A bill seeking to reform the requirements for TOPS eligibility recently failed in the state house education committee in the Louisiana Legislature.
TOPS, the acronym for the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, helps thousands of eligible Louisiana students every year to cover their college tuition at both public and private universities within the state.
However, the program is becoming harder to sustain, as it takes a lot of money to get these several thousand students covered financially. With the state’s already economically deprived budget problems, the costly TOPS program is only adding to the issue.
The bill proposed that the minimum requirement for TOPS should be a score over 24 on the ACT test and a GPA of at least 3.0 rather than a score of at least 20 on the ACT and a 2.5 on their GPA as it has been in the past.
The bill also says that students who do manage to meet the minimum standards must pay a larger portion of their tuition for their first two years of their chosen undergraduate program.
Dr. Michael Corbello, an instructor of political science, says the sustainability of TOPS has been an issue for years now.
“I don’t remember a time when the sustainability of TOPS was not in question,” said Corbello. “It has always been an incentive-based program, but one that would cost more money as the program became more popular and more successful.  In a budget that’s well over $20 billion, programs like TOPS are financially viable if the governor and legislators want them to be so.”
Corbello says these new requirements could be beneficial, but only when gradually applied so that universities and students can adapt. However, he also says that university tuitions need to not be in a state of flux for them to be effective.
“The fact of the matter is that requirements should increase incrementally, but not in a vacuum,” said Corbello. “Universities need to be properly funded and tuition itself needs to remain stable.”
In the end, though, the ones who would be most affected by these changes are students, many of whom are struggling to pay their way through school or deal with student loans.
“We have working-class students working their butts off to get a college degree,” said Corbello. “They aren’t perfect.  Many of them have more than one job, and many of them have families, with more and more of the cost of college being shifted in their direction.  Forcing them to pay back the TOPS scholarship for a momentary lapse one semester is not going to do them any good, nor will it do the state any good.”
No legislation regarding TOPS that would have adjusted the standards or capped the scholarship amounts made it out of house education committee.