With TOPS approaching $300 million next year, Republican state lawmakers tentatively are filing bills to rein in the massive-yet-beloved program while preserving tuition payments for seniors and their parents who have come to expect them.
Manship School News Services reports Republican state Sen. Blade Morrish, of Jennings, pre-filed a bill for the March 14 regular session that would raise the eligibility requirements for TOPS from a 20 to 21 on the ACT and from a 2.50 to 2.75 GPA. It would become effective with students graduating in the 2019-2020 school year.
If that criteria were implemented today, the scholarships of 3,294 current students would be revoked.
The state has run into trouble funding the program. TOPS is short $28 million this year, which state colleges and universities absorbed as a budget cut.
For years, legislators have tried to find a solution to the ballooning TOPS program which began in 1998 at an initial cost of $54 million. It has more than quadrupled since then reaching $265 million this year.
Sujuan Boutte, the director of the Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance, says the number of ineligibles could change as students learn about the new requirements.
“All of those 3,200 students could say, ‘Hey, I’m taking the ACT until I get a 21,’” she says.
Morrish says his bill will be just one of a “litany” of measures dealing with TOPS in the coming session.
“We are going to do something with TOPS,” Morrish vows. “If (the cost) continues to climb, it’s going to go off a cliff and we won’t have it anymore.”
Sen. Jack Donahue, R-Mandeville, says he introduced a nearly identical bill two years ago, but couldn’t find the votes for passage as the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation, for whom the program is named, opposed it.
