Enrollment at LSU’s flagship campus in Baton Rouge is down significantly this year over last, with nearly 13% fewer undergraduate students registered for the fall semester.
So far, some 27,000 undergraduate students have registered and paid for fall classes, 4,000 fewer than the 31,000 registered in the fall of 2015.
But university officials expect that number to rise between today and Sept. 9, which is the 14th day of classes and the deadline for fall registration.
“I think you’re going to see those numbers come up in the next few days,” says Jason Droddy, executive director of policy and external affairs. “I think we’ll ultimately be close to 30,000.”
Several factors are believed to be responsible for the lower enrollment figures. One is the recent flood. Some 29% of LSU students list their permanent home address as being in Ascension, Livingston or East Baton Rouge parishes, the three hardest-hit parishes in the flood. Registration and payment deadlines were extended by the university to accommodate those students and their families. Still, some students haven’t been able to get to campus yet and some may not be able to come this semester at all.
Another major factor is the uncertainty that surrounded TOPS until early June. Though state lawmakers ultimately voted to fully fund the popular tuition program for the fall semester, it wasn’t at all clear that would happen until it was too late for some students.
LSU President F. King Alexander believes another factor may also be affecting enrollment for at least some students and their families—the negative publicity that surrounded the Alton Sterling shooting and the subsequent ambush killing of three law enforcement officers in June.
“I think some parents of freshmen from rural areas may be reacting to that,” Alexander says. “Now they see Baton Rouge as the big, scary city.”
Alexander says he doesn’t have any data to support that theory, but he has anecdotal evidence and has heard those concerns in conversations with families around the state.
Enrollment of entering freshmen was particularly off from what had been projected based on the number of applications the university received last spring. LSU was expecting to enroll 300 more freshmen than it had in its 2015 class of 5,600. Instead, it enrolled 350 fewer.
“We’ve had a confluence of circumstances—three forces that were outside of our control,” says Alexander. “They’ve really hurt us.”
While the final enrollment picture will likely improve somewhat, Alexander is already looking to the spring semester and what promises to be more bad news. State lawmakers have only funded TOPS at 40% for the spring, which creates uncertainty for students and their families. Before the flood there were questions about how and when the state would find the money to fully fund the program.
Now, with so many other pressing issues before them, there’s no telling what lawmakers will do.
“The state was in a fiscal crisis before,” Alexander says. “Now, it’s in a bigger one and students start planning and pre-registering their classes for the spring semester in mid-October, less than two months from now.”
—Stephanie Riegel
