University execs look to students to make up for cuts

Nicholls State University President Stephen Hulbert asked members of the Bayou Industrial Group on Monday for their support in helping the university overcome recent budget cuts by lobbying the governor to start charging Louisiana students for each credit hour they sign up for instead of only 12.

Nicholls currently charges $2,145.85 in tuition for in-state undergraduates who take 12 or more hours. Hulbert estimated the school could add more than $4 million in annual revenue if they stopped “giving away 17 percent of their product.”

“I’m sorry to say it, but it’s time for Nicholls students and LSU students to pay their fair share for their educational opportunity,” Hulbert said.

Nicholls is facing an effective 26 percent cut in state funding, which has caused them to eliminate 117 full-time positions, eight degree programs and four concentrations. Hulbert said instead of whining, the university is trying to help itself.

Students who do take advantage of the free-after-12 policy are either fishing for easier classes while dropping the hard ones or streamlining their educational process, Hulbert said.

“I don’t know in your businesses, but right now we are giving away 17 percent of our product each year free of charge and it is to students trying to get through more rapidly,” Hulbert said. “Therefore they are in the upper-level classes that cost us more, and we are giving it away for free. We can’t afford to do that. It’s a simple reality.”

Hulbert also admonished another issue with Louisiana schools and credit hours – the fact that they all cost the same. Instead of increased prices for nursing and culinary classes, those students are paying the same prices per credit hour as history majors.

“We have to get to the point where the students are paying a premium for the more costly courses in order for us to be able to support those programs,” Hulbert said. “Does it seem unfair that we now take a shift of money from state appropriation support to student payment? In many ways, it is.

“But right now, Louisiana students are paying an average of $1,300 less to go to a university like Nicholls than corresponding students in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. We tend to say our people cannot afford it, but I can guarantee you the people of Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama are not better prepared to pay.”

Seventy percent of Nicholls students who were surveyed said they would rather pay higher credit hour fees than have to go a greater distance and pay room-and-board fees to stay in their programs, Hulbert said.

Hulbert said he and state Rep. Jerome “Dee” Richard had the opportunity to meet with Gov. Bobby Jindal two weeks ago, when the university president was able to voice his concerns to the state leader and explain why Nicholls has been so aggressive in promoting their message.

He said the average Nicholls student travels to campus almost 35 percent more than the average college student nationwide, and nearly 90 percent of the university’s graduates in the past 10 years still live in the state.

Eighty percent of the nurses and 80 percent of the teachers in the Bayou Region are Nicholls graduates, he added, and students from Terrebonne or Lafourche would have to travel an additional three to four hours per day to go to a different university.

Fletcher Technical Community College Chancellor Travis Lavigne joined Hulbert in addressing the crowd at the Bayou Country Club in Thibodaux.

The two-year college has worked with Nicholls to take over all their pure 2-year programs and developmental courses to alleviate the cuts.

The two schools have worked together in the past and reached an agreement for Fletcher to use the Theodore Duhé building in Houma to combat space issues.

“That’s a simple matter of two administrators getting together and understanding that our focus and our purpose in the community is to provide opportunities to the students, and not who wins and who loses with respect to tuition and other things,” Lavigne said.

Fletcher and Nicholls have alleviated some of the issues they have faced by working together, but it’s going to take a move from the state legislature – whether it be the reduction of proposed cuts or tuition raises – to fix the potential slashing of 18 more programs that Hulbert said would return the Nicholls to the state it was in the “late ’50s and early ’60s.”