The bill sponsored by state Sen. Robert
Adley would allow the Louisiana Community and Technical College System to
undertake a series of capital improvements worth $250 million across the state.
It gathers a 12 percent match from private sector concerns, who figure the
improvement will increase the pipeline of skilled workers to them, and then
gets the state to pay in $20 million a year over 20 years to pay it all off.
Controversially, it goes outside of the normal capital outlay process,
where the Legislature puts up a list of projects, which if it exceeds the net
state tax supported debt limit then is culled by the State Bond Commission. The
bill exempts this outlay from that limit. Treasurer John
Kennedy raises the alarm about the precedent set in this ability in a
technical sense to exceed that limit, as this could increase interest rates faced by the state and obviously creates increased obligations in the future.
It also has provoked cries, particularly coming from the rest of the higher
education community, that the process becomes less fair and more politically
charged. In part, the present process came about because it presumably minimized
political considerations in capital budgeting decisions in favor of what met
truly important needs with a statewide impact. This deviation reduces the ability
of the Board of Regents to plan and coordinate.
The problem from the perspective of the two-year system was it was the
only part of higher education growing – partly because of conscious policy
decisions to steer more students to the system that delivers at less cost,
partly because of macroeconomic cost considerations by students facing the
fallout of the Pres. Barack Obama
economic slowdown, and partly because the marketplace has continued to signal
the value of a two-year degree is increasing relative to many of the four-year variety – while baccalaureate-and-above institutions continue to fight
enrollment declines. While the outlay system is supposed to allow for most and
highest immediate needs to come to the front of the funding line, in practice a
good deal of deference is given to time spent in the queue, which in the case of higher education is ordered by the Board of Regents. So, this bill
allows, in essence, opening up another line where deserving latecomers can get
to the front.
Kennedy thinks this presages opening up a lot more lines, hence a rapid
debt expansion to the detriment of the state. The Regents say that $1.7 billion
in deferred maintenance on other campuses is getting short shrift. This leads one
observer to opine that Gov. Bobby
Jindal and apparently the entire Legislature to date supports the bill
because they perceive the demand for occupations needing education beyond high
school but not requiring a baccalaureate degree and give this priority over the
idea that reconstituting facilities will attract more students to those
institutions that confer baccalaureate and higher degrees.
But none of this thinking gets to the real issue. That is, Louisiana
has an inefficient, overbuilt
system of higher education. It’s noticeable at all levels: in per capita terms, the state ranks in the
top five (behind states with much smaller populations) in most institutions,
and is in the top ten each for number of associates–and-below and baccalaureate-and-above
institutions. However, as far as the former that slowly is changing, as in the
past several years their enrollments continue to climb and in the past couple
of years there have been campus consolidations going on (one
working its way through the Legislature this session). Yet with the latter
there’s clearly duplication when states with populations the size of Illinois’
and Florida’s have about the same number of four-year schools as does the much
less populous Louisiana.
Naturally, the best
solution would be the merging, demotion, or closing of baccalaureate-and-above
institutions but, just as naturally, politics
has interfered with this from happening. Another solution would be to
pursue that strategy of building to attract students, but there remain big doubts
about whether the changing
landscape of higher education makes this a viable option. In essence, changing
federal policy, marketplace demands, and technology makes the four-year public
university sited to deliver education to a place-bound, price-inelastic
audience increasingly obsolete and unsustainable, so why put more resources
into supporting what is surplus to begin with?
Thus, backing SB 204 may signal relative to higher education policy a
willingness to pursue a strategy of a benign neglect of slack resources while
addressing the need for increased resources elsewhere. While the Regents continue to treat all parts of the overbuilt structure with slack resources equally, this bill takes an outcome-oriented approach. Where an institution cannot
demonstrate its facilities have reached the bursting point in usage, it should
receive only enough to stave off inoperability of the assets it can prove it
can use. Stinginess by the state here can force these institutions into
planning for more efficient use of these resources. Indeed, many of the
baccalaureate-and-above institutions would argue that already by default such a
strategy is in place.
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