Posted by Jordan Blum
Capitol News Bureau
May 19, 2011

Efforts to lower the state's cost on merit-based TOPS scholarships and change the program were all met with overwhelming deaths Thurs-day when faced with opposition from the Jindal administration.

The primary measures would have limited the maximum value of the TOPS awards and another bill would have trans-formed TOPS into a "loan for-giveness" program that would have required students to pay the money back if they failed to maintain the TOPS academic requirements.

Both of the proposals have failed in the Legislature in pre-vious years and both were de-feated without objection on Thursday.

State Sen. Butch Gautreaux, D-Morgan City, who annually attempts to cap the Taylor Op-portunity Program for Stu-dents, called TOPS, said the taxpayers' cost of the program keeps rising while the scholar-ships mostly go to middle and upper-class students who do not need the financial assis-tance.

"I'm a supporter of TOPS, but we've just got to control the costs," Gautreaux said.

His Senate Bill 50 would cap TOPS payments at 90 percent of a student's mandatory tui-tion and fees. TOPS currently pays for all of the tuition costs and many fees. A full TOPS award at LSU, for instance, currently covers $4,834 of the total $5,764 in tuition and fees a year, according to LSU.

At 90 percent, a student with a full TOPS award could be re-sponsible for about $1,000 for the full school year. "Entitlement programs are very difficult to change, unless they're designed to help the poor or elderly," Gautreaux said. "The kids who are in the underperforming, inner-city schools can't meet the criteria."

TOPS currently costs the state about $140 million a year, and is expected to grow to as much as $170 million next year because of increasing tuition costs.

The legislation also faced op-position from Taylor Energy, whose founder, the late Patrick F. Taylor, played a key role in starting TOPS.

"TOPS has done what we ex-pected it to do, or hoped for it to do," said Taylor representative Robert Bowman. "One of the things that helps to drive up the cost of TOPS is the success … That is a good thing."

Gov. Bobby Jindal has op-posed any efforts to cap or sub-stantially change TOPS. He has only expressed an open-mindedness to increasing the academic standards to achieve TOPS awards.

As for the loan forgiveness program, Senate Bill 138 would make it so that if a TOPS stu-dent failed to maintain the aca-demic requirements to keep the award, then the student would have to pay the money back to the state.

But if the student maintains the requirements, then the stu-dent will still be able to treat TOPS like a free scholarship.

Bill sponsor and state Sen. Rob Marionneaux, D-Grosse Tete, said the state has lost $142 million in 10 years from TOPS students who drop out of school or fail to maintain the eligibility.

"It also now rewards college failure," Marionneaux said of TOPS. "To take a steadfast po-sition that we ought not touch TOPS, I think, is a mistake."

Bowman argued that stu-dents who drop out or lose the award - often because of per-sonal reasons or family prob-lems - would struggle even more with the additional bur-den of paying back the TOPS awards they had earned out of high school. "I see this as gutting the pro-gram," Bowman said.

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