Posted in Budget, Governor's Office, Higher Education, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables, Revenue on February 9, 2015| 2 Comments »
“As states prepare their budgets for the coming year, they face the challenge of reinvesting in public higher education systems after years of damaging cuts — the product of both the economic downturn and states’ reluctance to raise additional revenues.”
—From story by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 19, 2013.
Posted in Budget, Finances, Governor's Office, Higher Education, Layoffs, Legislators, Legislature, LSU, Politicians, Revenue on February 9, 2015| 8 Comments »
Louisiana’s colleges and universities are facing some difficult choices.
With the latest round of budget cuts to higher education announced by Gov. in Absentia Bobby Jindal, college presidents have been thrown into deep crisis mode in trying to figure out how to keep their schools afloat in the wake of another $350 million slashed from their cumulative budgets.
The LSU campuses are facing cuts of 35 percent to 40 percent, or about $141.5 million which translates to the elimination of 27 percent of faculty positions, 1,572 courses, 28 academic programs and 1,433 faculty and staff positions, according to Associated Press reporter Melinda Deslatte. http://theadvocate.com/home/11535937-125/lsu-outlines-dire-budget-scenarios
Because of Jindal’s disastrous fiscal policies over the past seven years, repeated budget cuts have been imposed on both health care and higher education.
Conspiracy theorists might attribute that to the goal of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its objective of “taking the state out of state colleges,” or including public colleges and universities in its stated drive toward near total privatization of government.
And those conspiracy theorists, in this case at least, might not be too far off.
As has already been reflected in tuition increases of 90 percent for state colleges and universities in Louisiana since Jindal took office (with more undoubtedly on the way), it’s rather easy to see what such privatization would mean: soaring tuition costs putting college out of reach for all but the wealthiest Americans absent the securing of ever-rising student loans from private banks with debts guaranteed by the federal government (ALEC wants privatization to go just so far, it seems).
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has conducted an exhaustive state by state study of cuts to higher education which show Louisiana has undergone some of the deepest cuts (fourth highest in the nation) at 43.6 percent from Fiscal Year 2008 (the year that began six months before Jindal assumed office in January of 2008) through FY-13 (2012-2013). There have been two additional cuts since then in Louisiana. The $4,714 per student cut through FY-13, for example, has increased to more than $5,000 since then in Louisiana. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3927
The center’s report said state could have reduced the size of the spending cuts by enacting “significant new revenues, but many (including Louisiana) chose not to.”
It is an understatement to say that Louisiana colleges and universities are going to have to make some hard decisions, but the one issue that has flown under the radar thus far is intercollegiate athletics.
This is going to get some push back from the more rabid sports fans, especially at LSU which plays in the big leagues of the Southeastern Conference. Not to slight the other schools, but the reality is (as Jindal is fond of saying) the LSU athletic program is the only one in the state that is self-sustaining—but athletics could be adversely impacted in another key area: keeping players academically eligible.
You see, there is something out there called Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 which was written to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities.
Section 504 is employed by elementary and secondary schools to help students with learning and other disabilities but is especially popular in college athletic programs, according to one former high school coach who is familiar with the program.
Because any school receiving federal funding (which is all Louisiana colleges and universities) is mandated to provide extra assistance to those with learning disabilities. Section 504, therefore, is protected and exempt from any state cutbacks—much to the appreciation of college athletic programs.
Athletes with learning disabilities, and let’s be honest: there are a lot of college jocks who can’t read or write above fifth or sixth-grade levels and some have comprehension skills that fall lower than that, are provided special tutors. These tutors, our source tells us, not only do much of the students’ academic assignments for them, but even sit with them during testing, coaxing them on when they provide an incorrect answer and often even pointing to the correct answer.
(Had I had that kind of help at Louisiana Tech, I could have made the dean’s list other than the one I found myself on most of the time.)
There has been much written about Mary Willingham, the former academic advisor at the University of North Carolina who finally had enough and blew the whistle on so-called “paper courses,” or “counterfeit classes” for 18 years involving more than 160 student-athletes.
Willingham said athletes were literally funneled into the program as a means of keeping them eligible at the sacrifice of any semblance of a real education. The “paper classes” produced boiler plate papers that were shamelessly plagiarized. Professors in those classes rarely, if ever, bothered to read the papers but instead relied on counselors who simply advised the professors as to the grade an athlete needed to remain eligible, a practice they called “GPA boosters.”
