Dillard University Pres. Walter
Kimbrough, upon reviewing the results of a recent report concerning statistics
about the state’s Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, which pays tuition
at the highest state-school level for any university in the state for students
who have graduated from high schools in state, or who were home schooled, or
who meet other special qualifications if certain qualifications are met,
declared the program “is more of an engine of inequality than it is of
opportunity.” The program began out of a private effort by philanthropist Patrick
Taylor to fund college for at-risk children in New Orleans who were able to
graduate from high school.
But when the state
institutionalized this into law using public money in 1998, the program as a
tool to send students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to college became
only one goal for use of that money. Incredibly modest merit standards were put
into place for qualification to earn it, which today
means that a student graduating from a high school to pursue non-technical
study must pass there a certain number of core courses, achieve a 2.5 grade
point average, and score a 20 composite on the American College Test.
The report noted that students from
higher-income families were more likely to qualify for TOPS, given their higher
average ACT scores and that they were more likely to take the core courses.
Kimbrough found this disappointing, in that “TOPS is structured to give money
to top students, from top-income families, who attend top schools with top curriculums
… a program that exacerbates income inequality and limits financial assistance
to those who need it the most … [lawmakers have] rigged the system to give the
money to those most likely to succeed.”
So, he writes, “if we are trying to
improve opportunity, it means helping students who cannot go to college without
additional financial support … most TOPS recipients come from families that
will pay for them to go to college, with or without this grant. TOPS
essentially serves as a tax break couched as a reward for academic rigor and
success.” His solution, then, is “[c]ap the income level of families that are
eligible for TOPS ($60,000), lower the ACT score and raise the grade-point
average,” even though “I am asking the Louisiana Legislature to create rules
that are against the self-interests of its members,” because the current set of
standards “essentially ensures that their kids will be TOPS-eligible.”
Never mind that Kimbrough tries to
resurrect the original intent of the program to justify his changes, basically
transforming it from a very watered-down merit basis (the ACT score requirement
is set at the state average, which is below the national average but never less
than the current 20) into primarily a need-based instrument – an approach
rejected in 1998. The population to which he seeks to cater is that which by
their school is assigned decent grades (even as the state does not release GPA
information, grade inflation is such these days that anecdotal evidence shows
that for state public high schools regularly around a third of their students graduate
with honors, typically above a 3.0) but who perform significantly below the
national average on the ACT. This condition seems indicative of current performances
at a number of Louisiana high schools, almost all of these primarily attended
by students from lower-income families, that have few students qualify for
TOPS.
Whether intentionally, Kimbrough’s
argument implies that household income drives ability to secure a merit-based
TOPS. Yet this is an error in logic because income does not cause achievement,
but only is associated with it. The genuine cause, which affects both income
and achievement and therefore makes them appear causally related, is that the
traits and attitudes that cause parents to succeed financially in most
instances get passed along to their children and are the same components to
succeeding academically. It’s not degree of wealth that is the largest factor
in academic success, but adhering to certain cultural values.
So if the state is going to give
money away to encourage academic achievement, it makes no sense to distribute
it on the basis of presumed ability to pay. Possessing discrete attitudes is
the appropriate object of subsidization, which is independent of household
wealth: except in the cases where luck intervenes decisively, those with wealth
without the optimal attitudes will squander it and those without it who do have
them will find a way to get ahead. This makes his plan entirely unsuitable if
the goal is academic achievement.
That may not be it, but if that is
need-based, there’s a different program specific to Louisiana for that, GO Grants, which can address the
additional expenditures for those admitted to a college that otherwise might
keep them out even if they earn tuition. If that’s what Kimbrough wants to
stump for, he should say he wants to defund TOPS at the expense of this, not to
change its essential nature as an encourager of academic achievement that leads
to college study.
Which points out the most bizarre
aspect of his argument: if TOPS was altered along his lines, there would be
students who could qualify for TOPS that
could not qualify to be admitted to a public four-year university in the state.
In essence, those entrance
requirements for those just graduated from high school now match TOPS
qualifications. Unless policy-makers wanted to juice the enrollments of
community colleges, there seems to be little point to this.
Unless taking into account that
private and proprietary schools also qualify. While TOPS mainly is to encourage
students to attend Louisiana public universities – another main motivation
behind it was to provide an incentive to stop a reputed brain drain of the
state’s brighter students from heading out of state – the tuition equivalent of
what in practice turns out for most recipients (some qualify for higher amounts
whose GPA and ACT scores are significantly higher than the minimum) to be an
amount up to the rate of tuition charged at Louisiana State University Baton
Rouge can be paid to a non-public school certified to operate in the state.
It’s not likely to pay fully that amount, but this subsidization does create an
incentive to attend those schools.
And, guess what? The average ACT
score of students admitted at Kimbrough’s Dillard is between its lowest
quartile cutoff of 17 and highest of 20 – in other words, well below the
current TOPS minimum and national average. The policy changes that Kimbrough
advocates would serve to shovel more tax dollars into Dillard’s coffers.
Naturally, he fails to mention that possible outcome in his piece, leading to
wondering whether legislators are the actual objects in question related to
this effort who are acting in self-interest.
You can fault TOPS for not being an
efficient use of taxpayer dollars in its not being a true scholarship program –
it’s hard to argue that it is when probably half the state’s graduating classes
can qualify for it – that therefore subsidizes weak and/or unmotivated students
who end up wasting these public resources by flunking out or not completing
college degrees. But it does not serve as “an engine of inequality” and of inopportunity
because of its current standards, if inefficiently, that reward those whose
practices lead to success after schooling. Those without a willingness or
inability to inculcate such standards stand little chance of achieving
significant academic success in any event.
Just paying to send more students of
marginal or worse capability to college does little to increase the eventual
pool of those in the workforce with meaningful college degrees. If you want to
find donors to subsidize such students, great. But don’t ask taxpayers to
submit to an exercise the major impact of which would be to send more taxpayer
resources to non-state schools while relatively few students of that kind
graduate into real success.
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