Leave TOPS alone

The year was 1988. A successful New Orleans businessman named Patrick F. Taylor had a speech to give. His audience was 183 restless middle schoolers who weren’t college bound. Heck, many weren’t even high school bound. They were biding their time until they could drop out of school.

Instead of a pep talk, Taylor decided to make a pitch. He would pay for the kids to go to college if they kept going to class, stayed out of trouble and maintained a “B” average. With that promise, Taylor established the building blocks for TOPS.

TOPS (the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students) is the state-funded college scholarship program that has benefited more than 200,000 kids in Louisiana. It doesn’t just send kids to LSU or Southern. It sends them to truck driving school if they want to drive a truck. It sends them to court reporting school if they want to become a court reporter. In other words, TOPS fulfills dreams.

Now some will tell you that TOPS has become too expensive. They’ll tell you the sky is falling. They’ll tell you the state budget is on a collision course, and TOPS is helping fuel the inevitable crash. They’ll tell you that changes can be made gradually to make the program more affordable for the state.

Here’s what I say: Leave TOPS alone. We can’t afford to diminish what TOPS does for our state.

The Hamilton Project, an arm of the Brookings Institution, crunched the numbers last year on what a college degree is worth. Not surprisingly, a degree in chemical engineering is more of a moneymaker than a drama degree. Also not surprisingly, any degree is better than no degree.

The Hamilton Project’s conclusion: “Median earnings of bachelor’s degree graduates are higher than median earnings of high school graduates for all 80 majors studied.” For every successful college dropout like Bill Gates, there are a thousand other dropouts clocking in at minimum wage jobs and not making a living wage.

JOHN KENNEDY

La. Treasurer