Louisiana is getting a noticeable upgrade with Richard Nelson assuming the presidency of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System.
Nelson currently helms the state’s Department of Revenue, having served as a state representative for one term and running for governor before exiting the race early. He carved out a reputation for fiscal responsibility, offering several pieces of legislation well-designed to make the state more competitive economically, and took many of those ideas and stumped successfully to put some of them into law once Republican Gov. Jeff Landry installed him overseeing Revenue. Others fell by the wayside by a defeated constitutional amendment, but there will be another try with them for voters in 2026.
That commends him well in taking over a higher education system which has had its traditional model of heavy lifting by taxpayers that discouraged efficient operations usurped by a more balanced one that increases reliance on tuition, creating an incentive to provide useful educations to a clientele interested in value for its money. This especially matters with community and technical colleges, for while the former may serve as a gateway to a bachelor degree and above, much of community college emphasis and the entire focus of technical colleges is vocational in nature.
Nelson also had an interest in workforce development while in the Legislature which will serve him well int this position. As well, he doesn’t have an academic terminal degree – this continuing a pattern long established in Louisiana higher education of having presidents and chancellors with law degrees with these considered terminal – but this is much less an issue with a system chief than with the chief officer of a university or college.
In this day an age, that even might be an advantage. The opening stages of the “demographic cliff,” or demographic changes that will shrink the traditional pool of students, have commenced, challenging Louisiana institutions to maintain, much less increase, their enrollments. And this comes in the face of the Board of Regents’ ambitious Master Plan to have at least 60 percent of residents have at least some kind of credential from higher education by 2030. It is extraordinarily unlikely that any significant boost in degree completion, particularly at the senior level, will occur in the next four years, so if the 2024 level of 52.5 percent can be stretched upwards enough by then, completion of credentials will have to take up the slack and that is the wheelhouse of the LCTCS.
Somebody without the usual taint of inertia from academia will be valuable here, and Nelson can provide that spark. Consider also that he can’t have a worse attitude about the nature and purpose of higher education than does the outgoing system head, Monty Sullivan. A careerist who worked his way up the LCTCS system, Sullivan embodies the wrong thinking so prevalent in academia, with perhaps his most noticeable exposition of this being when he framed a resolution asking all institutions to report on the monies spent on and purposes behind race-based initiatives as an attack on racial minorities and insinuated anybody who supported it was racist.
This kind of evidence-free closed-mindedness is what increasingly drives people away from higher education and towards activities and careers where they can succeed on their merits, not by being judged on how well they respond to indoctrination. Nelson’s administration should feature anything but this, and this joins the selection of Wade Rousse to head up the Louisiana State University System as promising picks to lead state higher education systems.
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