Louisiana’s higher education leaders won approval Sunday of their push to get authority to raise tuition up to 10 percent a year, with the House agreeing to give the bill final legislative passage.The 74-23 vote sends the measure to Gov. Bobby Jindal, who supports it.
To get the tuition increases, the schools will have to agree to work on performance improvements, like increasing admission standards, improving graduation rates and boosting efforts to get students into jobs.
The proposal – called the Louisiana GRAD Act – will set up voluntary six-year agreements with colleges. They’ll have to start showing demonstrated progress on the performance benchmarks by the 2012-13 school year or lose the tuition increases.
House Speaker Jim Tucker reluctantly went along with Senate changes to the bill that allowed colleges to get the tuition authority before showing the improvements. The House had previously backed the bill with requirements that the schools show improvement for two years before they could get the tuition increases outlined under the measure.
The GRAD Act had narrowly received the backing of the Senate, and Tucker, R-Terrytown, argued it would be difficult to get the Senate to support any attempts at reworking the bill. Jindal also urged lawmakers in the House to agree to the Senate’s rewriting of the proposal.
“We believe that it’s going to be difficult to get the Senate to change their minds on this,” Tucker told the House.
The bill required two-thirds support of each chamber to pass. It needed 70 votes in the House and got only four votes more than required for final passage.
Supporters said the schools need to be able to raise tuition to help offset more than $250 million cuts in the last two years and to cope with another $300 million in reductions that are expected to be levied upon them in a year.
Opponents called the proposal a tax on students who can’t afford the price increase and said lawmakers should do more to restructure higher education to help cope with the revenue loss.
Schools meeting the performance requirements can raise their tuition by up to 10 percent a year until they reach the average of similar schools in the South, or for LSU the average of state flagship schools around the country. After that, schools can increase tuition up to 5 percent a year or an amount equal to the growth in a national higher education price index, whichever is greater.
“I think we will be safe in ensuring performance will happen,” Tucker said.
