LSU President F. King Alexander’s plan to make going to college a debt-free experience for American students is highlighted in an extensive feature in the current issue of Washington Monthly, a bimonthly publication based in the nation’s capital.
The feature titled “Can This Man Save the Public University?” opens by detailing how Alexander recently stole the show with his plan at a hearing on college affordability held in Washington, D.C. At the hearing, Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander made clear his intent to use the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act—the federal statute that controls everything from student loans to support for minority-serving institutions—a vehicle to deregulate higher education.
“But as today’s hearing on college affordability proceeds, it becomes clear that things aren’t going as he might have liked,” the feature reads. “The problem is that the Democrats’ star witness, the Louisiana State University President F. King Alexander, is stealing the show.”
Alexander’s ideas for ensuring college affordability are the polar opposite of Sen. Alexander’s: the LSU president wants more federal regulation—including on his own state and university.
The “greatest challenge facing public universities,” F. King Alexander explains, is that states today spend about half as much on higher education on a per capita income basis as they did in 1981. This is a direct result, he says, of a regulatory failure built into federal law. In other areas of federal policy, such as transportation and health care, federal dollars come with strings attached—states have to pitch in a set amount of money too. That’s not the case for higher education, where money follows the student to private and public colleges alike, and states have no requirements to fund public universities at a certain (or indeed any) level.
Washington Monthly reports that according to King, the result is that when states are under budget pressure, as they have been in the years since the financial crisis, they slash spending on higher ed. The burden of those cuts then gets shifted to students, in the form of higher tuition, and to the federal government, in greater spending on grants, tax credits, and subsidized student loans.
On the current course, King says, within twenty years at least eight states—including Colorado, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and South Carolina—will spend no public money on their state universities, and in the rest of the country public higher education will be a shell of its former self.
