State Panel Recommends Single Board to Oversee Louisiana Colleges

Louisiana has a committee that is studying the future of higher education in the state. But as that panel is just beginning its work, another state commission is weighing in, reviving the long-debated idea of having all public colleges in the state overseen by one governing board, The Advocate of Baton Rouge reported. The recommendation came Monday from a group advising the state's Commission on Streamlining Government, which is studying ways to make the state's operations more cost effective and efficient given a certain decline in state revenues through 2012. The panel was generally supposed to focus on areas other than higher education, given the work being done at the same time by the Postsecondary Education Review Committee established by Gov. Bobby Jindal. But that didn't stop members of the streamlining panel's advisory group on efficiency and benchmarking, including former Gov. Buddy Roemer, to propose that all colleges in the state report to the Louisiana Board of Regents, which now coordinates the work of public colleges but does not govern them. Louisiana's colleges are governed by Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors, the Southern University Board of Supervisors, the Board of Supervisors for the University of Louisiana System, and the Louisiana Community and Technical College Board.