Technology Helps New Orleans University Rebuild Enrollment

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Technology Helps New Orleans University Rebuild Enrollment

6/5/2008

By Linda L Briggs

What do you do when the mainstream media's portrayal of your city is relentlessly negative? When news services persist in showing flooded streets and stranded people and cars? When enrollments drop drastically and your technology staff is slashed because students and staff have left the city?

For several New Orleans colleges and universities, the answer has been technology.

Through carefully designed, targeted Web sites, e-mail, and social networking tools, the University of New Orleans (UNO), for example, has managed to pull enrollment back up from lows after Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005.

Ron Maggiore, associate vice chancellor for enrollment management and dean of admissions, said that freshman applications for this coming fall are up by 65 percent over last year, and transfer numbers are up 76 percent. "It's been pretty dramatic.... We've been through two years with a lot of recovery going on in the city, and I think confidence is up among students and parents. New Orleans is ready for prime time again." More than two and a half years after the storm, those numbers are evidence that confidence in the city and its schools is up, he said.

It's also evidence that technology can be used effectively to deal with declining enrollments and reduced staff and to project a positive message to prospective and returning students, even in the face of unrelenting bad news.

New Orleans has traditionally been an easy place to entice students to, Maggiore said, but after the hurricane, the city faced "a relentless negative media stream from the national media." The situation in New Orleans wasn't nearly as negative as it was often portrayed, he said, but that was difficult to convey when images on the evening news continued to show a city underwater and struggling. "Our biggest challenge was to get to our populations with the right message--the accurate message," Miggiore said.

The Drastic Decline in Enrollment
Enrollment took a hard hit initially. In August 2005, prior to Katrina, UNO had more than 17,000 students. Six weeks later, the school re-enrolled just 7,000 students for its fall semester. The main campus, located on a high portion of land across the street from Lake Ponchartrain, was relatively unscathed by the hurricane and subsequent flooding --just 10 percent to 20 percent of the campus flooded, although there were many associated problems, such as broken windows and mold. But using branch campuses, UNO managed to start its fall classes on schedule--several days before the city itself reopened.

When the university reopened completely in January 2006, enrollment had risen back to just 12,000 students. "We lost 5,461 students," Maggiore said. "From an enrollment guy's perspective, it was just crazy." His research shows that students with the least investment in the institution were lost permanently. Of the 5,000-plus who did not return, 25 percent were new freshmen and sophomores. As Maggiore explained it, "The front end of your admissions funnel drops out. The latter end stays and keeps graduating. Over the course of three years, the critical mass of continuing students declines." He's now on course, he said, to replace those students and get numbers back on track.