Willingham said the “paper classes,” many of which were African and African-American studies, were openly discussed as a way to keep athletes eligible to participate in sports. One email from a counselor to a professor advised, “Yes, a D will be fine; that’s all she needs. I didn’t look at the paper but figured it was a recycled one as well, but I couldn’t figure out from where.”
Willingham called the system “corrupt because many of these young men are passed through the system without really being given what they’re promised, which is a real education.”
She said universities have lowered their admissions standards for athletes and the NCAA allows it to keep the revenue-producing sports going.
That’s because NCAA-level college football alone is a $16 billion (with a B) business for tax-exempt, “non-profit” universities which ostensibly are focused on research and education.
No wonder that subsequent to releasing her research on the poor literacy levels, UNC officials went to extreme of hiring outside academics in an attempt to discredit her findings.
We attempted to learn how many LSU athletes are currently participating in the Section 504 program. We submitted the following public records request:
Please provide any and all documents and/or public records that provide the following information;
The number of learning-disabled student athletes currently enrolled at the LSU Baton Rouge campus;
The percentage of learning-disabled student-athletes to the overall student population currently enrolled at the LSU Baton Rouge campus.
Please understand I am not asking for names—just the raw numbers and percentages of overall student population.
LSU responded that it had no record of such data, a claim we find extremely difficult to believe. Nevertheless, we tried once more, making the same request of Louisiana Tech. This time we received not so much as even a response to our request.
Never wishing to leave part of the story untold, LouisianaVoice did a little research of its own into some of the degree programs into which athletes may be “funneled,” to borrow a phrase from Willingham. We should preface what follows by stressing the samples of classes come directly from the LSU 2014-2015 catalog: http://catalog.lsu.edu/index.php?catoid=6
General Studies:
Sports Studies Minor: To graduate with a minor in sports studies, students must complete 18 semester hours from the following: KIN 2530 , three activity courses and 12 semester hours from the following courses: KIN 2502 , KIN 2511 , KIN 2525 , KIN 2526 , KIN 3507 , KIN 3800 , KIN 4513 , KIN 4515 , KIN 4517 , KIN 4800 , MKT 3410 .
Okay, you get the picture. Obviously, these are important courses. The beast must be fed so we can continue to kneel at the altar of intercollegiate athletics. Some things, after all, are sacrosanct. The option of cutting these programs is not even on the table.
So the cuts must be made elsewhere. But where?
Oh, such non-revenue producing programs as English, Arts, Physics, Engineering, Medical School (after all, who needs doctors after Jindal’s cuts to health care?), Business, Economics, History, etc. After all, who ever heard of TAF selling tickets to a science lecture?
Loss of accreditation of the business and engineering colleges? Hmpf, we don’t need no stinking accreditation when there’s a national championship to be won.
The alternative could be to sacrifice some of the courses we listed above in an effort at maintaining some semblance of academic integrity.
Of course, that would mean all athletes would have to take real courses—and pass. The lack of academic funding of the university and the resulting cancellation of the courses required for athletic eligibility will deal the death blow to athletic programs as we know them.
And that could have LSU playing Baton Rouge Community College in flag football next season.
Efforts to contact Les Miles and Johnny Jones for confirmation of the mothballing of the 2015 football and basketball seasons were unsuccessful.
We can only conclude that although Jindal, who has exhibited nothing but disdain and contempt for Louisiana’s education systems, knew of the consequences of his administration’s budget cuts on college and university athletic program, this was an “unintended consequence” by the legislature. To that, we can only say to legislators: “You should have done your homework and not sold your soul to Jindal for personal and political gain.”
(Thanks to Ruston High classmate John Sachs for the idea for this post.)
Posted in Budget, Higher Education, Jobs, Revenue on February 9, 2015| 2 Comments »
LOUISIANA TECH COLLEGE OF BUSINESS
U.S. News & World Report, known for its overall rankings of America’s best colleges and universities as well as their law schools, has a new ranking and one state school, Louisiana Tech, made the top 10, the only Louisiana higher education institution to do so.
But with yet another round of deep (as in $350 million) budget cuts anticipated for higher education, any rankings of Louisiana colleges and universities will likely remain in a constant state of flux.
The ranking of the 50 Most Underrated Colleges in America places Louisiana Tech as number 8 in the country and number 1 in Louisiana (obviously, since we’ve already established that no other school in the state made the list).
