There are really many issues here:
1. Public colleges and universities are inefficient bureaucracies with bloated budgets and lots of spending that has only tangential or no benefits to the educational mission. There is a lot of inertia in budgetary and spending habits not central to providing college educations. Interest groups yelp loudly when budget cuts are mentioned.
2. Too many students are drinking and partying while the government wastes money on tuition that is not being used to good effect. You want an efficient way to cut Louisiana's education budget? Require drug tests for every college student requiring any type of government funding or subsidy and immediately terminate all government funding and subsidy for the FIRST occasion or underage drinking or illegal drug use.
3. The education business has become an entitlement program for employees of the system. They focus on keeping the money flowing which means keeping enrollments high which means passing students whether or not they learn with high levels of unwillingness to fail the lazy slackers who need failing. Serious steps need to be taken to return to academic rigor and stop paying to pretend to educate slackers who are not taking real advantage of the opportunity.
4. We need to be more honest about the number of college graduates the state really needs. Louisiana needs a smaller number of college graduates who have really earned their degrees rather than the current number of graduates whose diplomas are pieces of paper that barely represent the same as a high school diploma in the 1980s. Students unwilling or unable to meet reasonably rigorous academic requirements of college should enter the workforce at younger ages (shortly after high school) rather than pretending to pursue degrees and acting like prodigal children on the state's dime.
It will take real leadership, vision, and form resolve to form a productive path forward.
As a parent, I would not continue to pay for my own children to party their way through college while pretending to study, and I would not pay any private school to pretend to educate my children if true and rigorous learning was not taking place. Why should anyone expect the taxpayer to pay for what amounts to the same thing for the children of others? The proposed budget cuts are a reasonable step toward fiscal and academic responsibility in a system that has been moving away from both for 30 years or more.
One possible path forward is to sell some of the schools to private interests to be managed as private institutions. The government can reduce its role (and expenses) in college education through privatization. Private management knows how to cut costs.
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