Louisiana students and families could pay more for colleges and universities in the future if the ability to raise tuition transfers from the Legislature to school governing boards as proposed in two bills before the Legislature.
These proposed measures would take the schools off their traditional legislative leash.
Higher education leaders have lobbied for tuition autonomy in recent years to offset decreasing state funding to schools. As the Legislature ran into continual budget deficits and former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s ardent refusal to raise taxes became law of the legislative land, lawmakers had only two primary sources of money to use in balancing the budgets: higher education and healthcare.
Because so much of the budget is dedicated by law or the constitution to other areas of government, universities and public hospitals have picked up the tab for money shortfalls by cutting staff and consolidating programs.
“They had to,” said Rep. Barry Ivey, R-Baton Rouge, because the state cut the schools’ budgets year after year.
Faced with decreasing general fund dollars, higher education administrators began eyeing tuition increases to offset funding shortfalls, But the ability to raise tuition rests with the Legislature, not the schools. That’s partly due to the fact that the state offers TOPS, four-year tuition scholarships to Louisiana high school seniors who have at least a 2.5 GPA. Essentially, TOPS provides free tuition, courtesy of the state.
To increase tuition drastically would be to further inflate the costs of an already rapidly growing program that has been difficult to rein in because of its popularity among residents.
The Legislature has increased tuition for universities, in relatively modest amounts, understanding that they hadn’t been able to fully fund them with the general fund. LSU’s in-state tuition and fees have increased from about $6,360 per year in 2011 to $9,722 in 2015.
The mandatory attendance fees, including tuition, for the University of Louisiana-Lafayette has more than doubled since 2007-08 to around $7,000 per year. UL Monroe
has a nearly identical trend. The others in the UL System, with the exception of Louisiana Tech, UNO and Nicholls State, run about 12 percent lower. Tech costs about $8,000, UNO $7,483 and Nicholls roughly $7,200.
Schools were granted the ability to increase fees on students in last year’s session, but that autonomy ends in 2017.
Even with some schools doubling their costs to students, Louisiana schools’ tuition still ranks below the average of peer institutions in the Southern Regional Education Board, and well below the national average.
The yearly cost of attendance for Louisiana four-year schools in 2010 was nearly $5,000 less than the national average, and was the lowest among all five SREB schools. Currently, the state is around $1,000 below the SREB average for tuition.
“You would think they would have already [given schools tuition autonomy], but they haven’t,” said LSU System President F. King Alexander, noting that lawmakers “love their control.”
Alexander likened the legislature’s grip over higher ed funding to a boa constrictor.
“They’re strangling us to death on this,” he said.
But Ivey, R-Baton Rouge, filed HB 439 to allow schools to raise their own tuition, albeit with some government oversight.
“When [schools’] funding is cut so devastatingly over the last several years in the Legislature, they have no ability to react,” Ivey said.
But Ivey’s bill includes caveats guarding against overly aggressive increases. It caps hikes at 10 percent for one year and 20 percent over a four-year period. It prohibits those increases from applying to TOPS students.
Rep. Steve Carter, R-Baton Rouge, has a similar but more restrictive bill. It would allow governing boards to impose a one-time increase in tuition, after 2019, only if the school meets certain graduation and retention benchmarks. It also would not allow tuition to exceed the SREB average.
If TOPS was left alone and university boards were allowed to increase tuition on their own, the cost of the scholarship could further increase.
That has been part of the hesitation to allow schools to increase tuition as lawmakers have been reluctant to change the beloved scholarship program that benefits thousands of Louisiana residents. For instance, half of LSU’s undergraduates receive the scholarship.
“It’d be like giving [LSU] a checkbook to the treasury,” Ivey said.
Scholarship costs to the state already have ballooned to nearly $300 million a year as tuition has increased and more students have qualified, and dozens of lawmakers are throwing their hat in the ring to rein it in — including Ivey.