Southwest Louisiana over the next two
or three years is scheduled to become home for one of the most thriving
industrial complexes
in the country. Unfortunately, there is some question about
whether the citizens who live in this state will be able to take
full advantage of the thousands of job opportunities opening up at
the half-dozen or more billion-dollar economic development
projects that have been announced for this corner of the state.
How, for example, does the state supply
just the 500 or more engineers who it is estimated will be needed to
staff these gigantic
projects? And are our community and technical colleges going to be
able to train the thousands of workers needed to fill the
technological positions?
Political leaders won’t admit it, but the higher education our people will need to qualify for those jobs has been crippled
since 2008 because of continuing state budget cuts. You knew things were going from bad to worse when some members of the
state Board of Regents last week told higher education leaders to quit complaining. And regents are supposed to be looking
out for higher education’s best interests.
Jim Purcell, state commissioner of higher education, ran into a brick wall when he asked regents to lobby the Legislature
for more support for public colleges.
“We need you to help us,” Purcell said. “A lot of states are coming out of the recession and starting to reinvest in higher
education. We are not one of those.”
Consider what has happened at McNeese State University and Sowela Technical and Community College. They are the two local
institutions that will be charged with training many of those citizens who would like to become future employees at those
billion-dollar facilities.
McNeese’s budget has been cut from $43 to $22 million over the last five years, a 49 percent reduction. Sowela’s budget was
$7.9 million in 2008 and that was down to $5.6 million five years later, a 29 percent cut.
Yes, institutions have been allowed to
increase tuition, but the added funds don’t come close to closing the
gap. Louisiana’s
other higher education institutions are facing identical funding
problems, and they could help train workers for those local
jobs.
Former Govs. Mike Foster and Kathleen Blanco had higher education at the top of their agendas. By 2008, Louisiana had reached
the Southern Regional Education Board average in funding for higher education. Since then, there has been a steady decline
in state funding and a net loss of $300 million in state funds.
Obviously, that doesn’t bother some
members of the Board of Regents. Joseph Wiley of Gonzales, vice chairman
of the board,
told Purcell after his plea for lobbying help that regents needed
to come up with a new strategy other than complaining about
budget cuts before legislators start tuning them out. He said
individual college systems needed to do their own lobbying.
“We really need to get off what’s happened in the last four years,” Wiley said.
Playing as though everything is right
with the world isn’t exactly the way to solve problems. You have to
wonder whether some
regents have forgotten how important higher education is to
equipping young people for productive lives. A recent study, “College
Funding in Context: Understanding the Difference in Higher
Education Appropriations Across the States,” explains it well in
its opening paragraph.
“Access to a post-secondary education is a vital aspect of the American dream, allowing for equality of opportunity and a
stable pathway to the middle class for all who are willing to work for it regardless of their background and socioeconomic
status,” the study said. “Higher education not only improves the prospects for the employment and earnings of individuals,
but has benefits that feed back into communities and society as a whole...”
The technological age is the future,
and it has pretty much passed Louisiana by. The funding study found the
state ranks behind
the rest of the country in terms of research and development and
technological jobs that are so crucial to economic growth.
Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Legislature
have made some improvements in higher education. They passed the GRAD
Act that makes
performance rather than student population the criteria by which
colleges and universities are evaluated. However, the cost
of going to college has shifted from being a major state
responsibility to parents and students who pay most of the costs
through higher tuition.
The funding study mentioned earlier was done by researchers from Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy center located
in New York City. It makes the point that state appropriations have historically been the most important source of funding
for higher education, but state support has declined over the last two decades.
Those of us who have been around a long
time remember when Southwest Louisiana failed to become the state’s oil
business center
during the last century. Lafayette seized the opportunity, and
that is a major reason it has enjoyed major economic success.
Are we going to again not take full advantage of an economic bonanza because we couldn’t train our citizens to fill the jobs
so they can benefit from the growth coming here over the next two years? You can be sure well-educated citizens from other
states are waiting in the wings.
• • •
Jim Beam, the retired editor of the American Press, has covered people and politics for more than five decades. Contact him at 494-4025 or jbeam@americanpress.com