Over the past several years, with
legislative countenance to make the process easier, rising tuition (and the
addition of a small amount of fees or their increases) by the state’s higher education
institutions have changed significantly the role that user charges have played
in funding this enterprise. In the fiscal
year that encompassed the first six months of Gov. Bobby
Jindal’s initial term in office, tuition and self-generated fees paid for
26.3 percent of the $2.814 billion spent. In this fiscal
year, it’s budgeted to pay for 48.7 percent of $2.629 billion. By way of
example, this means over this period that resident tuition and fees at my
institution have gone up for a full 12+-hour load per semester from $1,667.40
to $2,471.64,
a hike of almost 50 percent.
Critics of Jindal’s budgeting and
legislative acquiescence of it claim this presents an unacceptable barrier to
access for cash-strapped households, and decry that the state’s contribution,
directly or indirectly, has gone down hundreds of millions of dollars as a
result. But such a view fails to understand that reductions seem so stark only because
the state has historically so generously subsidized students – to the detriment
of the system and possibly to the students themselves.
In comparative perspective,
Louisiana remains a higher education bargain. For 2011-12,
Louisiana ranked second-lowest in the Southern region, and fourth-lowest in the
country for median undergraduate resident full-time tuition. It has gone up 20
percent since, but other states have been raising theirs as well so if the
state has gone past any others, it can’t have been too many of them. Nor does
that impose much of a relative burden on state households: measuring these
figures in terms of median tuition to median
household income, Louisiana ranks only 35th highest among states
at about 12.5 percent. And this does not take into account that about a fifth
of all students get their tuition paid for by the Taylor Opportunity Program
for Students (and is becoming of increasing concern to policy-makers precisely because
rising tuition gets passed along to the state in this form), which would lower
the relative burden further.
Finally, as recently
noted in a report about financial security, Louisiana has the third best
outcome of any state when it comes to students graduating from four-year
colleges with debt, underscoring the bargain that tuition and fees are in the
state. Thus, not only does low tuition and fees cost relatively less than most
places for households, debt accumulated in the process is almost the lowest.
This relatively light financial
burden indicates, if anything, that users of higher education are not paying
their fair share relative to taxpayers of the costs of higher education.
Raising this proportion also would produce a continued salutary effect: because
own resources become more invested in obtaining higher education, this
increases incentives for students to take more seriously their studies and achieve
better. In turn, this would help more efficient use of higher education
resources, as fewer marginal students would think higher education should be
pursued, and more serious students would strive harder and faster to complete
degrees. More efficient use helps both taxpayers and institutions to stretch
dollars further to reach more students more satisfactorily.
If anything, because of the fairness
issue for taxpayers and the beneficial impact on learning it would have, the
share of Louisiana higher education, through continued increases in tuition
until it reaches a level commensurate to a realistic ability-to-pay and adequate
return on investment level, coming from self-generated resources by higher
education should continue to rise. The over-subsidization of taxpayers to
students, a legacy of the state’s populist political culture, has more than
anything held back excellence in Louisiana higher education.
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