The USN&WR study includes only two Southeastern Conference schools, the University of Arkansas (no. 40) and Auburn (tied for no. 41) in the top 50 most underrated schools.
The report took into consideration two factors: reputation and future earnings on the premise that the students of schools otherwise flying under the rankings radar made high salaries would be underrated.
By combining the two factors, 316 universities and liberal arts colleges appeared in both the USN&WR and PayScale rankings.
Louisiana Tech was ranked as the 201st best overall school and 234th in mid-career salary at $83,000 (Someone was really raking it in to pull my average up), ranking Tech among the top 25 in the U.S. for the best return on investments in college education.
By comparison, the University of Arkansas ranked 135th overall and 222nd in pay scale rank ($83,600) and among the top 50 in public research universities while Auburn ranked 103rd overall and 151st in PayScale rank ($87,900).
Obviously, other statistical data factored into the underrated rankings, such as tuition costs, etc.
There was one other school that made the top 50 underrated schools, one which LSU baseball fans should remember with some trepidation.
Stony Brook University, a space grant university in New York eliminated a heavily-favored LSU team in the LSU Super Regional in a best of three series in 2012 to advance to the College World Series. Stony Brook, which also ranked as one of the top 40 universities overall by USN&WR, was the 34th most underrated school with its graduates earning an average mid-career salary of $94,300.
Posted in Contracts, DEQ, DHH, Economy, Elections, Exemptions, Finances, Governor's Office, Health Care, Higher Education, Incentives, Office of Group Benefits, OGB, Politicians, Privatization, Revenue, State Agencies, Teague on February 7, 2015| 35 Comments »
Some may think it’s too early to bury Jindal’s presidential ambitions just yet, but it is our humble opinion that Roy Orbison summed it up more than 50 years ago with his 1964 hit It’s Over.
What little spark that still burned in his fading presidential hopes has been snuffed out by a fast-paced series of events beginning with his incredibly idiotic rant about the Islamic no-go zones in Europe which then morphed into a tirade by Jindal shill Kyle Plotkin over the tint or lack of, in Jindal’s “official” portrait hanging in the reception area of the governor’s office on the fourth floor of the State Capitol.
Whether or not blogger Lamar White’s comment about Jindal’s “white-out” of his portrait which (a) makes him appear almost anemic or (b) makes him appear as if the anemic version caught a little too much sun at Gulf Shores (depending on which is the “official” portrait), the entire episode quickly descended to the level of ridiculous political theater.
And when the dialogue is reduced to arguments over the shade of color in a portrait Jindal has run out of issues for serious public debate and can no longer be taken seriously.
As a great singer, the late Roy Orbison, crooned back in 1964, It’s over.
And as our favorite writer, Billy Wayne Shakespeare from Denham on Amite would say (with certain literary license):
“Not that I loved Caesar Jindal less, but that I loved Rome Louisiana more. Had you rather Caesar lived Jindal were President and (we) die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead Jindal were forgotten, to live all free men?”
—Brutus Bob, from Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene II.
“I have come here to bury Caesar Jindal, not to praise him. The evil that men do is remembered after their deaths, but the good is often buried with them difficult to find. It might as well be the same with Caesar Jindal. The noble Brutus Bob told you that Caesar Jindal was ambitious. If that’s true, it’s a serious fault, and Caesar Louisiana has paid seriously for it.”
—Marc “T-Boy” Antony, from Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene II
If there was any lingering doubt, that was erased late Friday (notice the timing) when he released a laundry list of yet another round of budget cuts. As has become his practice, all bad news is announced late on Fridays so the impact will be lessened because people tend not to follow the news on weekends.
Among those cuts:
Jindal also some miraculously came up with $42.8 by sweeping several agencies, including $9 million from the Medicaid Trust Fund for the Elderly.
The governor’s office was not spared, of course. Biting the bullet along with everyone else, Jindal’s plan included a reduction of $10,000 in travel expenses for his office.
That’s correct. Health care is taking a $13 million hit while Jindal is sacrificing roughly the cost of one trip to appear on Fox News or to Washington D.C. for something like his recent attack on Common Core at an event sponsored by someone like oh, say the American Principles Project.
