Senate President Joe Negron said on Monday he wants to enhance the state’s graduate and professional schools as part of a plan to improve the quality of the state’s higher-education system.

As reported by News4Jax, Negron (Stuart-R) wants to boost university system funding by $1 billion over the next two years. He said one of the quickest ways to elevate the system is to enhance “our graduate programs, particularly law, business and medicine.”

He also said:

I would expect that we want to set aside some money specifically designed to make those schools even more prominent that they already are and the good news is we’ve got a lot of great law schools, medical schools and business schools in Florida.

Marshall Criser, III, chancellor of Florida’s state university system told the Senate Education Committee that the production of master’s degrees, research doctorates and professional degrees has been “flat” across the 12 state universities.

Graduate degrees rose from 22,136 degrees in the 2012-2013 academic year to 22,654 degrees in 2014-2015. That is an increase of less than 2.5 percent. Medical degrees rose from 39 percent to 581 degrees while law degrees dropped 13 percent to 864 in that time frame.

Florida’s graduated programs have grown based on enrollment. Over the last decade, students enrolled in research doctoral programs or professional programs were up by 41 percent, while master’s degree programs were up by 21 percent.

Criser said:

Some of that may have been the function of the recession, while some people decided to stay in (school) and go for that next degree. We’ve seen a fairly flat level of graduate degree production in the last three years.