OT: Louisiana facing $2B budget shortfall, no funds for college athletics?

Submitted by iawolve on

These things often get sorted out since elected officals will protect sports teams since one way to create a revolt is to defund the football team. However, it would personally give me pause regarding attending LSU knowing there is this instability. Regardless, the quality of education would likely be affected due cuts likely coming, they will not have full funding 

 

Facing a budget crisis, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards says higher education in the state could be compromised. And that includes the possibility of college athletics in Louisiana being canceled.

...campuses could run out of money and be forced to shut down in April, highlighting the LSU football team as one of the potential losses from massive cuts to higher education funding.

"If you are a student attending one of these universities, it means that you will receive a grade of incomplete, many students will not be able to graduate, and student-athletes across the state at those schools will be ineligible to play next semester," Edwards said

http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/14764642/louisiana-gov-j…

 

 

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SAMgO

February 12th, 2016 at 10:26 AM ^

It's very unlikely that LSU football will be affected. He just knows that when it comes down to it, an agreement will be reached if it's necessary to keep the Tigers' season afloat.

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NolaBleu

February 12th, 2016 at 10:57 AM ^

It's a little of that and the fact that we here in the bayou state are facing a massive $960 million budget shortfall. A lot of it came from Piyush Jindal and the old Louisiana way of cutting higher education to try to close the budget gap. Well, since the previous years have already done that and now that there's nothing else to cut, reality is about to set in. It also didn't help how bad the oil and gas market is and a lot of Louisiana's revenue is from oil and gas. It's almost like the perfect little storm of shit that's about to drop all over us in the bayou. LSU is certainly posturing here to make threats, but I wouldn't sleep on all these threats because of the simple fact that there is no more money and even the TOPS program is about to be canned. 

To think, I almost went to LSU for undergrad..... I'm glad I froze my ass off for 4 years in A2. Now I get to sit back and watch the panic set among LSU fans (possibly canning Miles etc) and let me tell you, it's been a great show that's only about to get better. 

 

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m_go_T

February 12th, 2016 at 12:05 PM ^

Why would you go to Michigan and be in the cold, when you could have went to LSU and been warm all year round (well warm or extremely hot)?  Think of all the STDs you missed out on as well.  

Shame on you picking on lil' Bobby. Just think of how great he could have made America.   

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lilpenny1316

February 12th, 2016 at 10:31 AM ^

LSU, for example, has made a lot of budget cuts over the past few years.  My aunt works for LSU and her job has been facing the chopping block for at least five years.  This is more a political issue than sports related issue at this time, making this a tough topic for our board.

The only thing I will say politically is that there are a lot of people in the educational field (k-12 and higher education) that did not agree with many of the decisions the previous governor made.  I won't play partisan politics and offer blame on how or why decisions were made, but I just know that there was a lot of questioning his decisions when it came to educational funding.

Oh, and there's no way the LSU football team is touched.  More people live and die with LSU football than Saints football.  LSU baseball is a close third behind the Saints.  That will never change.  You even touch LSU football and you'll get recalled.  The non-revenue sports may be affected, but not the biggest money maker in the Boot.

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sdogg1m

February 12th, 2016 at 3:42 PM ^

You have three choices in the matter of balanced budgets. 1) Cut costs. 2) Raise taxes. 3) A bit of both.

The public will often push back at a pure tax hike and sometimes you can get acceptance on both but if you can't then you have no choice but to cut costs. I have no problems with downvotes because no one likes cutting a budget but sometimes that is what is required.

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CarrIsMyHomeboy

February 12th, 2016 at 10:35 AM ^

This brings up the point of adapting to the modern funding environment. The University of Michigan has a general fund that contributes to 27.1% of the total operating budget. Of that 27.1%, the state contributes less than one-fifth. Your head math isn't failing you. The state of Michigan only contributes 4.4% of the University of Michigan's total operating budget. http://vpcomm.umich.edu/budget/fundingsnapshot/index.html If the state ever did to U-M what Louisiana is threatening against LSU, U-M would just say "well that is genuinely too bad, but OK I guess we are a private university now." Remaining public is a virtue but I think it is every university's responsibility to be as autonomous and resistant-to-peril as possible. LSU evidently isn't.

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CarrIsMyHomeboy

February 12th, 2016 at 11:14 AM ^

It's a fair question, but your tone seems to neglect the possibility that other forms of funding could have seen growth outpacing inflation-adjusted tuition hikes. A total operating budget is an enormous thing. As mentioned, the General Fund only contributes to 27.1% of it. And tuition contributes to a large fraction of that. But the remaining majority of the total operating budget has been growing at an impressive rate out of cleverness and foresight. Fundraising, grant-getting, endowment interest, etc. And of course, the enormous A.D. and (even more so) UM Health System pay for themselves. Maybe you had not forgotten those things, but since you neglected to specify them, I wanted to.

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jmblue

February 12th, 2016 at 11:36 AM ^

The amount of money given to state universities hasn't actually decreased for all that time.   That's only been the case in the last 15 years or so.  Prior to that, state appropriations were increasing, but the university budgets kept expanding even faster, causing tuition to also steadily increase.  

The facility arms race has been a factor, but probably the biggest one has been a gigantic increase in the number of administrative positions colleges have created.  Some schools now have more administrators than faculty.

