Legislators propose linking state higher education funding to graduation rates

Two high-ranking members of the state Legislature are proposing legislation that would more closely link the amount of money colleges and universities get from the state with a school’s graduation rate.

In such an outcome-based model, schools would have to meet the average graduation rate of their peer institutions in the South in order to receive their full share of state funding.

Louisiana institutions get about 40 percent of their funding from the state and the remaining 60 percent from students in the form of tuition.

State Sen. Conrad Appel, R-Metairie, said Wednesday that Louisiana has a problem when it comes to funding colleges and universities.

But what no one talks about, he said, is the state’s “performance problem.”

“Our graduation rates and our retention rates aren’t where they should be,” Appel said. “We want to move to a more progressive, more modern performance mechanism.”

Under his plan with state Rep. Steve Carter, R-Baton Rouge, Appel said each college in the state would be divided into about five tiers and then compared with similar schools in other states.

For instance, LSU’s Baton Rouge campus would be in the “flagship” tier, Appel said, and would be judged against other flagships in the South.

LSU’s state funding would then be based on whether it meets or exceeds the average graduation rate of other flagships schools in the South, he explained.

Appel added that state funding to schools would be broken into two parts — an “expense” category for maintenance and utilities and an “outcomes” category for academic performance.

The “outcomes” category would make up a roughly 25 percent to 40 percent share of a school’s total state funding, Appel said, while the “expense” category — 60 percent to 75 percent — would stay the same, allowing schools “to keep the lights on.”

“We want a simple formula with just a handful of variables that everyone can easily understand, but also something with some teeth in it,” Appel said.

“If you underperform, you are penalized. If you overperform, I’d like to say that you get a bonus, but that would depend on what the state budget looks like,” he said.

If such an outcome-based bill were to pass in the legislative session beginning April 8, Appel said he could support a “tuition freedom” bill giving colleges and universities control over how much they charge students.

Louisiana is also the only state in the nation that requires two-thirds legislative approval on tuition and fee increases.

Tuition hikes are only allowed through the 2010 LA GRAD Act law that lets colleges raise tuition up to 10 percent each year if they meet certain performance goals, including improved graduation and retention rates.

Carter, chairman of the House Education Committee, said the dozens of performance measures in the GRAD Act make it easy for schools to manipulate the results.

An outcomes-based bill would hold “colleges’ feet to the fire,” Carter said.

“We want each youngster to have an opportunity to get a quality education for all the money they are spending,” he said.

Comments

1) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 28/02/2013

Carter, if he knows anything about the RSD, knows a lot about how the RSD manipulates results!

2) Comment by Bouncer - 28/02/2013

Government doesn't do ANYTHING well. It doesn't even GOVERN well, so entwining it with education is disastrous. Government should get out of education, and career politicians should not have a say in setting educational policy.

3) Comment by twinkie1cat - 28/02/2013

I think this proposal shows how little our legislature values a college education and how we may need to look at educational level in our legislators. But, spqr, I would be more inclined to look not just at the issues you listed but also at numbers of people incarcerated, quality of medical care for the poor and how much we can go down the "bad lists" where we frequently are positioned between numbers 1 and 3 on quality of life issues.

4) Comment by twinkie1cat - 28/02/2013

College is not high school where the purpose is often to get the paperwork so you can get a good job or go to college. The purpose of going to college is not always a degree, but developing one's knowledge. For this reason, many adults go to college after retirement. Therefore, not finishing is not necessarily failure, even a few courses enrich one's life. It is the exposure to ideas, values, and people different from what you were brought up that are important. For example, my freshman year I met a self-identified communist, who was also an atheist and who had hemophilia. My own faith was actually strengthened by interacting with my first non-believer. College also helps people develop into an independent adulthood as a citizen and to think for themselves and learn to make good decisions without parents breathing down their necks. The factor of learning to think and decide makes me wonder about Jindal's motivation for the changes since independent thinking tends to make one question authority and more educated people are often also more liberal. Making it achievement based reduces college's quality and could even throw higher education into the curricular narrowness that K-12 has developed with its standardized testing mentality. Graduating at a college level does not mean a person has necessarily achieved success. Self-realization is just as important.