He is pulling $9 million from the Medicaid Trust Fund for the Elderly but don’t worry, he will forego a trip to Iowa or New Hampshire. Yeah, yeah, we know trips to Iowa and New Hampshire are paid out of his campaign fund. But when he takes those political trips, he takes along a detail of state police security personnel whose transportation, lodging, meals and overtime must be borne by the state treasury. It doesn’t take long for just one of those trips to eat through $10,000.
If Jindal is not acutely aware by now that any chance he had to be president has vanished into that $1.6 billion deficit projected for the coming year—a far cry from the $900 million surplus he inherited when he took office seven years ago.
If he does not know by now that his political credentials are shot, he can compare today’s 6.7 percent unemployment rate to the 3.8 percent unemployment when he took office in 2008. That wasn’t supposed to happen after industrial tax incentives increased from a couple hundred million a year to more than $1 billion a year over that same period.
If he is still wondering why his approval rating is lower than President Obama’s, he may want to direct his inquiry to the presidents of Louisiana’s colleges and universities who have seen their budgets cut by $673 million since taking office—and who are now anticipating another $300 million in cuts.
If he still doesn’t get it, he could ask the 250,000 low-income uninsured adults how they could possibly be upset at his decision not to expand Medicaid to cover their health care—all because of his philosophical criticism of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare. And while he’s at it, he might wish to ask Baton Rouge’s low-income uninsured residents in the northern part of East Baton Rouge Parish how they’re going to make out after he closed Earl K. Long Hospital last year which forced those residents to seek emergency care at Baton Rouge General Medical Center-Mid City which announced this past week that it is closing its emergency room because of the financial losses incurred from that overflow from Earl K. Long.
Michael Hiltzik, writing for the Los Angeles Times on Friday (Feb. 6), to say, “Jindal has promoted his plan with a string of distortions about the ACA and the health insurance marketplace that suggest, at best, that he has no idea what he’s talking about.” http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-the-lesson-of-louisiana-20150206-column.html
And if Jindal is still a bit hazy about why his chances of becoming president could make a possum optimistic about making it across a busy interstate highway, he might wish to review his glowing optimism over the privatization of the Office of Group Benefits (OGB) that preceded a drawdown of the agency’s reserve fund from a healthy $500 million built up by former OGB CEO Tommy Teague, whom Jindal fired, to less than half that amount.
After he’s done all that, then maybe he’ll finally understand why Louisiana’s middle income growth was sixth worst in the nation (-4.9 percent, as in a negative growth) in 2013. Maybe, just maybe, it will finally dawn on him that the widening income gap is not good news for the state’s poorest citizens. Perhaps someone will explain to him that the state’s poorest 20 percent of households averaged earning $8,851 in 2013 (that’s household income, not per capita). There may even be a chance that he can explain why the income share of 2.8 percent among the state’s 20 percent poorest was down from 3.2 percent share in 2009 while the wealthiest 20 percent held nearly 52 percent of the state’s income—a figure even higher than the national figure and a dramatic increase from 2009—even as the state’s poverty rate increased.
We’ve been beating this drum steadily for nearly five years now and just when we were beginning to believe no one was listening, no less than three national news organizations (the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Politico) have jumped into the fray with witheringly harsh stories critical of Jindal and his train wreck of an administration in Louisiana.
And to think, it took an incredibly silly diatribe about Islam in London and a prayer meeting in Baton Rouge sponsored by a fundamentalist fringe element to get the attention of the national media that decided, at long last, it might be time to peel back the layers of righteousness and morality and take a long, hard look at the real Jindal and his actual record.
Funny, isn’t it, how often the big picture is overlooked until someone stumbles onto some little something that sets much bigger events into motion?
And now, at long last, we feel we can safely say it’s over. Done. Kaput. We have witnessed, in the incredibly short span of only a couple of weeks, the complete cratering of a political quest.
Cue Roy Orbison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufgrNRPFJn8&list=RDufgrNRPFJn8#t=0
Posted in Budget, Contract, Contracts, DHH, Economy, Exemptions, Incentives, Finances, Governor's Office, Health Care, Higher Education, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, NGOs, Revenue on February 3, 2015| 4 Comments »
State Rep. Jerome “Dee” Richard (I-Thibodaux) has revealed an ambitious set of bills he will be pre-filing preparatory to the 2015 legislative session, a couple or which are almost certain to be vetoed by Gov. Bobby Jindal should they survive both chambers intact.
The 60-day 2015 session convenes at noon on April 13 and will adjourn at 6 p.m. on June 11.
