SADOW: No, Higher Education Isn’t In Catastrophic Shape In Louisiana

Thought this would add a little data to the discussion in the other thread. A little light to go with the heat if you will...

Posted on the Hayride

A few key points:

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A mythology, largely driven by disgruntled higher education employees and Jindal critics, formed over his years in office asserting that in this time period higher education suffered nothing less than catastrophe. They point to the $2.814 billion budget, just about half of which was funded directly by state government in the last budget before Jindal’s arrival, as compared to the current fiscal year’s budget that contains only about $525 million in that general fund financing, feeding the narrative of cataclysm.
But even a cursory look at the data reveal such an interpretation to be at the very least overwrought and at the most deliberately distorted.

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The overall amount spent hardly has changed, with the only changes internally happening to the mix of funds: again using his numbers, Jindal will propose that tuition and fees comprise $1.367 billion, up from the FY 2008 amount of $741 million. That is, the two sources essentially have swapped places, and with the removal of ARRA funds with the difference made up in statutory dedications for the most part.
This means the seven-year change in total financing is down only 1.6 percent.

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The other one is that the shift from taxpayer to service user resources for funding reduces access, especially in a “poor” state. Yet this rationale also relies more on myth than fact. Even after a couple of years of tuition increases, Louisiana ranked 47th among the states in average tuition and fees paid, and even assuming 10 percent increases over the next three years to bring us to the present and assuming other states did not raise theirs, the state would have moved up exactly one place – and this doesn’t even count that one-fifth of all full-time students have their tuition paid for through the Taylor Opportunity Program for Scholars. Nor is this low figure even out of line with the relative wealth of the state’s people: Louisiana ranked 39th overall in per capita income. Bluntly, low tuition levels are a product of a populist era that put burdens on the backs of a relative few to spread out benefits to many and have been an impediment to funding higher education rationally.

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So higher hasn't really been hurt because tuition filled the gap, and tuition is still (and will continue to be) low for the foreseeable future.

Now, let the yapping and wailing commence.