All but lost in the brouhaha over Gov. Piyush Jindal’s overt moves to privatize the Louisiana Office of Risk Management, Office of Group Benefits, state prisons, Medicaid, the Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance and K-12 public education is the quiet but steady erosion of state financial support for state colleges and universities that is pushing higher education toward that same precipice.
Once considered sacrosanct, Louisiana’s state colleges and universities no longer are considered untouchable by legislators. Accordingly, administrators find themselves having to seek funding more and more from private endowments and from tuition increases that threaten to push student costs to a prohibitive level for all but the wealthiest.
And Louisiana is by no means the exception. The trend toward pseudo- and outright privatization is becoming more prevalent in all 50 states as state
