Louisiana officials are pushing more of the state’s high school students toward vocational education. This is a good thing – if only because state officials are standing around idle as Louisiana’s higher-education system goes to ruin. What’s the point of preparing our children for college if we’re not going to preserve our colleges for our children? So, yay, vo-tech!

I’ll admit. I’m typically fearful of an emphasis on vocational education, not because I doubt that such education is valuable, but because it often feels like proponents of such tracks are lapsing into stereotypes about which children are fit for college and which aren’t. It might yet be true, that Louisiana doesn’t think highly enough of its students to prepare them all for college. But there’s no gainsaying the fact that Louisiana doesn’t think highly enough of its colleges. If higher education were held in high esteem, our colleges wouldn’t be suffering so.

At the end of last month the president of the University of New Orleans announced that the university would be laying off 28 staffers, a workforce reduction predicted to address $2 million of a reported $6 million budget deficit. Faculty members and instructors were spared in this round of cuts, […]