by
Dr. Albert L. Samuels

 When Bobby Jindal ran for Governor, he talked about how important higher education is in securing Louisiana’s future. He cited his experience as former president of the University of Louisiana System as one of his key qualifications for the office of governor. Many in the higher education community were encouraged by Candidate Jindal’s background, thinking that someone who was “one of them” would occupy the Governor’s Mansion.
 But that was then - before the national recession and the meteoric descent in oil prices  turned surpluses into deficits.  The same governor, the Rhodes Scholar that some had hoped would be a friend to higher education, proposed a Friday the 13th Freddy Kruger type of budget for higher education - to the tune of $219 million in cuts, a reduction of 15% in state funding. Thus far, the legislature has not come up with enough cash in order to substantially mitigate the proposed cuts. The latest proposal, offered by Sen. Lydia Jackson (D-Shreveport) would delay the implementation of a portion of the Stelly tax rollback enacted last year (projected to raise $118 million) in order to soften the blow to the universities. The governor has threatened to veto this bill should it reach his desk; he calls it a tax increase by another name. However, the governor has yet to offer a serious proposal to offset the cuts facing higher education this year. Unless something changes soon, Louisiana’s colleges and universities will experience a catastrophic hatchet job that will have devastating, long-term consequences on the state. These impacts will cripple not just our colleges, but will have far-reaching implications for Louisiana’s economic development for decades to come.
 The governor justifies his proposals in part by decrying his lack of “flexibility” due to the failure of the Louisiana Constitution  to include higher education and health care among its constitutionally protected areas from budget cuts. He supports a constitutional amendment granting the administration more flexibility to deal with budget crises  (However, since the earliest an amendment can be voted on by the people is October, it’s not clear how this amendment helps us with the problem we have right now.)  However, he found $50 million to save a chicken plant in Farmerville from going out of business and $85 million to keep the Saints in New Orleans. To be sure, I have nothing against the chicken plant and I love the Saints. The point of these examples is that the problem is not simply one of revenue - the problem is one of priorities. And when it comes to higher education, that has historically been a problem in Louisiana.
 The truth is that Louisiana has never given higher education - or education, for that matter - its proper priority. Education, in the heady days of the oil-financed populism that is the legacy of Louisiana politics from Huey Long to Edwin Edwards, was always the state’s highest priority - after everything else of course. By comparison, Texas, another oil state, invested the proceeds of its oil revenues in higher education (which explains, for example, why the University of Texas at Austin is significantly more well endowed than LSU).However, in a state with such an abundance of natural resources, it did not matter (or so it seemed) that its higher education system was under financed or poorly organized. Not when people with an eighth grade education could get middle-class level jobs in the oil patch making more money than people with college degrees.
 This way of life came crashing down to earth in the 1980’s during the Oil Bust. As a result, higher education endured thirteen consecutive years of budget cuts starting in the early 1980’s; indeed, in some years, colleges experienced mid-year cuts, which are even more debilitating. Many bright professors and researchers left the state, finding greener pastures elsewhere. The state began to reap the consequences of its failure to invest in education at all levels. Industries for decades have more often cited inadequacies in Louisiana’s education system than its supposed “unfriendly business climate” or its reputation for political corruption as the principal reason they choose not to invest in our state.  This point is significant because it explodes the key fallacy in Jindal’s political and economic philosophy thus far - the notion that Louisiana’s history of poor ethics and its “unfriendly business taxes” constituted the chief stumbling block to the state’s economic growth. It has taken the state’s colleges and universities 20 years to recover from the budget crisis of the 1980’s - only to be walloped again by the current proposals by the Jindal administration.
 It is through the prism of the budget crises of the 1980’s that the proposed cuts by Jindal must be viewed because it disrobes one of the arguments used by those who support the cuts - the idea that  higher education could simply return to its 2006 funding levels (before the Katrina funding boom) and simply “cut the fat” that colleges put on during the boom years.  This argument ignores the fact that Louisiana went 25 years without fully funding its higher education formula. The recent infusion of dollars into higher education represent the first time in decades that Louisiana funded its colleges and universities at the Southern average. While that was a noteworthy accomplishment, it should not be the end-all we strive for. If, for example, Les Miles were simply an “average” coach with an average win total, it wouldn’t be long before the LSU faithful would be calling for his head. A football program that has grown accustomed to competing for a national championship would not long tolerate a coach who was simply “average.” Similarly, Louisiana should not settle for an “average” or a “below average” higher education system. 
