GET DAILY REPORT FREE
Monty Sullivan, president of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System, reopened an old debate recently in response to news that Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration asked higher education officials to prepare for a $250 million cut as the temporary 0.45 percent state sales tax sunsets.
Members of the Board of Regents say the impact could be severe, with board member Blake David reportedly saying he’s holding out hope, albeit possibly delusional, that the tax would be renewed or replaced with another revenue source.
Sullivan had a different take. “Yet another failure of leadership by Louisiana Regents!” Sullivan posted on X. “Nobody seems to have the courage to say it out loud. … Louisiana has too many universities.”
Using the same social media platform, Senate Judiciary C Chair Jay Morris countered there may be too many community colleges, as “every small town wants one” but “doesn’t fill them up with students.” In response, Sullivan suggested Morris may have the “inability to comprehend the two-year college mission.”
Sullivan and Morris have since communicated, both willing to accept there are differing views on this topic. But the larger conversation is far from over.
Louisiana has 14 publicly funded four-year schools serving a statewide population of 4.5 million residents. Florida, by comparison, has 12 such institutions serving a population of 22.2 million people.
No one can argue Louisiana has an overflow of colleges and universities, but it’s highly unlikely our elected officials can find the political will to shut even one down, since each serves a different region of the state with jobs and other opportunities.
That said, higher education leaders will be under pressure in coming months to find new ways of doing business. Yet no one should be surprised by the slim times ahead.
The 0.45% state sales tax that’s causing all the headaches was originally sold to the public as a temporary budget fix, notes House Speaker Phillip DeVillier, so higher ed leaders should have been ready for this moment.
“That’s something I would have expected the universities to try and prepare for,” DeVillier says, adding he personally has no plans to consolidate or shutter campuses.
“I don’t think we have too many universities,” the speaker also said. “I think we have too many universities duplicating services.”
DeVillier mentioned LSU-Eunice’s plans to build a new STEAM (science, technology, engineering, agriculture and mathematics) center. That’s great for LSU-E, he said, but other schools want something similar.
“How many law schools do we need? How many med schools do we need? How many nursing schools do we need?” DeVillier asks. “We have to also take a step back and say, ‘What does Louisiana’s workforce need?’”
The higher education systems will present their budget requests to the Board of Regents in the fall. The board is responsible for prioritizing those requests, though Louisiana Economic Development and regional economic development offices review them first, meaning the Landry administration will have the opportunity to express its preferences.
The closest Louisiana has come to closing a university in recent memory was in 2011, when then-Gov. Bobby Jindal proposed merging Southern University at New Orleans and the University of New Orleans. The proposal created a political firestorm that brought the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. to town to help rally Southern stakeholders against the plan. Backers ultimately got behind another instrument that moved UNO from the LSU System to the UL System.
The politics of closing a university are daunting to say the least. Colleges are economic development engines, and even the most fiscally conservative lawmakers don’t want to lose one in their districts. In fact, legislators with colleges and universities in their backyards tend to stick together to block closures.
“I’ll protect you, and you protect me,” says Barry Erwin with the Council for a Better Louisiana, explaining the political strategy.
Even if you could make the politics work, would the exercise be worth the squeeze? Closing down a school won’t make its debt disappear, and if students move from a closing school to an open one, the state still has the expense of educating them.
“It’s not the cost-saver that many people think it would be,” Erwin says.
Plus, a state with Louisiana’s low educational attainment rate probably shouldn’t make it harder to get a degree, he adds.
Landry did not respond to questions asked through a spokesperson about whether Louisiana has too many colleges and universities, or if his administration had a plan to mitigate the $250 million reduction.
His Workforce Development and Higher Education Policy Council did not call for campus closures, though the group did suggest reviewing “the roles of the managing and coordinating boards to identify areas that can be streamlined to increase autonomies and efficiencies.”
In his speech earlier this month at the Tennessee Republican Party’s annual Statesmen’s Dinner, Landry made clear that at least some universities are his enemies in the culture war.
“Today, universities sometimes seem more interested in creating ‘victims’ than educating students,” he said. “Just look at the protests that have erupted on college campuses. The result of the very indoctrination we speak of.”
Landry didn’t point to any Louisiana examples of the “indoctrination” that he fears, though as he asserts his control over the university management boards, we’ll likely find out if there are policy proposals tied to that talking point.
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
