re: TOPS Benefit

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If the LA tax payer is paying for this, maybe a requirement of staying and working in state should be attached to the recipients. 2 years or more?

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Considering that the point of the program was to keep more college educated people in the state, it should have some kind of claw-back provision if you leave the state before a certain period of time after graduation. If you want to leave the state for a better opportunity then you still can, but you have to pay your tuition back to the state over a set period of time. But at this point it's become a sacred cow that no one dares make significant changes to. Even trying to bump up the minimum GPA/ACT requirements gets people up in arms.

TOPS is a great program but should have some sort of stipulation with it

Payback if you fail out in year 1

Must work in LA for 2 years minimum, post graduation (or pay back entirely, if broken)

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The government used to give money directly to universities. Now, through TOPS they give vouchers to students to give to universities. It is just a shell game.

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Pretty much this.

I remember a speaker at a conference some years ago (It may have been Loren Scott) saying that in the 70s and 80s (when I went to LSU), the cost of in-state tuition for Louisianans was subsidized to the tune of about 75%. Thus if you (like me) were writing a check each semester for about $1,000, an additional $3,000 was coming from the state to pay the rest-- for professors, maintenance, COB, overhead, etc..

But then it flipped to the state was only subsidizing the universities to the tune of 25%, while 75% of the actual cost of tuition was borne by the students-- but by then we had TOPS, so in a way it IS just shifting money.

But there is one major difference from those days of 75% subsidies. Prior to the late 1980s, LSU was open admissions-- if you graduated high school in Louisiana, you were accepted into LSU. As expected under such a scenario, you had LOADS of kids who were not college material that went to LSU (mostly/75% on the state's dime) for a year or so, just to party and have a "college experience", then flunked out, or at best transferred to somewhere like SLU or Nicholls.

TOPS at least put SOME minimum academic requirements on getting that state money, and prevented SOME waste in that regard.

Colleges costs across the country are high, so it’s not a TOPS specific issue. At LSU tuition itself is reasonable, but dorms, meal plans and “fees” are over $7,000/semester - with TOPS!!!

Maybe tie it to staying in La after graduation?

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The legislature still has authority over tuition that universities set and whether or not to approve

it's the fees that LSU has raised to offset cost of attendance and yes those are outrageous plus the ridiculous food plan you are required to have while living on campus

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And yet despite the increases in tuition, the university still comes to the state hat in hand for building improvements and new education structures on campus not related to athletics and student recreation which have their own funding arms and structures.

Meanwhile the library still leaks and floods everytime it rains.

But this is not LSU specific. It is like that for every university in the state.

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The government used to give money directly to universities. Now, through TOPS they give vouchers to students to give to universities. It is just a shell game.

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This is a huge part of it.

Direct state funding at LA universities (e.g. state funding not allocated through TOPS) fell by $4,454 per student from 2008 to 2018. Meanwhile, average tuition in LA increased by $4,810 over the same time period. (Both values adjusted for inflation.)

The reduction in state funding per student was the second highest in the nation, behind Arizona. The increase in tuition was also second highest in the nation.. also behind Arizona.

This is a trend nationwide, not limited to LA. As a college attendance (as a percentage of population) has increased, the percentage of cost absorbed by the student has also increased.

Some of this is that state funding levels don’t necessarily trend with attendance rates. A lot of it is probably due to the availability of student loans, which allow states to pass off cost to (ultimately) the federal government. But again this is happening across the country.

What is somewhat unique in LA is the magnitude of the change. People will probably point to TOPS, Jindal-era budget cuts, and general state financial woes (among other things) as potential reasons but you’d have to do a pretty deep dive into somewhat obscure data to try to make a serious case for any specific issue. There are likely several factors at play.

(Source for the tuition/funding data above: LINK)

Well, there is a huge benefit of it if you are female or a minority. That’s a huge percent of the graduating classes now days in Louisiana.

WTF.

Louisiana pays to be a Top.

Daggum the Bottom is getting screwed.