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Blue_sophie

February 12th, 2016 at 10:47 AM ^

Sometimes I wonder if Michigan will eventually become a private university (see Cornell). Then I think of the massive amount of real estate owned by the State that the university uses for its physical presence. Would the university need to buy it? It would probably take decades to untangle through the courts, even if the state funds little of the operating budget.

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CarrIsMyHomeboy

February 12th, 2016 at 11:22 AM ^

That wasn't really my point of greatest emphasis but of course you are correct. Technically the state constitution possesses a clause stating ownership of the University. (...) But I have to imagine the state forfeits their ownership if they deliberately quit their stewardship. In other words, it may be effectively impossible for Michigan to go private right now (Good!), because the state continues to fund the school (Good!). But I imagine it would be easy to lobby for a rewriting of that constitutional clause if the state dropped their support from 4.4% to 0.00% of the total operating budget.

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SBayBlue

February 12th, 2016 at 11:23 AM ^

I graduated in '89. Out of state tuition when I graduated was $7,500, and total out of pocket was $15,000. It is now $60,000+/year for us out of staters.

I live in CA and will find it hard to justify sending my daughters to UM when a UC like Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, or Davis is available (if they get in). It is 50% of the cost. I make very well into the six figures, and even after 15 years of saving, there is no way to swing $240K for each child. (it will be much more by the time they are ready).

Michigan is sitting on an endowment of $10B+. They spent $133M on financial aid in 2015. If they used just 1% more of the endowment annually (I hope their investments make much, much more), they could nearly double financial aid.

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Brian

February 12th, 2016 at 12:17 PM ^

That isn't really an accurate characterization of Michigan's situation. 54% of the overall budget is the hospital, athletic department, Daily, and housing that are run as self-sufficient entitites. Another 16% comes from grants, gifts, and endowment payouts, and only a small fraction of that is part of the day to day education experience. 

The general fund is more or less the whole pie when it comes to things the state should actually be involved in supporting. 

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momo

February 12th, 2016 at 1:14 PM ^

Moreover, the state contribution is of the order of $300M.

 

I'm frankly surprised at some of the comments about how easy it would be to walk away from this money, or increase financial aid payouts from the endowment, or whatever, because "it's a small percentage of the total". A small percentage of a huge number is a *lot* of money. The endowment payout rate is set at 5% (or whatever) for long-term fiscal prudence. You can argue about the appropriateness of that number but it's not like going to 6% is a decision you make off the cuff to throw out of state families a bone.

 

The summary of the LSU situation is that, at least in theory, you do actually need a functioning university in order to have a university-affiliated football team.

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CarrIsMyHomeboy

February 12th, 2016 at 6:08 PM ^

No doubt those things fold into the Total Operating Budget. And no doubt they sustain themselves. Maybe my language was accidentally misleading, though I deliberately distinguished "General Fund" from the TOB to avoid that. Even still, the Health Center, research facilities and AD sit on U-M's plot of land and their annual budgets -- however autonomous -- go a long way each year toward defining the Michigan identity. Why not add 'em in when accounting for The State(TM)'s annual contribution to U-M's identity? I think the next Guy's point is better. A small fraction of a crazily large number can still be a crazily large number. That's just math. Math that my original post glossed over maximally lazily.

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Danwillhor

February 12th, 2016 at 10:36 AM ^

Southerners will go without health care, education and more but you don't touch their football. Whatever he's trying to accomplish by saying this will be done....OR...his bluff will be called and they'll see what happens when he's facing the decision of riots and finding the money.

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Blue_sophie

February 12th, 2016 at 10:39 AM ^

The chancellor recently stated that athletics will be funded by direct donation rather than pullin from state funds... And Cal alumni are not nearly as fanatical about their football team as LSU grads. Les will be just fine.

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MI Expat NY

February 12th, 2016 at 10:49 AM ^

This is a little off base.  It's not that LSU risks not having funding for it's athletics.  Like Michigan, LSU athletics actually contribute to the academic side and are well in the black.  The problem is supposedly that if the school loses funding on Apr. 30, every spring semester class will be an incomplete for students.  Thus, the entire LSU football team aside from true freshmen would be academically ineligible.  

Still a scare tactic and unlikely to happen, but not an actual threat to LSU athletic funding.

Edit: I see that this is in the OP but others seem to be missing the point. 

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PopeLando

February 12th, 2016 at 10:48 AM ^

It's at the state level for 2017, not the university level. And there are a lot of reasons why a Revenue Estimating Conference can be off by that amount. For a state with $30 billion in yearly spending, $2 billion in revenue is easily lost in a shitty economy. Finally, there will be at least one more Revenue Estimating Conference this year before final figures are determined, I assume

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PopeLando

February 12th, 2016 at 10:42 AM ^

I know a bit about state finance. The whole "college athletics will end" is not a decision the Governor is making: it's three or four steps down the "money chain," well after the money is passed to the schools themselves What he's saying is that higher education funding won't be getting as large of an appropriation from the General Fund or whatever the analogue is of Michigan's School Aid Fund. This will put a lot of strain on all universities' budgets, meaning that the various boards and trustees will have some difficult decisions to make. Some will undoubtedly suspend programs or research grants. Others will dip into their endowments. Most will probably secure low-interest financing with future state appropriations as collateral. It is always foolish to cut education appropriations. But that's just my opinion.

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