SB 48 by
state Sen. Jack Donahue would give
the Legislature a cost-control mechanism over the TOPS award. Presently, the
amount given per student is linked to tuition paid to Louisiana public colleges
and universities, up to the highest amount charged by each kind (or a weighted
average of each kind of these for a student wishing to attend a Louisiana
nonpublic school). The bill locks in the amount at the academic year 2017 level – beginning
almost 18 months from now – and gives the Legislature the discretion whether to
raise the award for any future tuition increases past that level. This means
tuition could go higher without TOPS fully paying for it.
As far as reforms of the program go,
this is about as close as it can be to being no reform at all. It treats the
symptom – escalating costs pegged at $267 million for this fiscal year for
which the only control the Legislature has is its bizarre two-thirds majorities
requirement to raise tuition more than 10 percent (for schools that meet
certain qualifications; otherwise, no autonomous raise is permitted) – instead of
the disease: a program so lax in its requirements (requiring for an award to
pay for attending a baccalaureate-and-above institution only the national
average score on the American College Test and a mediocre high school grade
point average, and less demanding strictures to attend a community college or technical
school) that it pays for too many marginal students to attend post-secondary
education institutions, encouraging waste and making schools work less
efficiently. Any serious reform must start with raising
standards and graduating award amounts depending upon performance that
reward excellence, which in turn creates incentive for more efficient learning
and higher achievement in doing so.
Unfortunately, consistent with the
state’s populist political culture, college education seems considered as an
entitlement rather than as a reward for quality performance, or at least a
majority of lawmakers and even Gov. Bobby
Jindal have perceived this as such, for repeated legislative attempts along
these lines of genuine reform have met with defeat, often spurred by special
interests featuring most prominently the organization that had run the program before
the state read it into law, the Patrick F.
Taylor Foundation. However, this next-to-nothing proposal looks to have secured
the blessing of this organization, meaning this could be the first bill
reducing the value of TOPS ever to make it into law.
This means that, many years down
the road, if left at this small savings above the current defined levels would
occur. Anything is good, but this has significance only if its leads to more
fundamental. Precise, and effective reforms as noted above. Worse, if only this
gets enacted after which policy-makers and interests declare victory over TOPS
incentives encouraging the disease of inefficient use of taxpayer dollars, it
will subvert the chances of achieving any additional meaningful changes that go
beyond the symptoms. Hopefully, this does not represent a change in strategy from
that pursued by Donahue and state Sen. Conrad
Appel (who acts as coauthor on this attempt) last
year, where the latter offered a bill to index TOPS to the rate of
inflation and the former offered several bills addressing much more extensive
reforms along the lines of above.
By all means, pass this incremental
bill – even improve it by speeding up the locking in of the payment level to AY 2016 – that
changes positively only at the very margins. But do not let it become an excuse
to decline in engaging in further reform with real significance, as by itself
this does next to nothing to resolve wasteful allocation of funding paying for
higher education. It alone would leave us still a long way from scoring on this
issue.
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