 Just recently, LSU was mentioned among U.S. News and World Report’s top U.S. universities--it was ranked 130th , making it the first public university in Louisiana ever to make the U.S. News and World Report rankings. This is partly attributable to the university’s “Flagship agenda,” its “Forever LSU” Campaign, higher academic standards, and other factors that are starting to pay off. Louisiana needs a first-rate research university if it is to be a major player in the global economy. The connection between economic development and research universities is well known in economic development circles. The draconian cuts proposed by the administration threatened to undo the progress that LSU has made in recent years. They will send a powerful signal nationally that Louisiana is not a good place to invest. And to the degree that LSU catches a cold, many of the state’s other universities will have pneumonia. The cuts will have devastating impacts at many of the smaller universities. They will require massive layoffs, cause the cancellation of numerous academic programs (and imperil the accreditation of other programs that are not outright eliminated), and threaten the long-term viability of some universities.
 Supporters of these cuts argue that Louisiana has more four-year colleges than it can afford and this crisis creates an opportunity for a long-overdue pairing down of universities. But too many colleges by whose definition? There is no magic ratio for what the “optimal” number of universities should be - the city of Boston has 18 four-year colleges, more than the entire state of Louisiana! Furthermore, only 27% of the state’s population is college educated (the national average for a state is 39%), making Louisiana dead last in the proportion of its population that is college-educated. Given our deficit of college educated citizens, it is not clear how closing colleges and universities makes a whole lot of sense.
 Some say Louisiana should invest more in its community and technical colleges and reduce the number of four-year schools. But that is a false choice. The argument often used is that Louisiana’s shortage of skilled laborers is what is preventing companies from locating here; consequently, we need to build up our community colleges to create the workforce necessary for those kinds of jobs. Then, we will be able to nab the big firms, like the German steel plant that recently went to Alabama or the Nissan facility that located in Mississippi. (Actually, Louisiana lacks no shortage of good training programs - we already train welders and carpenters and brick masons,  who very often move to other states where they make more money). The same thinking is behind this so-called “alternative diploma” (ostensibly to solve the state’s high school dropout problem) to provide opportunity for those kids not likely to earn a four-year degree.  This rationale overlooks the fact that if Louisiana decapitates its colleges and universities, that will hurt all workers, not just those in the so-called “knowledge industries.“ Furthermore, it fails to consider that even the kids taking “shop” or “auto repair,” or “business math” in a digital, automated economy, need to understand computers and mathematics to deal with the high-tech equipment currently utilized in these so-called “mechanical” fields. 
 Not only is it short-sighted to cut higher education as deeply as is being proposed, but the manner in which the administration proposes to do so is grossly unfair. Jindal wants to use a so-called “performance-based” formula as the basis for determining the state allocation for its public universities. Institutions would be funded on the basis of their graduation rates and the amount of federal research dollars they generate, as opposed to their levels of enrollment.  On the surface, it appears to be a fair measuring stick. But the devil is in the details. In actuality, the formula does not measure performance at all. If for example, it treats institutions like Southern University, whose entering freshman average 18 on the ACT on par with LSU, where students frequently score 24 or above on the same measure. Colleges who primarily admit the best-prepared students will always have an advantage over smaller schools with more lenient admissions standards that enroll a higher proportion of the less-prepared students. It is like comparing apples and oranges.  Students who come to college with weaker acad For those institutions like Southern University, whose mission has been to offer educational opportunity not just to the elite or the best prepared, the formula penalizes Southern and institutions like it simply for fulfilling their own missions. Jindal’s so-called “performance based” formula is a thinly-veiled mechanism that appears purposely designed to mortally wound “less favored” higher education institutions within the state.
 The legislature and the administration must come up with a solution to this current crisis that minimizes the impacts to higher education. Literally, the future of our state is at stake. Jindal cannot simply be “Dr. No” and stick to his unrealistic, anti-tax, anti-solution stance to the problem. His posture is particularly infuriating considering that his policies are partly to blame for this crisis. It was the Stelly tax rollbacks that he brags about (and which he seems unwilling to acknowledge were a mistake) which have aggravated the budget crisis. While he opposes using “one-time money” to solve the current problem, that did not stop him last year from spending $500 million in one-time money on road projects. Lawmakers should delay or roll back the tax cuts from last year, dip into the Rainy Day Fund, apply the tax incentives that  Jim Bernhardt wants to give back to the atate, or some combination of the above in order to avoid catastrophic cuts to higher education. If state leaders do not change course (and soon), they will not only be cutting colleges; they will be cutting our own throats.