What if I told you that there were colleges in this state that have graduation rates below 5 percent?
Okay, so you probably wouldn’t be that surprised. But what if I also said that, of the roughly 14 four-year public universities, only one had a graduation rate above 50 percent?
You would probably be right in thinking that you attend that university. But LSU is an outlier from Louisiana’s universities in that it graduates 61 percent of students within six years. Louisiana Tech takes a close second place at 46 percent, according to a 2011 study by the non-profit Complete College America.
I mention all of this because the American Association of Colleges and Universities ranked this state first in — wait for it — cuts to higher education funding in the past year. Louisiana cut funding by a cool 17.6 percent, which is almost double the amount that second place winner West Virginia lopped off at 8.9 percent.
This is not to say that there is a direct correlation between funding and success of the students in the education system. In fact, Governor Bobby Jindal’s office commented that Louisiana outspends 33 other states per capita. This almost makes sense, because we are the 25th most populous state in the union.
So, if we are counting spending per capita, shouldn’t Louisiana be spending more than only 25 states instead of 33? Well, therein lies the problem.
In addition to the four-year universities, the state helps fund more two year colleges than one can count. Most of these institutions go a long way to set their students up to fail.
Our lowest achievers on the two year scale are Delgado Community College and Baton Rouge Community College that total an egregious five percent graduation rate. But granted, these are community colleges.
At the four-year level, Southern University at New Orleans – SUNO – graduates a meager 8 percent of its students in four years while UNO, LSUS and LSUA all come in below 25 percent.
The moral of the story is that our above-average per capita investment is not exactly garnering the returns that the state taxpayers should expect. And while our friends at other universities around the state will probably celebrate the news that we are first in something pertaining to education, at least we can rejoice in the fact that we – or at least 61 percent of us – know better.
So while we are spending more than we should on higher education, LSU still feels the pain when the state lops off another 17 percent of the education budget. Lord knows what other campuses around the state are starting to look like.
At some point, the legislature and the governor need to become realistic in the number of institutions that we can continue to keep open. There is a lot of money to be saved by either closing or consolidating the smaller and least productive colleges around the state.
We don’t need more colleges to give opportunities to our students. We need effective institutions that are funded well enough to graduate more than 50 percent of their students.
Then, our tax dollars would go a lot further in funding universities that have a chance of giving their students a college education. Because currently the graduation rate for students seeking bachelor’s degrees is an abysmal 43.7 percent.
And before I run out of synonyms for bad, I should mention that the average full-time student takes 5.5 years to graduate a state university.
That’s bad.
But despite all of these dour statistics, at least we can take pride in the fact that from our flagship we can look down upon the veritable sea of mediocrity below us.
It almost explains how the University of Louisiana at Lafayette can screw up their three letter initials.
Eli Haddow is a 20-year-old English and history junior from New Orleans.