Whether you’re thrilled about the election of Donald Trump as the next president or you’re still recoiling from the news, LSU President F. King Alexander says it’s time to accept the outcome and begin a conversation on how Trump can improve higher education.
“It’s time to get serious about solving our nation’s higher education crisis with support from our nation’s new leader,” writes King in a new op-ed featured in The Hechinger Report, a publication of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media. “We need to pull together and galvanize the recommendations of our higher education leadership into real, positive policy change for our public universities. Because without clear, affordable pathways to quality higher education, the other problems facing our country—a stagnant economy, middling job growth, mounting health challenges—will remain just as pressing as they are today.”
Though Trump hasn’t outlined his higher education plan, Alexander notes, the incoming president is against the idea of federalization.
“That is why the concept of a federal-state partnership, which would incentivize states to maintain or increase their support of public colleges and universities, is so crucial to our future,” Alexander writes. “And that’s why the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) have both identified the pursuit of such a partnership as their number one priority.”
As it stands, the federal government is the primary funding source for public colleges and universities through federal grants, loans and tax credits, Alexander notes. Students and parents are given these funds to take to whichever university they choose, regardless of whether it is public, private or for-profit.
“This has had a quiet and unintended consequence of allowing states to steadily back out of their funding obligations by supplanting state dollars with federal ones,” Alexander writes. “In other words, we stand at the brink of ‘federalizing’ higher education as states continuously remove themselves from funding their public responsibilities.”
At the very foundation of this predicament is a 30-year decline in state “tax effort” support for public colleges and universities, Alexander says. And while public institutions educate 75% of the nation’s students, he notes they receive funding from their respective states that hovers at 1966 “tax effort” levels, which measures state spending when compared to a state’s per-capita fiscal capacity.
“As a nation, we complain about the cost of attending college, while studies show 80 percent of tuition increases at public universities and colleges between 2001 and 2011 were the direct result of state disinvestment,” he writes. “Without state reinvestment, public tuition will undoubtedly rise in order to fill the gap. This can’t continue if we are committed to our next generation of students, or to the current and future economy of this nation.”
It’s a national issue that hits home particularly hard in Louisiana, where state funding of higher education is on pace to be abandoned in 2027, Alexander says.
“Once that happens, higher education will indeed be a federalized institution,” he writes. “As Mr. Trump begins planning his approach to policy in earnest, we urge him to take the recommendations of our nation’s leading public higher education organizations and implement a federal-state partnership to keep public colleges and universities affordable.”
