After semesters of uncertainty for the future of the TOPS program, a clear solution was made over the summer by the Louisiana State Legislature to fully fund the program.

In 2016, an advance budget was approved by the state House and the state Senate to cut the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students to about 70 percent, leaving students who qualified for the TOPS responsible for 40 percent of their scholarship money during the spring 2017 semester. On June 1, The Louisiana Senate Finance Committee agreed to reinstate the funds allocated for TOPS, fully-funding the program again.

“[A fully-funded TOPS program] is a lot of relief in the parents’ minds,” LSU President F. King Alexander said. “Particularly, it is has more impact on LSU more than any other university in the state. Fifteen thousand to 16,000 of our 26,000 undergraduates are on TOPS.”

Research collected on CollegePortraits.org states 81 percent of students at the University call Louisiana home, meaning they have the opportunity to qualify for TOPS.

Along with the June 1 reinstatement of funds, the Legislature also guaranteed the University and other higher education institutions fee authority for three years, rather than allowing the state Legislature to determine them.

Part of the concession made by the University to receive full funding to TOPS included a reduction to the Louisiana Department of Health’s budget, affecting LSU Health Sciences Centers and the University’s Healthcare Service Division, possibly reducing the ability for these constituents to generate revenue.

Alexander said any money saved from cutting the TOPS program should be used for higher education funding.

“Our concerns are that any tweaks they make to TOPS, that if any money that they actually save doesn’t go back to higher education, we’re not interested,” Alexander said. “Unless you can guarantee that any savings would go either one way back to our students or higher education, and right now there are not guarantees of that.”

In an update released to the public by the University on June 16, the University stated that “Louisiana’s higher education budget remains austere at best by national standards,” but commended that higher education continued to be spared from further cuts to their budget.

Dena Winegeart contributed to this report.