These days, $10,000 doesn’t seem like a lot of money. Sure, you can buy a moderately priced used car, furnish your apartment with class or get a cup of coffee from Starbucks every day for seven years. But in terms of college tuition, $10,000 is only a few drops in the bucket. Considering that the average cost of attending a public university in Texas is nearly three times that amount, even without living expenses, $10,000 won’t get you very far.

However, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has recently proposed a challenge to public universities in the state of Texas: offer bachelor degrees for around $10,000 in course credit and textbooks. This is supposed to be achievable through a combination of online classes, large cuts in higher education funding, credits for prior learning and textbook alternatives.

This specific plan for cheaper college degrees came from Bill Gates at a conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif., last August. Gates suggested that implementing new technologies on college campuses could help lower costs.

This will most likely prove to be easier said that done, though. In 2010, tuition at the University of Texas at Austin reached nearly $10,000—for only one year as an undergraduate.

There are some schools in Texas that are currently very close to the $10,000 mark. For the low, low cost of $9,168, you can get a Bachelor of Applied Technology from Brazosport College, a community college in Lake Jackson. South Texas College and Midland College, two more community colleges authorized to award Bachelor’s degrees, offer the same degree.

Sounds great, right? Well, maybe if Midland College is your first pick and your dream job is working in applied technology. Unfortunately, it sounds a little too much like a degree that you get after calling a number on a daytime TV commercial.

Even if that is your best option for higher education, the Bachelor of Applied Technology might not be available for much longer. Those large cuts to higher education, proposed to help relieve tuition prices, would cut many programs exactly like this one. Even more worrying, decreases in education spending would leave many public universities underfunded.

Just because Perry wants to cut educational spending doesn’t mean the expenses of operating a university or college go away. That money has to come from somewhere, and the cost would most likely be passed down to the students, raising their tuition instead of lowering it.

To give the governor some credit, he did present this idea to the public as a challenge, a reason for universities to think of innovative, cost-cutting measures to make the dream of higher education a reality for more students. But without a realistic plan for executing these ideas, a $10,000 college education seems more hopeless than challenging.