House Bill 77 is moving its way through the state legislature and is a re-working of the TOPS program. Louisiana State Representative Laurie Schlegel joined WWL’s Newell Normand to discuss the state of TOPS moving forward in Louisiana. Schlegel is the acting Chair of House Education and said that, between sessions, there were meetings to take a deep dive into the state of education in the region. “The report showed me antidotally what I already know. That we’re losing a lot of our best and brightest to out of state schools. That report shows that within ten years, we saw roughly an 11% decrease in honors’ level students accepting their TOPS and going to Louisiana colleges,” Schlegel says.
The emphasis of the program should be keeping the best and brightest students here in Louisiana, but Schlegel says our schools are not competing at the levels of out-of-state colleges and she hopes House Bill 77 will help to keep the state competitive when it comes to keeping Louisiana’s most remarkable students here to further their careers. She adds that the hope is to not only educate Louisiana residents within the state, but to employ those graduates locally as well. This is all in the hope of strengthening both the university system and the middle class in the region.
Surrounding states like Alabama and Mississippi have been implementing programs such as this for some time and Schlegel says the predictability of those states’ scholarship programs proves to be very helpful. “You know if you make a certain ACT score and you have a certain GPA there, you will be awarded a certain amount of assistance. The only thing we have like that here is our TOPS program and even that doesn’t help to keep us as competitive as many of these out of state universities,” adds Schlegel.