For a generation of young Americans, choosing where to go to college—or whether to go at all—has become a complex calculation of costs and benefits that often revolves around a single question: Is the degree worth its price?
Public confidence in higher education has plummeted in recent years amid high tuition prices, skyrocketing student loans and a dismal job market—plus ideological concerns from conservatives. Now, colleges are scrambling to prove their value to students.
Even in Louisiana, some campuses are seeing significant enrollment declines.
Borrowed from the business world, the term “return on investment” has been plastered on college advertisements across the U.S. A battery of new rankings grade campuses on the financial benefits they deliver. States such as Colorado have started publishing yearly reports on the monetary payoff of college, and Texas now factors it into calculations for how much taxpayer money goes to community colleges.
“Students are becoming more aware of the times when college doesn’t pay off,” says Preston Cooper, who has studied college ROI at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “It’s front of mind for universities today in a way that it was not necessarily 15, 20 years ago.”
In Louisiana, some regional universities have seen their student populations decline dramatically over the last eight years, economist Loren Scott wrote in his Louisiana Economic Forecast for 2026-2027. Enrollment at Northwestern State University has fallen 25% since 2017. UNO enrolled 6,501 students in 2024—down from its all-time high of 17,349 in 2004.
LSU’s Baton Rouge campus is an exception. This fall’s freshman enrollment of approximately 8,000 creates an eight-year streak that freshman enrollment has set a new record. LSU-Shreveport and LSU-Alexandia are among the few regional universities that have enjoyed a steady upward spike in enrollments over the last few years, and with UNO returning to the LSU system, education officials hope to reverse decline there.
Bucking the trend is Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, where after an 18-year period of declining enrollments from 2006 to 2023, the school has seen the start of a nice recovery for the past two fall enrollment periods, according to the report.
Stricter admission standards coupled with the pandemic shutdown contributed to Louisiana Tech University’s 15% drop in enrollment between the fall of 2017 and the fall of 2022. Scott says a relaxation of admission standards has helped the university recover about half of the losses.
