LSU eyes deep cuts

• By JORDAN BLUM
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: May 30, 2009 - Page: 1A

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Higher education could be left at just one-quarter of its current state funding levels in three years, according to a worst-case scenario released Friday by the LSU System.

The end result could be reducing state funding for colleges from $1.48 billion in 2008 to only $388 million in 2012.

Even closing several colleges would only put a dent in the onslaught of budget cuts by 2012, said Bob Keaton, LSU System special assistant and a former state Senate budget official.

The LSU analysis projects a rapidly expanding budget gap from relatively low oil prices, the end of federal stimulus funds in two years and substantial decreases in federal Medicaid match funding that is upcoming.

Those losses are on top of the current proposed $219 million in cuts to higher education. Deeper cuts in the state’s contribution to higher education will be necessary over the next few years.

Total funding for colleges last year — counting tuition and federal revenue — was $2.8 billion.

“What we’re trying to show is we’ve got a really, really difficult budget problem,” Keaton said. “Simply consolidating  some colleges and closing some stuff won’t do much.”

Shuttering all of the LSU System’s colleges would only save the state $439 million, Keaton said. That equals the total of the current proposed cuts plus the $220 million in stimulus funds currently set aside for colleges.

That does nothing to solve the additional $600 million in likely higher education cuts from the loss of all state stimulus dollars and the decrease in federal Medicaid matching dollars, he said.

State government is estimating a $1.9 billion budget shortfall in 2012 when federal stimulus dollars expire, even though state revenue is expected to increase by $500 million.

LSU System President John Lombardi stated in the LSU release that Louisiana’s higher education will become a “fundamentally different enterprise.”

“This new system will be smaller, it will serve fewer students, it will have a much narrower range of opportunities, it will require them to follow rigid curricular paths, and it will shift significant financial costs from the state to the consumers of higher education services: primarily students and their families,” Lombardi stated.

Louisiana likely could not expect more federal aid because the state has decreased taxes by more than $900 million in recent years, Keaton said.