A continuing tight
budgetary environment in Louisiana has gotten observers to consider picking up
the knife to slaughter some sacred cows. First it was the motion picture tax
credit, and now perhaps the Tuition Opportunity Program for Students?
This space on several occasions has spilled the ills of the
program that pays for all tuition costs at any public community or technical
college, or at any public baccalaureate institution and perhaps even more in
some cases, or a portion of tuition at a private baccalaureate institution, for
high school graduates in the state or of families claiming residency in the
state. The idea was to get presumably college-ready students to a college in
the state, drawing both on those who might have left the state and those who
otherwise did not have the financial means to attend college.
But because of the
program’s relatively low standards and tying the award directly to tuition
levels, it did not evolve into a true scholarship reward but rather an
entitlement program. Among its several pernicious effects – inflating the
number of marginal students who would not complete degrees going to college,
providing a disincentive to achieve past a point of mediocrity in high school,
providing an incentive for colleges to raise tuition and to lower standards to
capture revenues without regard to quality and efficiency – in these times the
fact that it self-defeats greater reliance on tuition as a way of responding to
budget reductions seems to be getting the increased attention of policy-makers.
Proponents of the program as is, among them most disappointingly Gov. Bobby Jindal, say that it isn’t broken because it has increased the proportion of Louisianans going to college and they complete it at a rate about a third higher than those who don’t receive it. But this analysis is somewhat selective: in 2011-12, about 45,000 awards were granted, while the number in college in the state was over 225,000, meaning only about 20 percent of all enrollees were in the program (although probably closer to 50 percent when considering only full-time students) and, because there are at least low standards as opposed to none, you would expect the cohort with TOPS to be more capable and therefore more likely to graduate. It’s not the program that causes graduation; it’s the self-selectivity of the populations that does.
So the policy goal must be
to have TOPS as part of a strategy to assist deserving students who otherwise
might not go to college in Louisiana while mitigating its negative spillover
effects. A suggestion using the philosophy adopted by Oregon sets a good
framework. That state has qualifying students apply for other forms of
financial aid and then, if sufficient funding exists, makes up the rest with a
TOPS-like structure.
This can be improved by
making TOPS a true scholarship program by increasing standards (such as to
Louisiana State University Baton Rouge’s admittance criteria of an American
College Test score of 24 and a 3.0 grade point average). While some argue this
should become a need-based program instead, that makes the program unfair to
students who they or their families must pay just because they have resources,
removes an incentive to learn more in high school for them, and can be gotten
around through gamesmanship (like the student declaring independence from
family after a year, as out-of-state students do to gain in-state tuition
rates).
Rather, it makes more sense
to put the state’s need-based GO Grant program, currently set at a flat $1,000,
on a sliding scale and create a state-backed lending program, both of which
would be a part of the calculation of the altered TOPS program amount. This
decouples TOPS from tuition charged and creates an incentive for students who
have borrowed to pay more attention to their studies, because they can’t write
off failures or exits as TOPS now allows but instead will owe money, as well as
lets the state get back much money that is wasted by students failing to
complete courses and degrees.
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