Days before the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Higher Education Act, LSU President F. King Alexander hosted a panel of higher education leaders Wednesday on education reform as state funding for universities disappears.
Seton Hall assistant professor of higher education Robert Kelchen and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of educational policy studies and sociology Sara Goldrick-Rab rounded out the three-person panel. Both panelists spoke through Skype, but Kelchen could not participate because of technical difficulties.
“Everything is just hunky-dory as it sounds like in the newspaper,” Alexander joked of higher education. “It’s all roses and soft violins.”
Alexander and Goldrick-Rab lamented the state of public universities, especially regarding funding, tracing the history of federal and state legislation both said damaged low-income students’ chances of getting a college degree.
A “smart, poor” child has only a 10 percent chance of attending college, while a “rich, dumb” child has an 80 percent chance, Alexander said.
On the heels of a massive funding request for public universities by the Louisiana Board of Regents last month and another looming budget shortfall that could put higher education at risk, Alexander called for an overhaul of the funding system for universities.
Since the HEA’s passage, he said legislators decided not to fund public universities with state dollars, instead pointing to tuition increases and federal dollars as resources for universities. Louisiana now spends 55 percent less on higher education than it did in 1980, he said.
Goldrick-Rab said Louisianians are at the center of the challenges facing higher education, as the HEA transformed and put low-income students at a “tremendous” disadvantage by changing the purpose of universities.
“College is so much about money it’s hard to be about learning,” Goldrick-Rab said.
She likened the HEA to welfare, which she said gives low-income people “just enough” to prevent an uproar that would change the system.
The act assumed the only costs for attending universities were tuition and fees, she said, but 78 percent of costs to attend universities now are items such as transportation, books and housing — all of which cannot be supplemented by federal dollars coming from the HEA.
Goldrick-Rab said education is the only avenue the U.S. created to success, while it simultaneously blocks a large group of people from attending universities through inadequate funding mechanisms.
“One route to opportunity? That’s pretty narrow,” she said.
Alexander also said accreditation is “a joke,” and “anybody and everybody” can be accredited, although most institutions would not seek accreditation if they could not receive federal dollars from it.