Political Horizons for April 12, 2009

• By MARK BALLARD
• Advocate columnist
• Published: Apr 12, 2009

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John D. Rockefeller once told how to grow the best American Beauty rose.

The trick, he said, was to pluck off all but one bud, so that all the food and energy in the plant would come together to create one full bloom of beauty and fragrance.

Critics of the founder of Standard Oil of New Jersey, now known as Exxon Mobil Corp., said Rockefeller’s lesson was nothing more than analogy for eliminating competitors and concentrating assets to benefit a single business.

Perhaps Gov. Bobby Jindal and Louisiana legislators should take note of Rockefeller’s ruthlessness in dealing with a $219 million cut into the budget for colleges and universities.

Jindal needs to cut about 8 percent of the budget to get higher-education spending next year down to $2.6 billion. In a couple of years, when the federal stimulus money runs out, higher education will be looking again at similar-size cuts.

For LSU’s main campus in Baton Rouge the cuts mean laying off employees and shuttering some research facilities. The university trotted out a study last week that says LSU has a $1.2 billion impact on the Baton Rouge economy.

We’re going to hear more of that refrain. For instance, this Thursday, the University of Louisiana system — governing eight universities — plans to trumpet a similar study.

All these studies are aimed at stemming higher-education budget cuts. But they divert attention from the central issue: Does a state with 4.2 million people really need 14 four-year universities? Florida has 11 to serve 18.3 million residents.

Louisiana is about to graduate 42,000 high-school students. About 23,000 of them — roughly the size of LSU-Baton Rouge — are planning to continue their studies at a public college in Louisiana.

A Baton Rouge senior has the choice of four public universities within an hour’s drive of LSU. A Monroe senior has a choice of three four-year colleges, but the commute is actually shorter.

Of all 14 public colleges and universities in Louisiana, only LSU-Baton Rouge shows up on national lists that judge academic quality. The U.S. News and World Report, for instance, lists LSU 130 out of 130 schools in its first tier of national rankings.

 

True, the administrators of Louisiana’s higher education institutions — all of whom receive six-figure salaries — are quick to pooh-pooh that ranking. But other, higher-ranked schools in the Southeastern Conference, such as the University of Alabama and the University of Florida, tout their ranking in the Top 100 when recruiting our state’s best and brightest.