Louisiana colleges and universities bracing for cuts, shift of costs to students

Public colleges and universities are bracing for yet another cut to their budgets when legislators meet Friday to figure out how to close a $304 million gap in funding.

The one bright spot, says Higher Education Commissioner Joe Rallo, is that the actual dollars lost won’t be that much — $22 million to $60 million — because the state has so often reduced its support over the past eight years.

Of greater concern is that the withdrawal of support has shifted the bulk of a college education’s cost from state government to individual students. The change endangers higher education’s traditional mission of helping lower and middle income students to move up the economic ladder.

Higher education leaders have long stressed the importance of providing an avenue for upward mobility in a state with such high poverty and low incomes. Now, they have a recently released national analysis, which they plan to use with legislators, that shows Louisiana’s public colleges have a better rate of helping students move into higher income brackets than the elite Ivy League schools.

Read more: http://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/education/article_009ee880-e421-11e6-80d4-9f7e4d274897.html