In an effort to stem the brutality of enormous cuts to higher education, Texas Gov. Rick Perry came up with a solution: community colleges ought to create $10,000 degree programs.

Sounds great on the surface, but when analyzing what it would take, it’s clear this is another futile attempt at ignoring the higher-education crisis facing many states suffering from huge budget shortfalls.

First, not every degree can be brought down to $10,000. In Texas, there is only one degree students can obtain for a little less than $10,000 in tuition and fees — a Bachelor of Applied Technology — that is offered at three community colleges.

However, this doesn’t include the costs of textbooks, which amounts to around $4,000. So even the cheapest degree a student in Texas can get still ends up around $13,000.

Unless Texas legislators are willing to sacrifice the quality of a four-year degree, creating more degrees with $10,000 limits is going to be impossible. Tuition, fees and textbooks for four-year degrees average $31,696 at public universities in Texas, according to the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Bringing such a number down to $10,000 will only result in drastic cheapening of the quality of college degrees.

After hearing of Perry’s radical idea, South Texas College President Shirley Reed said one of the ways a $10,000 degree could be accomplished is by reducing the number of hours in degree programs.

“But will the students actually have the competencies that the employer is looking for?” Reed asked in an article on Statesman.com. That is the essential question.

Further proving that creating $10,000 degrees will be a next-to-impossible task is the fact that the Texas House’s base budget eliminates all funding for the only current $10,000 degree in the state. The only way such a degree could exist is if public institutions received enormous subsidies.

If we’re not careful, OU could find itself in a similar position as Texas schools. Gov. Mary Fallin recently proposed a 3-percent cut in higher education. The Daily reported in December that the College of Arts and Sciences is getting hit with a $1.7 million cut for the 2012 fiscal year, which could mean cutting some majors and minors and moving more classes online.

While universities have access to technology that can reduce some costs, online courses save little if any money. This is because the largest expense of classes is the salaries of faculty members, who have to be just as involved with online coursework as they are in a classroom.

This became evident during the days of canceled classes on our own campus. Many professors we talked to said putting lectures on Desire2Learn via podcasts or slideshows required almost as much work as doing it in the classroom.

The simple fact of the matter is funding for higher education, not just in Texas, should be preserved. Continuous cuts are only cheapening the quality of public education as colleges are forced to make tough decisions in the face of budget shortfalls. We’re all for efficient government, but not at the cost of our generation’s education.

Of course, the only real way to combat the higher-education crisis would be for states to get serious on some of the unnecessary tax breaks for wealthy corporations, as well as raising taxes on wealthier citizens — solutions tantamount to totalitarian socialism in red states like Texas and Oklahoma.

However, once the sacrifices of austerity measures reveal that we don’t have a well-educated workforce, which in turn will lead to greater economic decline, perhaps the wealthy libertarians will finally realize the benefits of some collective forms of government.