the amount increases at a far greater rate than inflation. Most, not all, majors are overpriced for what you get. Best bang for the buck is the Jr College system. As long as the university can build buildings and name them after major donors, they DO NOT CARE if the student graduates or not. Got to have the super fancy student activity center to brag about, build that Taj Mahal of a stadium for the overpriced coach, but students can't find the professor during listed hours.

@3:57 - it’s not incompetency; it’s intentional.

"I was educated once - It took me years to get over it."

Zing!

OK, if this is the road we want to go down then lets keep following it. Change tuition rates based on the major. Education programs are pretty cheap. Their faculty are paid about a third of what Business and most science based faculty are paid. They also don't require expensive labs. Heck- students pay to go to schools and work for their practicums and student teaching. Most Humanities faculty are also making way less than their counterparts in other areas. So, students in those disciplines should pay less tuition as well.

Let’s be honest. The (((left))) have totally ruined the education system in the country as well as all institutions of higher learning. The irony is that the only universities left that are worth a damn for STEM are all in Israel.

6:51 for the win!

If Shad would just make the Leflore County supervisors repay the money he claims they owe I would be a supporter, but alas it will never happen. He has no balls.

Based on the above posts, it must be a slow day at The Jackson Free Press.

If he did this on his spare time , that’s okay . If he spent a dime of state money or a minute on working time. Someone needs to send him a demand letter to recoup the funds he wasted on this study .

@ "I don’t see how a university cares about a major if it’s funded the same; I think you still pay the same for STEM hours as anthropology hours, right?"

As 6:12 said, they may get funded the same or charge the same tuition, but the actual cost of the programs varies. So the difference between the cost and the funding/income is the pot-o-gold that the university is after. In other words, they're selling fake Rolex watches alongside real ones, all for the same retail price.

What does “Some College Majors More” mean?

Libs seeing their monasteries under attack sure get mad.

I could feel my own brain draining with this dumb report.

WTF is this guy doing wasting/misspending money on studies/reports that are in no shape, form, or fashion a part of his statutory responsibility. This is nothing more than pure politically motivated self-promotion and advertising on the taxpayer dime.

@11:15
He needs to do something to distract from his failures during the TANF scandal.
Including that start-struck, velvet-glove treatment of Brett Favre.

Lol y’all know, because of his young age, he’s anointed to be in line for governor sometime after Michael Watson. That is, if the old guard doesn’t end up turning the state blue first!

Mr. White does have the marvelous gift of triggering people. I would hate to know someone had that kind of power over me.

I'd rather read an auditor report on why MILLIONS of TANF money have still not been recovered. Did a social science major steal over 90 million dollars? Perhaps the thief was a Magic major and magically made it disappear.

"If you major in rhetoric, you go to one of our universities and major in rhetoric… you can still go and get that major under my proposal, but I’m not sure that taxpayers should be paying for that degree, because we don’t get a lot out of it."

Shad is absolutely right, we don’t get a lot out of people who get degrees in rhetoric. Now remind me, what did he major in again?

1:37 Therein lies the biggest problem: we're graduating too many people with degrees that don't teach them how to do shit!

5:06 Yes: Best bang for the buck is the Jr College system

I submitted a declined post in which, for about the fifth time, I challenged Shad and Gibert on Supertalk to name the state agency, tracking method or educational body that tracks graduates by degree and where they live following graduation. That would back up their repetitive claim that there exists a 'brain drain'.

But, since Kingfish remains indebted to the State Auditor, the post is unapproved.

If Kingfish will not allow a challenge to that claim, then he is complicit in the weakness of the claim.

When I think about anthropology a classic scene from Animal House comes to mind.

You claim to view and decide on each and every post submitted for publication. Now you claim you've not seen the five I've submitted stating and restating this challenge?

In short, no state agency, college, university, Board or group of data entry geeks tracks college graduates by major and who remained here to work and who didn't? Both Gibert and the State Auditor frequently talk about the mysterious brain drain. Where's the reliable data backup for those claims?

Do we know grads who left? Sure. Do we suspect many leave? Sure. Do we have an opinion? Sure. Are some of us the malcontents who say we're going to make sure our kids leave? Sure. Is any of that backed up by comprehensive data-specific proof? No.

Any paper with 'Studies' needs cut, professors, space, everything. Studies means no more than mail order.

There is a running ton of programs that result in a worthless degree. Is the state 'wasting money'? Maybe, but it's for damned sure the colleges are making money off the parents or sponsors of these kids.

And as soon as the scholar graduates with that degree in Diversity Studies, the dean of that school convinces the kid she's a superb candidate for a masters or PhD in the field.

Who takes anything Shad says seriously? It's all jibber jabber and attention seeking.

@7:18pm "Best bang for the buck is the Jr College system".

No, unless you mean for technical degrees - which far too many youth are in no way interested in because they require actual, hands-on, outdoors work -even with the opportunity to make some moola.

The primary function of the Jr. or "community college" system is strictly a "feeder" system - to herd as many high schoolers through their doors as possible, then "complete" them regardless of effort or achievement, then feed them to the major universities around the state. It's a racket for sure to capitalize on BILLIONS in federal Pell Grants and Loans. One third of the community college "completion" of their "college" level credits happen in high school as "dual credit" achievements - which doesn't happen in real life - you can't be in two places at the same time - or get double salary for covering someone else's work while they're out. Huge scam on Mississippians.

All three levels stay flush with money, get good "grades" for completing everyone (since attendance is no longer required in high school - just turn something in) and they keep building their high school, college, and university fiefdoms. All of this activity is justified because? "Jobs, PERS, and votes."

The largest employer in MS is "education" - where the state and federal gravy is. Shad puts out garbage like this to merely appear he's looking at the educational systems - but is simply looking the other way hoping no one knows how much he truly knows about the level of fraud that's going on. Just like he did in the welfare system. So, Shad is part of the overall fraud now because he has a family to provide for - in Mississippi - so you play ball, or don't eat.