If we’ve learned anything over the past decade about higher education in Louisiana, it’s this: The state no longer views what’s going on inside LSU as critical to its intellectual and economic future, Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball writes in his latest column.
It’s certainly not as important as the corporations, plants and businesses racking up some $5 billion annually in corporate welfare from the state, he adds.
“We know this because LSU’s state funding has been cut 16 times since the 2009 dawn of ‘The Louisiana Miracle,’ otherwise known as the Bobby Jindal administration,” Ball writes. “That, in dollars and cents, is a whack of some $141 million, or more than 53%. The situation isn’t much better under Gov. John Bel Edwards and our current crop of state legislators.”
Jindal spent eight years slashing $731 million in direct funding to higher education—reducing state government’s financial role from 61% to 29%, he notes. Louisiana colleges and universities responded by hiking tuition and fees 111%—much of which is covered by TOPS.
“Despite the seismic shift of transferring higher education funding from the state to the student, the cost of attending LSU—despite a decade of tuition hikes and the nonstop invention of new fees—remains below the national average,” Ball says. “Fair enough, but given the present-day view that LSU is little more than a user-funded, job training facility with a good football team and a cute, new live mascot, then the Ole War Skule needs to start charging based on the value of its degrees.”
According to LSU research, someone who graduated from the Manship School of Mass Communication, between August 2015 and May 2016, earned an average starting salary of $35,025.
“Why should those graduates pay the same tuition and fees as someone averaging $81,490 as a freshly-minted chemical engineer? Especially when it’s far more expensive to educate an engineer than a journalist or marketing wonk,” Ball says. “ … LSU is turning out numerous graduates who are beginning life in ‘the real world’ with salaries less than $20,000. Given the evolving nature of what colleges—sadly—have become is it fair they pay the same freight as those knocking down $80,000-plus?”
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