New Orleans-area colleges project 80 percent of pre-Katrina

New Orleans CityBusiness, Jul 3, 2006 by Tommy Santora

Ronald Maggiore, associate vice chancellor for enrollment management and dean of admissions at the University of New Orleans, says rarely is there a radical change in university's enrollment numbers from year to year, or semester to semester.

Typically, it's less than 5 percent, and the usual predictors, like changing academic offerings or students deciding to attend somewhere else, are things you can prepare for, he said.

Hurricane Katrina was not one of those predictors.

Maggiore and other four-year college administrators in New Orleans returned in fall 2005 not knowing what kind of impact the storm would have on enrollment numbers.

But as campuses renovated and reopened and displaced students returned to the city, it was not as big of a blow to enrollment counts as some might have expected.

The three largest four-year colleges in New Orleans - Tulane University, Loyola University and UNO - are projecting enrollments above 80 percent of pre-Katrina numbers for this fall after hitting at least 70 percent of pre-Katrina counts in the spring semester.

Xavier University had 3,091 students in its spring semester, or 67 percent, of its fall 2004 enrollment of 4,121 students. Southern University at New Orleans' enrollment declined 44 percent from 3,700 in fall 2005 to 2,055 students in spring.

At Tulane, 11,307 students attended the university in the spring after a pre-Katrina enrollment of 13,000, an 87 percent return.

Richard Whiteside, Tulane vice president for enrollment management, said the spring numbers met the university's expectations. He said typically there is an 8 percent to 10 percent drop from fall to spring enrollment counts.

Whiteside projects about 5,200 undergraduates this fall, a 17 percent drop from the 6,300 undergrads enrolled in 2005, while the graduate numbers will stay unchanged.

Our biggest challenge has been the national media coverage New Orleans has received after the storm. There is a lot of uncertainty from the rest of the country on where we are in the recovery process, said Whiteside, who added that out-of-state students make up 85 percent of the university's population.

There is mass confusion on the rebuilding of the levees, the political stability and the crime situation in the city, and people are concerned about living in that environment, he said.

Loyola University had 5,000 students enrolled in spring, down 9 percent from the spring 2005 figure of 5,500 and down 11 percent from the fall 2005 count of 5,600 enrolled pre-Katrina.

After Katrina, Loyola had 3,000 students displaced in 500 institutions across the country.

Debbie Stieffel, Loyola dean of admissions and enrollment management, projects about 5,000 students this fall with the biggest decrease coming in the freshman class, where they will see close to 600 students, down from the typical 850.

Stieffel said Loyola has typically takes in about 75 transfers in the fall, but that number is already close to 100. Loyola's student population typically has been 75 percent out-of-state and 25 percent in state, but Stieffel says those numbers will be close to 50-50 this fall.

We do see a lot of concern from out-of-state parents and kids about New Orleans post-Katrina, but on the other side, there is a general sense of adventure for students interested in being part of a city that offers more than daily classroom instruction, she said. There's a historical pull to this city now, and they want to be part of something bigger.

UNO never officially closed following Katrina, enrolling approximately 7,000 students in the fall semester. In the spring, the campus had 11,200 students return, a 30 percent decrease from the pre-Katrina fall count of 17,250. Maggiore projects about 14,000 students to be enrolled this fall.

After Katrina, UNO had 5,400 students displaced at 275 universities across the country, including 1,200 in masters programs, primarily in education.

Maggiore said Katrina has changed and enhanced the ways admission departments communicate with prospective students. For example, UNO has asked for all applications to be sent via its Web site. The university has also hired the New York-based technology firm GoalQuest to assist with its recruiting efforts. Its software sends e-mails and posts Web site messages for parents and students who are interested in the programs offered.

Whiteside said Tulane completely revised the literature it hands out to prospective students to correlate with the recovery direction of the university.

We're all in a very challenging environment and with unprecedented predictors and factors that not too many admission departments have faced, said Maggiore. The key is changing people's confidence in the university and the surrounding city, and that's something we have to meet head-on.

Board of Regents allots

$50,000 for doctoral work

The state Board of Regents approved $50,000 from its support fund to help doctoral students at Louisiana's research universities affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita with their research and education projects.