5) Comment by jwarren - 28/02/2013

Another problem I have with the plan is this: I think the assumption that universities have somehow failed students who don't get a degree is false. Many students start college -- they are encouraged by guidance counselors in high school; they are "supposed" to go to college -- but never finish. They often don't really know what they want to do in life at that point and realize that they are not ready to get a four-year degree. They enter the workforce with the benefit of one or more years of college and lead successful lives, or they return to college later to get a degree. I did that myself. I dropped out after two years. I just wanted to get out on my own. I returned to college a few years later to get my degree. Did the university fail me? I don't think so. I got exactly what I wanted out of college, on my terms. I needed that break to grow up. It seems now we want to pigeonhole everyone into graduating from high school, going straight to college, and completing four consecutive years and getting a degree, as if that is the only successful outcome for everyone. It isn't. Someone who goes to college for one year or one semester and then goes into the world of work and is successful has probably been well served by the university, but we are told the college has failed that individual.

6) Comment by Attila - 28/02/2013

@Jwarren: So universities would then get more funding by lowering standards. That is such a brilliant idea. Well J, look how well lowering the standards have worked in EBR parish schools...I rest my case.

7) Comment by jeffsadow - 28/02/2013

@jwarren, you have hit the nail on the had as far as the biggest challenge to this idea. I've been in the classroom coming up on 27 years now, most of them in LA, and the dropoff in standards has been very evident in that span (although it's not just here; this and grade inflation have been going on everywhere), the downward pressure mainly coming from having next-to-no admission standards at the most of the baccalauerate-and-above institutions, vast expansion of the community college ranks and automatic transfer of students, and the reshuffling of admissions because of the introduction of TOPS. While to some degree the admissions cause has been addressed (higher standards beginning this year), if not done right this idea adds more downward pressure to quality. The idea is great in concept -- moving from a system that gave incentives to racking up student credit hours with no thought to quality other than those fields where external factors forced it (i.e. passing licensing exams) to one where there is accountability in outcome -- but you point how one way how this can be gamed.

8) Comment by jeffsadow - 28/02/2013

"The 'more progressive more modern' method is for the legislature to stop micromanaging the universities." You do realize that in the budgeting process it has gone from the Legislature specifying exactly the dollars received from the state for each campus now to governing board distributing them, partly on the GRAD Act basis? And in reducing the state share, that leverage has decreased. So how is this "micromanaging" -- unless you count having any oversight at all and by standards-based evaluation (not legislative review) tied to quality as that? Also, keep in mind LA ranks about 8th in per capita state spending per student. And that until this year's budget, from the year previous to Katrina, spending per student had increased nearly 22 percent, with the state's portion rising over 7 percent per student. Another way of putting it -- from Fall, 2004 to Fall, 2012, spending in total went up $700 million or almost 25 percent while the student population increased less than 4 percent or 8,000 students. How in any way do these indicate lack of resources then or now? In that laundry list cited about alleged problems as a result of more money coming into schools, the only one I've seen at my institution is library cutbacks. If you are witnessing such problems, it is because of poor decision-making at the campus level as to where to allocate funds.

9) Comment by bourbon-soda - 28/02/2013

@jwarren - thanks.

10) Comment by geauxtee - 28/02/2013

Three years ago the grad act was forced on higher Ed. Increase grad rate and receive more funding. Every campus in the state has improved yet their budgets have been slashed by $650m. These legislators are delusional !! Fund higher Ed at 40 pct of their peers in crumbling buildings and expect them to outperform their peers? There is no hope. Send your kids out of state, I did.

11) Comment by Scrooge - 28/02/2013

translation: keep the masses ignorant so they keep electing clowns like me.

12) Comment by spqr - 28/02/2013

Let us tie Legislative pay to the state's outmigration, the number of Fortune 500 companies we have, coastal erosion, crime rates, hurricane damage, and insurance costs for the state's citizens.

13) Comment by jwarren - 28/02/2013

So universities would then get more funding by lowering standards. That is such a brilliant idea.

14) Comment by SuzanneMS - 27/02/2013

The "more progressive more modern" method is for the legislature to stop micromanaging the universities. What this plan is really about is justifying cutting funding further. How about we compare Louisiana institutions with institutions in other states that are receiving the same level of funding? Louisiana schools receive the least amount of state funding among their peers, yet this plan would require them to meet the retention and graduation rates of others with much higher funding BEFORE the funding would be increased. I'd like to see anyone do the job before they were provided with the tools and equipment to do it. Louisiana schools no longer have the staff to handle the admissions and graduation paperwork in a reasonable amount of time; they are no longer offering courses often enough for students to graduate within 4 years; class sizes are larger, so faculty don't have the time to spend working with individual students; faculty advising load has doubled or even tripled, so they have less time to spend with any individual; tutoring centers have reduced hours or been closed entirely; the library budgets have been slashed, including for online databases, so students don't have access to the information they need.