Editor's note: WWNO is licensed to the University of New Orleans but is funded independently and reports on the university like any other school.
Enrollment is down again this fall at the University of New Orleans. Roughly 5,300 full-time students are enrolled, about 500 fewer than last year.
UNO is in the process of leaving the University of Louisiana system and returning to LSU’s oversight, a move supporters hope will help turn the trend around.
In an email to faculty and staff last week, UNO President Kathy Johnson said the latest figures are “lower than we’d hoped, yet understandable given the challenges we’ve experienced over the course of the past year.”
Those challenges include transitioning to a new platform to manage student services — including distributing financial aid and collecting fees — and “the loss of student-facing staff in key positions.”
She also listed “uncertainty about the future of the university regularly reflected in the press” as well as “shifts in procedures to ensure that students are not able to remain enrolled if their fee bills are not paid.”
Johnson said in the email that “progress has been made in all of these areas.”
UNO enrolled more than 17,000 students at its peak before Hurricane Katrina. Enrollment never fully recovered after the storm and has been in decline since the pandemic.
Johnson has made several moves over the past year to bring the school’s spending in line, including budget cuts, furloughs and layoffs.
The school is under a spending freeze, and hiring is largely on hold.
University officials told faculty and staff in July that the budget for the coming year was over by $1.5 million, due largely to the cost of paying graduate students workers and adjunct professors.
In response, Johnson and other university leaders said they would eliminate some classes and asked full-time professors to take on more classes so they could reduce the number of adjunct professors and save money.
But, in an email sent earlier this month, Johnson said the university is still short $1.1 million.
“We will not address this by reducing budgets further at this time,” she said. “However, we will need to be extremely judicious in replacing positions.”
The university will only hire for “critical student-facing positions” and those that impact health and safety for the time being. Faculty and staff have also been asked not to purchase equipment, software and office supplies unless they’re “absolutely essential” or paid for with outside funds, Johnson said.
Dual enrollment with the city’s high schools also dropped by almost half this fall, from 664 students last year to 365.
In an email to WWNO, Johnson said the university had to stop offering some classes because it did not have instructors with the appropriate credentials.
“We’ll be working to build that back up in the future,” she said.