Vetoes are nothing new to Richard and in fact, one of his bills rejected by Jindal last years in hindsight represents a moral victory for Richard and something of an embarrassment for Jindal.
House Bill 142 (HB-142) passed both the House and Senate unanimously last year and was vetoed by Jindal only to see Jindal find it necessary to implement at least part of the bill through an executive order last month.
Passing 84-0 in the House (with 20 members not voting) and 37-0 in the Senate (with two not voting), HB-142 would have provided for a 10 percent reduction of all state professional, personal and consulting service contracts. The bill further provided that the savings from the cuts be deposited into the Higher Education Financing Fund.
State Treasurer John Kennedy, Richard was quick to point out, has been recommending slashing state contracts for several years and has been all but ignored by the administration but now even Jindal has ordered that state contracts be cut but not so higher education could be funded but instead to attempt to plug the growing chasm that is the state budget deficit.
Jindal, for his part, says he will offer legislators “suggested solutions” to ease the budget crisis which now is projecting a deficit of $1.6 million. http://theadvocate.com/sports/preps/11454861-123/jindal-says-hell-suggest-options
First of all, wasn’t that why he hired Alvarez and Marsal (A&M) Consulting for a cool $7 million? We were under the impression that A&M was going to find all these wonderful ways for the state to save money.
Second, the governor is the state’s CEO and as such, is charged with the leadership of the state. After all, Gov. Kathleen Blanco came under withering criticism for the manner in which she handled the crisis of Katrina. Jindal appears no less befuddled and clueless in his approach to the state’s budgetary crisis and now, after seven years of telling lawmakers what he wanted done, he punts to them.
Of course, it’s difficult to fight Islam in Europe, run for president and hold prayer meetings that fail miserably in filling all the seats in the venue while governing the state.
Only yesterday (Monday, Feb. 2), Kennedy broke the news that Moody’s Investors Service had issued a warning that reductions in revenue estimates by the Revenue Estimating Conference constituted a “credit negative for the state” and that the ratings service may downgrade the state’s credit outlook from stable to negative.
Kennedy said the next procedural step would be a rating downgrade that would make it more difficult for the state borrow money and cost the state higher interest for money it does borrow.
And lest Jindal attempt to blame the latest fiscal woes on the drop in oil prices, Moody’s pointedly noted that the state’s problems pre-date the fall in oil prices—by several years. “As the U.S. economy picked up steam,” the Moody’s analysis said, “Louisiana had muted job growth even before the oil price decline.”
“This is what happens when you spend more than you take in,” Kennedy said. “Moody’s is telling us that we’d better get our fiscal house in order or we are going to be downgraded, which will cost taxpayers dearly in higher interest rates on our bonded indebtedness.”
The Moody’s news comes on top of earlier reports that health care and higher education will probably suffer even deeper cuts than the $180 million in reductions made over the past two months. The state’s colleges and universities have been told to expect at least $300 million in further budget cuts during the next fiscal year even as the Department of Health and Hospitals is expected to have $250 million slashed from its budget.
Jindal has even had to renege on his pledge last year to create a $40 million incentive fund to pay for college programs that provide graduates for high-demand jobs in Louisiana. Once considered one of his highest priorities, he has yanked that money away before the ink was dry on the bill that created the program.
All this has had a cumulative effect leading up to what promises to be a tumultuous legislative session as lawmakers grope for ways to keep from cutting services while at the same time being able to keep the lights on.
One trial balloon, already rejected by Jindal, would be for the state to roll back some of the billions of dollars in corporate and industrial tax breaks but Richard is not ready to accept the governor’s dismissal of that idea just yet.
This year, Richard has an agenda even more ambitious than his across-the-board 10 percent cut in contracts last year. Remember, that bill, HB-142 was passed unanimously in each chamber but vetoed by Jindal because, the governor said, the bill “could hinder the state’s efforts to continue to provide its citizens with timely, high quality services.”
In hindsight, however, it would appear his signing that bill into law would not have hindered the delivery of services nearly so much as not having the funds to pay for the services in the first place. The only thing not hindered by his veto was uninterrupted payments to the contractors.
Among Richard’s bills to “re-establish the legislative branch of government” are bills:
Richard said he knows his bills will be fought by special interests and by the governor. “But Jindal has done nothing in seven years,” he said. “It’s time the Legislature re-asserted itself as an equal partner in governing this state.”
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Louisiana Voice 