By the way, make sure you read the second story in the piece about LSU football to which I just posted the link. It’s the quintessential story of financial life at P5 schools in today’s South.
Think because LSU’s athletic department pays all of its own bills that the slashing and burning of higher education funding isn’t going to affect the Tigers?
Think again.
LSU announced Tuesday the construction of its long-anticipated Tiger Athletics Nutrition Center will be postponed indefinitely.
Construction on it was supposed to begin in April. But because of the unseemliness of building another athletic palace while the academic side of the university is crumbling, the athletic department has decided to postpone said construction for now.
The athletic department has raised the money. That’s not the problem. The nutrition center will get built eventually. The problem is building a four-star restaurant while your neighbor is struggling to pay for his groceries.
Image, as they say, is everything.
Most SEC schools have or have plans to build a nutrition center. Oregon already has a fancy one, which bears a sign over the serving line that encourages Ducks athletes to “Eat Your Enemies – And The Other Food Groups.”
Whether LSU’s athletes truly need a dedicated nutrition facility is a matter for worthwhile debate another time. But what isn’t debatable is that Louisiana’s lack of commitment to higher education is starting to impact whether LSU will be able to land some high-profile commitments in a tangible, brick and mortar way.
SEC athletic programs are rolling in dough. The schools they’re affiliated with, well, that’s another story. LSU is in a worse case situation, exacerbated by Jindal’s ideology trumping competency, but there’s little doubt that, across the region, there is less and less financial support for public institutions coming from state government.
And while this story is about not rubbing people’s faces in the athletic department’s prosperity, the underlying message is that these schools need money to run and that won’t change in the face of public funding drying up. Schools have no choice but to go where the money is coming in, and in the SEC that’s television. Every bit helps, and the presidents whom Slive answers to know that. So don’t expect any moves that would endanger the cash cow. They literally can’t afford that.
Get The Picture 
“don’t expect any moves that would endanger the cash cow.”
They might not endanger the cash cow, but milking a much larger amount of the proceeds for actual college costs (instead of leaving it in the athletic account) seems like a logical step.
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That’s my point.
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‘Jindal’s ideology trumping competency’? Really? A nice quick shot at a politician you disagree with?
How many buildings did LSU build to keep up with the Jonses during the fat times? How many administrative positions were added? How many dollars diverted from reserves to current expenditures? I know few of the details but I’ll bet a dime to a dollar that LSU’s budget growth well exceeded inflation and state revenue growth during fat years, and re-trenching was inevitable.
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That’s some retrenching they’ve got.
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Changing direction slightly. I’ve got an estate with some producing royalty interests, and the February checks were a third of just six months ago.
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While that may be true, Bobby still needs to find a better excuse
“Gov. Bobby Jindal has repeatedly claimed that Louisiana’s projected $1.6 billion financial shortfall in the next fiscal year is primarily due to falling oil prices, but the state’s own economist is saying — in no uncertain terms — that this is not the case.
The bulk of the projected funding shortfall for [next year’s] budget is not related to oil prices. The [budget] funding shortfall was projected at nearly $1.2 billion before any oil price revisions were considered,” said Greg Albrecht, the chief economist for the Louisiana Legislature, in an analysis he released Wednesday (Feb. 25).
Nearly $1 billion of that shortfall is associated with the use of ad hoc resources supporting the current [year’s] budget that will have to be replaced for the [next year’s] budget,” Albrecht said, attributing just 25 percent of the $1.6 billion budget hole to dropping oil prices.”
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/02/greg_albrecht_state_budget.html
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Fla I doubt Jindal is the only person in Louisiana blameworthy for government over-spending.
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Not going to take that bait! When you hook this Piyush you certainly don’t reel up a Kingfish, that’s for sure
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Really? If you haven’t saved for a rainy day, you’re probably screwed by your bad judgment.
The difference between you and Jindal is that he’s playing with other people’s money.
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Too many years without a hurricane… darn global warming… wait.
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The senator makes a snarky comment about a republican
I’m shocked. Shocked
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I wasn’t being snarky.
You think Jindal’s done a good job?
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Yeah you were.
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No, I was being sincere about Jindal.
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Your comment was that Jindal’s ideology precluded competence. Put aside whether that’s true about any politician. Not snarky? Really, friend?
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There are plenty of Republican governors out there who haven’t turned their state budgets into train wrecks. Jindal ain’t one of ’em.
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‘Jindal’s ideology trumping competency’?
Absolutely! Step right up to the Petri Dish that is “Bobby Jindal’s Hot Tub Time Machine” for a cleansing
http://bobmannblog.com/2015/03/01/bobby-jindals-hot-tub-time-machine/
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Jindal is a politician that a LOT of people disagree with. He’s always been a self-promoting blowhard who’s more interested in running for president than fixing the problems in his home state. He’s more concerned with being able to get out on the presidential campaign trail and say he didn’t raise taxes, than doing anything (e.g., raise taxes) to bring in revenue to aid Louisiana’s ailing economy. Even a lot of conservatives hate the guy: Here’s a nice synopsis of his handiwork form The American Conservative, which is hardly the “liberal media”.
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I’m not about to debate the need to cut budgets at the state level but my sense is that many folks, politicians included, don’t recognize how much education they got from the institutions they attended. Many people, me included, tend to think they have always known what they know now and, especially, have always had the intellectual skills they now possess. There is often little awareness of what they actually got from education and the strong belief that, wherever they are in life, they got there on their own. This means, that when it comes to budget cuts, education is an easy target because “we really don’t need as much of it as we have and we never spent this much on education when I was in school.”
