A bill in the Louisiana Legislature to abolish the Board of Regents has it exactly backwards.

HB 391 by Republican state Rep. Dixon McMakin would amend the Constitution to do this, transferring current Board functions to other parts of state government, in a move described as cost-saving. McMakin called the Regents “duplicative” and that the agency didn’t “serve a positive impact on our students.”

He got it half-right: duplication is a big problem in the state’s overbuilt higher education system, with too many schools chasing too few students. And that’s reflected in the actual duplicative agencies whose functions need to be transferred to the Regents and abolished themselves: the four governance systems — the Louisiana State University System, the University of Louisiana System, the Southern University System, and the Louisiana Community and Technical Colleges System — along with their supervisory boards.

States have all sorts of models to oversee higher education. Generally, there are three components to these: a coordinating board that sets policy regarding all delivery, system governing boards that administer collections of institutions (with a common division between senior and junior/technical schools), and governing boards for individual campuses. Few states have all three, and some have just one board responsible for both coordination and governance for all institutions. The most common model is a coordinating board with either a system or two to oversee, or several institutions with their own boards. The majority of states have a coordinating agency like the Board of Regents, and of those that don’t, the most typical model is one where there is either a governing board for all institutions or a pair split between senior and junior/technical schools.

Louisiana has arguably the second-craziest model of the bunch. It not only has the Regents to coordinate, but then the three senior and one junior/technical boards to govern. Only Texas, with far more institutions and student population, has more systems below a coordinating agency. Other large states have fewer top-heavy models, typically preferring coordination either with individual campuses having governance boards or with fewer systems. States with Louisiana’s student population (and, notably, fewer community and technical colleges and far fewer senior institutions, typically) are even less porcine at the top.

To eliminate the Regents would create a situation with four management boards determining the minutiae of higher education policy. That would complicate articulation agreements smoothing out transfers between schools and pouring associates degrees into bachelors, oversight of programs to prevent duplication and inefficiency, and having a common set of general education requirements, among other things. That’s because, if left to their own devices, each system will go into business for itself without a care about any bigger plan (the state does have one).

To see how this could degrade state higher education, look no further than “holistic” admission criteria Louisiana State University embarked upon some years ago. In essence, it ignored Regents standards on the necessity (with some regulated exceptions) of standardized test scores as a necessary component to admissions, which (captured subsequently by data) eventually lowered standards and now has led to a small retreat. This all came about with the LSU Board of Supervisors thumbing their noses at the Regents (who admittedly didn’t fight this as they should have).

If McMakin and legislators really were serious about excising duplicative spending, they would emulate a couple of bills from a decade ago that would have wiped out the four systems and put all coordination and governance under a panel like the Regents, but with additional governance responsibilities. That would put Louisiana in line with models in other states that have worked out well.

The Board of Regents should be part of the solution to right-sizing Louisiana higher education that includes ideally both merging institutions and downgrading some four-year institutions to two-year status — but at the very least paring away supervisory boards. Politics likely will prevent any of this and if nothing like that happens, the current arrangement, as wasteful as it is, would be made worse without a check on the supervisory boards inducing chaos. McMakin’s bill needs a swift dismissal.