As part of the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Sen. Bill Cassidy stood before a presentation room packed with students and faculty Friday to speak about bioengineering and the future of healthcare.
What they heard, however, was just as much about politics as it was medicine.
LSU President F. King Alexander introduced the senator and addressed federal higher education funding and how it relates to engineering.
Alexander specifically mentioned the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, passed in 1965 to govern the administration of federal aid programs, which is reauthorized approximately every five years. When it was last reauthorized in 2008, Title IV federal student aid amounted to more than $169 billion for the 2012-2013 school year, and total student aid — including sources such as federal loans and grants — has grown to $238 billion, according to College Board’s Trends in Student Aid 2013.
“So far, we’ve done a lot to support institutions that have sprung up, that have grown in the last 25 years — many of those for-profit institutions — but we haven’t done enough to support our public institutions,” Alexander said.
Alexander added that of the hundreds of for-profit institutions receiving the same Pell Grants as the University, not one is going towards engineering or STEM fields because the programs are so expensive.
When Cassidy began his lecture, he also addressed the importance of higher education institutions and the effect they have on a person’s future.
“You will appreciate that you look over the course of your life, and in part, a large measure is guided by where you went to school,” Cassidy said. “I have the privileges I have now because of the education I had here.”
Cassidy also addressed topics including the human genome project, communication among researchers and ethics in the future of medicine.
After his lecture, one student asked Cassidy about the cost of higher education and how to get students to continue their education.
In response, Cassidy criticized some of the federal plans for student aid, including President Obama’s American Opportunity grant program.
“Invite me back for another distinguished lecture series, and we’ll have a full discussion on that,” Cassidy said. “I don’t mean to dodge, it’s just a really complicated answer.”
Mechanical engineering junior Courtney Soileau said she found the lecture interesting but didn’t think it necessarily addressed the topic she was expecting.
“I thought it was informative, but in more of a political aspect than the actual future of biological engineering in medicine,” Soileau said.
Biological engineering senior Ernesto Kufoy also said the lecture was interesting, though he didn’t learn anything new.
Kufoy said he felt like the senator was trying to advertise his political ideas to the crowd.
“I thought he had an agenda, like he came here trying to push certain policies,” Kufoy said. “I wish he would have talked about being able to keep biological engineering students, or even biomedical engineering students in the state of Louisiana. There aren’t jobs for us here. We have to move out.”