Colleges and universities will be spared from general fund cuts for the remainder of the current budget cycle as Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose campaign promise was to prioritize those schools, announced last week the state’s remaining $70 million deficit will come solely from the Department of Health and Hospitals.
“[Louisiana] higher education has suffered the deepest budget cuts of any higher education system in the country over the last eight years,” Edwards said in a statement Thursday.
The Louisiana Legislature’s decisions to hand down painful cuts to higher education over the past two terms under former Gov. Bobby Jindal, paving the way for skeptical university administrators and polite misgivings when it came time to balance the budget, informed the process.
But the state has a long way to go before it can boast a reinvestment in schools.
TOPS, the beloved tuition-paying program for Louisiana students who reach average academic benchmarks, was left unfunded by $28 million this year. Edwards directed universities to absorb those costs.
That means a cut to campuses in the same ballpark as the $70 million deficit anyways, as the state has used a 40-60 model for cuts in the past — 40 percent for higher education, 60 percent for DHH. If that were the case for this shortfall, higher education would be hit with exactly $28 million. Edwards acknowledged the TOPS cut in his statement.
And the University, which enrolls a large number of TOPS recipients, will take a larger hit than any other school, at $10 million. The next biggest cut to a school is a less than $4 million reduction to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
University Executive Director of Policy and External Affairs Jason Droddy said administrators are still hoping the TOPS cut can be mitigated so schools with higher-performing students aren’t punished.
“There doesn’t seem to be a vehicle right off the bat that seems to resolve the issue, though the DHH resolution to the budget was also unexpected, so there could be something out there,” Droddy said.
Droddy declined to comment on how specifically the University will deal with the TOPS cut, although cutting student services had been on the table before the new plan was announced. He said University leadership will be meeting in the coming days and weeks to evaluate the situation.
LSU President F. King Alexander lobbied in the months leading up to the newest round of cuts, explaining to legislators, students and families the “pain” to be brought on by the TOPS reduction.
“It’s kinda like running a 100 yard dash and [the Legislature] only went about 50 yards,” Alexander said in an interview before the cuts were announced.
Commissioner of Higher Education Joseph Rallo thanked Edwards for lessening the cuts in a statement Thursday, vowing to find efficiencies in schools — a point of contention among lawmakers, primarily Republicans, who say the state should live within its means during times of financial hardships.
Throughout February and early March, during a special session dedicated to finding the means to bridge massive deficits totaling at one point roughly $3 billion for the current fiscal year and the next, university administrators could be found bouncing from committee to committee, senator office to representative office, laying at legislators’ feet a bleak account of what they have endured.
Those pleas reverberated in committee rooms as freshmen legislators learned what exactly $700 million in funding reductions have done to schools — faculty and staff lines were eliminated, recruiting efforts maimed and efficiencies found.