House Bill No. 803, more commonly known as WISE, is no longer riding the legislative rails.
Gov. Bobby Jindal signed the bill into law last week, creating a $40 million fund for Louisiana higher education to produce more graduates in high-demand fields like STEM.
On Tuesday the Workforce and Innovation for a Stronger Economy Council met for the first time to begin discussing the allocation of these funds.
Board of Regents chairman Clinton Rasberry, Jr. said the Council will act as an independent subcommittee of the Board of Regents.
According to Board Deputy Commissioner for Finance and Administration Barbara Goodson, WISE funding partially comes from Community Block Development Grant recovery funds from 2008 hurricanes Gustav and Ike. The funds have additional restrictions outside of those already set forth via WISE, Goodson said.
Fifty-one percent of that money must help individuals under middle income levels in areas impacted by the storms, Goodson said. This only includes 53 out of 64 parishes in the state, excluding LSU Shreveport.
In addition, there is $16 million in general fund dollars from the 2012-13 fiscal year contributing to WISE without outside restrictions, Goodson said.
University of Louisiana System President Sandra Woodley said the Council needs to create a model for funding allotment possibilities to continue the conversation.
“We need to have something to react to,” Woodley said.
LSU President F. King Alexander said the University has worked closely over the past few months to investigate what would be best for the LSU System.
“We’re deciding on what degrees and certificates qualify [as a high-demand field],” Alexander said. “We want to be sure we aren’t leaving anything out or overvaluing anything.”
College of Humanities and Social Sciences Dean Gaines Foster, having worked at the University for a few months shy of 32 years, said students, and especially their parents, want to pursue majors that will lead to an immediate job after completing their undergraduate degrees.
“Our numbers are going down,” Foster said. “There’s kind of a major attack on them.”
Foster said people tend to forget the College also supplies majors in communication disorders, psychology and film and media arts, which may go on to work in Louisiana’s high demand industries.
“There are a lot of areas where we directly relate to what WISE is about,” Foster said.
Alexander said health-related degrees and certificates have been “reluctantly included” in the University’s WISE planning.
In August 2013, Foster wrote a letter to The Advocate entitled “LSU not a trade school.” Foster said he wrote in response to a letter to the editor a few days prior.
“I was deeply troubled and offended by that [letter],” Foster said. “I wanted to remind them that what we do is incredibly useful to society.”
Alexander said the emphasis on STEM versus liberal arts education is the “historical condition of American education” since the 19th century.
There is no point in “building bridges” for STEM students if those bridges do not contribute to solving society’s problems, Alexander said.
“I am not a STEM major,” Alexander said. “My undergraduate degree is in political science.”
Foster said if the U.S. economy is to take off industrial leaders and engineers need a higher understanding of the world than most Americans have.
The Council is set to meet again in the first week of August, where Rasberry hopes it may move forward with a clearer plan for allocation of funds.