Nashville education advocates are calling on state legislators to create a fair repayment plan after Tennessee underfunded one of its land grant colleges for decades.
In January, a report from the Tennessee Office of Legislative Budget Analysis showed that Tennessee State University could be owed nearly $544 million dollars. The state failed to distribute its federally required matching land grant money to the college from 1957 to 2007.
According to some legislators, sometimes TSU had to pull from its own general fund to provide the matches itself.
More: How decades of underfunding harms TSU students and hurts graduation rates
With state lawmakers gearing up to take on the topic during the forthcoming legislative session, the Education Trust in Tennessee has released a memo with recommendations on how the state can address the issue.
The proposals were drawn from similar cases of underfunding across the country, says Kiah Albritton, a policy associate with the nonprofit.
“The original funding would not have had strings attached. It’s important that we don’t try to attach strings in the repayment,” she says.
Putting a half-billion dollar check in the hands of TSU will probably never happen — even though that was somewhat the case for Tennessee’s only other land grant college, University of Tennessee Knoxville. The college received its share of funds during the same period TSU didn’t.
In June, a state legislative committee tasked the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration and Tennessee Higher Education Commission to work with TSU to identify potential investments that could help the university.
More: Education Officials Propose Plan To Make Up For Years Of Underfunding At TSU
Albritton, however, says the state should be hands-off when it comes to making decisions about how the investment funds should be spent. She says decisions should be left up to TSU staff, faculty, students and alumni.
“They didn’t do that with the funds they were sending to the University of Tennessee. And if they had been paying TSU like they were supposed to throughout those decades, they wouldn’t have been doing that either,” she adds.
Another piece of advice, says Albritton, is for Tennessee to follow the 10-year repayment plan created by the state of Maryland after underfunding its four HBCUs.
In April, Maryland settled a half-billion dollar lawsuit with the colleges. The money will be distributed over a decade. In Tennessee, the Education Trust says the state could start the process now and “finish repaying TSU by 2032 or sooner.”
TSU freshman Trey Cunningham says this is something he’d like to see state lawmakers make happen, and he believes they will, although he’s concerned that paying out the funds won’t be an equitable process.
“It’s just as to how, because they’re not going to give that much money away,” he says. “I keep saying there’s no way they’re going to do that.”
Full recommendations from The Education Trust in Tennessee include:
- Focus on fiscal adequacy not just fiscal equity
- Consider the cost of inflation and TSU’s influence
- Ensure repayment begins swiftly, with no strings attached
- Continue Tennessee’s status as an exemplar in higher education by creating a payment plan to fully compensate TSU
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