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Be assured I see your point, but it’s also true that the older you get the more good stuff you know that wasn’t learned in college.
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But a good education gets you a heck of a better start.
On the topic of costs, states have cut way back on support of public universities and that’s a big reason for the substantial increase in tuition and the need for undergraduates to borrow.. I’m not employed by a public university but I know many people who are. A friend of mine, now retired from UGA told me a number of years ago that they went “from being a state supported school to a state assisted school to a state affiliated school.”
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A good college education teaches you how to learn…from there on its on you.
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We as a State do not support public higher education with state dollars as we once did. When I enrolled at UGA in September 1972 my Father, a middle class guy, was able to pay my tuition, dorm and meal plan and give me money for books every quarter from his earnings. I left UGA in 1979 with a BA and a JD and with no student loan debt. My story was common. UGA was full of middle class kids such as me graduating with no student loan debt and degrees that allowed us to become productive Georgians.
I understand education costs have risen but so have incomes since them. It hurts the State of Georgia for its university graduates to have student loan debt that hurts their ability to get a mortgage, start a business or a professional office, and support a family. By spreading a larger percentage of the cost of education across a few million Georgians we produced a healthier State economy than by shifting a significant portion of the costs of education to student loan lenders and then the recent grads who have to pay them.
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Well the Hope Grant was a relief to the middle class if your kid was smart enough to keep it. After the start of it the college administrators seeing a potential cash flow boom started to raise the costs since the lottery was paying for the smart kids. They have finally milked that cow to the point that the Hope had to be changed. Most of the people that I have known with back breaking student debt were in grad school, law school or med school. That’s what I’d call investment loans. If you want an advanced degree and can’t afford it you must make a choice. I got my law degree the old fashion way, on the GI bill. It’s still around by the way, it just requires that you postpone your career for a few years. I have no pity for grad students that are running up debt, it was a choice not a requirement.
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Oh by the way, get the hell off my lawn.
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Step away from the Gran Torino. You are too close to the Gran Torino.
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Hahahaha Awesome 69Dawg !!
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A sincere h/t to your Father. Putting your son or daughter through an undergrad and an advanced degree is not easy no matter when it was done. I think we try and prepare for it when kids are born. The advanced degree can catch a parent off guard. It did me. But you kinda know what they may intend to do with themselves before HS.
The UGa that you went to is not the UGa today. Neither is Georgia. Ahhh the good ole days. Or does history remember better than it lived? 😉
The Class of 2018 has outstanding academic credentials:
95% took at least one College Board Advanced Placement Course.
More than 10% took college classes while in high school.
More than 90% were in their school’s “advanced” or “most difficult” curriculum.
More than 1400 have a core high school GPA of 4.00 or higher.
54% were in the top tenth percentile of their high school class.
More than 240 graduated first or second in their class.
531 are enrolled in the Honors Program.
https://www.admissions.uga.edu/prospective-students/first-year/fy-profile
HOPE does pay $229 per credit hour.
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Gaskill its not only Georgia college grads who are saddled with huge debt, most of them are. I have my suspicions about the root of this but most of it is just conjecture. But the point is these kids, for whatever reason, are beginning their adult lives saddled with significant debt us older folks did not acquire till we were at least 10-15 years older.
I have wondered for some time if some of these folks would not have been better off learning how to plumb.
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HS:
” I know few of the details but I’ll bet . . .”
Now that’s letting ideology trump competency. Or confirmation bias at a minimum. I-don’t-need-to-know-the-facts-to-know-the-truth is dangerous in the hands of politicians and activists of all stripes use (see what I did there. . . tigers . . oh well).
Thank you for making the Senator’s point for him.
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Navin I made a statement I stand behind. College costs and state budgets aren’t an obscure subject. College budgets grew way out of proportion in fat years and now they must retrench.
But you sounded real smart saying ‘confirmation bias.’ Impressive.
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Navin, college budgets and state budget shortfalls aren’t an obscure subject.
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Perhaps a better grasp of how the State expends & MANAGES its revenues to Higher Education is in order. Few if any will quibble with the fact that tenured staff & administrative costs have mirrored that of Washington so in the absence of accountability, they throw $$$ at it aimlessly.
Fact is, when a class is created that is immune to market forces, as today’s Intellectual Elites are, Judgement Day is always around the corner.
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Tangent: I remember a lot of College Republicans who left college bitter about their experience. They felt intellectually marginalized during their time on campus and openly scoffed at things like women’s studies programs and the like.
And now a lot of those people are in state governments. We’ve got more than a few running around Raleigh. Jesse Helms once famously said they should put a fence around Chapel Hill and call it the North Carolina zoo. Now, the current governor thinks curriculum at state universities should pass some sort of economic value litmus test, because only private colleges should offer degrees where the tax-payer ROI isn’t obvious.
Our colleges traditionally have been where our students close those K-12 testing gaps with other countries. Now, we’re taking those same K-12 state-legislature mandates and management systems and working them up the chain into our college systems. Yikes.
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It’s not uncommon for a kid graduating from a state medical or dental school to be $200,000. in debt. When I was a freshman at UGA in 1966, the tuition was $111.00 per quarter.
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