[StBernard] EDITORIAL: Louisiana must continue to provide incentives for education

[Westley Annis]

EDITORIAL: Louisiana must continue to provide incentives for education

Periodically, the press office will publish editorials, articles and columns that feature Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's work in various areas. 

The Baton Rouge Advocate: An incentive for education
Published Friday, September 28, 2007
Click here to read the article online. <http://keelson.eatel.net/websites/la.gov/action.cfm?md=communication&task=addClick&msg_ID=4452&ID=dYiPebiunVn%22&redirect=http://www.2theadvocate.com/opinion/10095516.html> 

Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the Legislature deserve credit for putting money this year into truly long-term investments: endowed chairs and professorships. The state will provide $15.9 million in matching funds to public and private colleges and universities across the state. Part of the money comes from the higher-education trust fund created by the Legislature in 1986 from an oil and gas windfall. But the trust fund can't keep up with the need for state matching funds, and the Blanco administration and the 2007 Legislature added more than $10 million in supplements to match endowments.

The total of $15.9 million will help create 16 new endowed chairs and 175 new endowed professorships. The state-funded portion matches more than $23 million in private-sector donations. Since 1986, the Board of Regents has been able to award nearly $286 million in matching grants through the program, creating 277 endowed chairs and 1,935 endowed professorships. The total of chairs and professorships is more than $438 million.

The proceeds from the endowments help pay for talent in an increasingly competitive national marketplace for professors. Chairs are typically $1 million, although there are 30 chairs with $2 million endowments. Professorships are $100,000 endowments. Because the chairs and professorships are permanently endowed, this is a long-term investment in the quality of higher education in Louisiana.

LSU Chancellor Sean O'Keefe recently applauded the supplemental funds provided by the state for matching funds, as the state's flagship campus needs endowed chairs to be competitive in hiring eminent scholars. If the Legislature had relied only on the higher-education trust fund for matching funds, the donations might have languished for several years without the state kicking in its share. That's not an incentive for donors to give.

Donors like this program in part because their dollars are matched by the state. Even with the jitters in the stock markets lately, there is a lot of wealth in Louisiana that can create endowments, and the state match encourages donors to invest in higher education. Lawmakers should not count on the higher-education trust fund, the so-called 8-G fund created from the oil and gas settlement 25 years ago, to pay for all the matching funds required every year.

The next governor and Legislature should always keep an eye out for using surplus funds to match these permanent investments in colleges and universities.


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