This space repeatedly has offered up policy changes designed to address
this goal (the most recent being here),
which long-time readers will think sounds like a broken record (speaking of new
modes of delivery, in this case of music, perhaps younger readers will not
recognize that cliché.) Kleckley’s request in front of media members for higher
education leaders to volunteer vigorously their own ideas to some degree
pretends that there has not been attempted
recently that very effort in an organized fashion, as part of the
Postsecondary Education Review Commission, many ideas of which found themselves
forwarded as legislation, almost none of which ever made it into law. Another
effort dedicated
itself just to the issue of governance.
So it’s a bit disingenuous to imply that the higher education
community in the debate needs this shrug of the shoulders from Kleckley as a
call to provide answers where the Legislature has failed, because they and
others already have provided these to the Legislature, which, under Kleckley’s
leadership, simply has failed to embrace them. But, in the spirit of bending
over backwards to assist, here’s some more of them and repackaged in a way that
might get the Legislature to act more decisively than its current tepid GRAD
Act framework that pays for mild performance gains.
Of course, the real problem is the system is so overbuilt that the
state actually ranks above average in per capita dollars spent (18th)
among the states in higher education, yet has among the lowest outcomes.
Unfortunately, it is politically impossible to reduce the number of separate
campuses, as demonstrated by the relatively recent failure to merge
into better health perhaps the worst-performing school in the country but
the waste
of time in trying to force another merger that made no sense. Politics, not
rational allocation of resources, clearly was in control in both instances, so
policy must work around this regrettable reality of Louisiana’s higher education
policy landscape. Add also to this the duplicative governance structures
(essentially, five) generally
eschewed by peer states, which have resisted legislative reform efforts.
Useful reform in this environment begins with removing legislative
control entirely over tuition. The GRAD Act actually for the first time offered
some decoupling of direct legislative involvement over tuition rates, by
allowing schools to increase tuition rates somewhat through better performance,
but encourages
gamesmanship by allowing targets to be set too low. Perhaps as a result,
the Legislature has been cutting state appropriations to higher education, which
are budgeted
this year to fall to 48 percent of the total, where tuition, fees, and
self-generated revenues are almost as much at 47 percent. Measures to strengthen
the pay-for-performance link and to free legislative control of tuition both
failed this past session.
A different option here would be to remove control entirely, but keep a
loose link to taxpayer contributions with those contributions locked in at around
the current per pupil rate. That is, allow schools to set tuition wherever they
wanted, but to create a scale where the higher tuition goes, the lower goes the
state per pupil contribution from the baseline, yet conditioned by performance.
The better the outcomes, the less the “penalty” in forgone state dollars would
be charged as tuition rose. This would give university leaders flexibility in
how they approached their missions. Some might believe that the flexibility
they get in moving tuition levels around and how they could use that extra
money would be worth the tradeoff in that they could induce superior outcomes that
would minimize the penalty. Others might feel their markets dictate taking the
bird in the hand rather than the pair in the bush and increase tuition
marginally if at all.
As a part of this, another measure previously suggested and resisted, decoupling
tuition from the Taylor Opportunity Program for Studentss, would have to come
into fruition. The free tuition program pays for the schooling of about a fifth
of the state’s university population, but with about a third
of its recipients losing eligibility at some point and another fifth
dropping out, this shows it awards too much to too many. By making
it more of a true scholarship program and independent of tuition levels, more
efficiently it will fund students truly committed to completing their degrees
and reduce needless resource expenditure on those not so.
This approach also would solve many related problems hampering
university performance. For example, the problems of the notorious 12-hour (semester-based)
cap on tuition, which means free schooling past that number of hours, encourages
wasteful overstaffing as students overbook, then drop courses strategically with
little financial penalty, would be solved by adopting the above framework.
Complainers that assert tuition increases would discourage
some from attending college are blind to the blizzard of aid available TOPS
and beyond and to Louisiana continuing to have among the lowest tuition of all
the states with its proportion of tuition as a funding mechanism remaining
below states’ averages. Make these changes to rate-setting and TOPS, and then
much will fall into place, even if the overbuilt nature of the system and duplicative
governance issues aren’t addressed.
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