The University of New Orleans has become the sick man of higher education in Louisiana, providing a lesson of what happens when a school loses focus, faces shoddy political governance around it, and suffers from poor state higher education policy.

My alma mater has received a string of distressing news since the spring as it stares down budget cuts of 15 percent on the academic side and 25 percent on the athletics side. This is in response to a projected $15 million budget deficit for the upcoming year. The symptom of all this is declining enrollment that has plunged nearly 62 percent over the past two decades, going from the second-largest campus in the state in enrollment now to the tenth-highest and in the bottom half of senior institutions.

There are reasons for this, and they don’t reflect well on higher education and UNO leadership, state policy-makers, and governance particularly of New Orleans and to a lesser extent its surrounding areas. Starting at the top with the broadest big picture, policy-makers set up failure by their steadfast refusal to pare the state’s overbuilt system of higher education. When the realization came some three decades ago it was top heavy; partial corrections were made by building up the bottom with community and technical colleges, but the top itself wasn’t reduced (in fact, it was made even bigger with the addition of Louisiana State University of Alexandria as a senior institution).

Since the fall of 2023, the total number of students in state higher education hardly has risen, from just a few thousand to 217,614 or 1.44 percent. Yet despite a push to place associate degree programs and emphasis on trades into community and technical colleges, their proportion of students in the system rose only from just under a quarter to just over a quarter. Fanciful plans to boost degree completion from the current (academic year 2024 that ended last month) 55,284 to 85,000 in six years, which could take up overbuilt slack, are a pipe dream.

Failure to consolidate some senior institutions and demote others leave inefficiency that harms almost all of the state’s schools except for the flagship Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge that gets the pick of everything. UNO is one of the most direct victims of this, because its main campus sits little more than a mile from the main campus of another public senior institution, Southern University at New Orleans. SUNO as well has seen suffering, with its enrollment down 41 percent over the past two decades, and it would make perfect sense to merge the two.

As SUNO is a regional school and UNO a statewide with higher admission standards, the SUNO campus could be repurposed as a branch of Delgado Community College to accommodate those who might have attended SUNO that couldn’t qualify to enter UNO. SUNO faculty members largely would be retained there or at UNO, and millions of dollars annually could be saved in reducing duplicative bureaucracy. But politics got in the way of this precise solution some 13 years ago especially from black Democrat legislators who would see the pouring of SUNO into UNO – which still would leave UNO at about half of its enrollment 20 years ago – as taking away one of “their” universities from the only historically black university system in the country.

A mega-merger like that would be good for all concerned, as Delgado as well has suffered an enrollment dip, of 28 percent over the past two decades. Which points to a problem exogenous to organization of higher education: policy at both the state and local level that has depleted the pool of potential students. While it’s fashionable among academia and the political left to denigrate the Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal era insofar as higher education with a myth of “defunding” Louisiana higher education, in fact there was little change in overall spending, just a rebalancing from a system that heavy penalized taxpayers while asking relatively little of users to one where the two major sources of revenue for higher education evened out.

In fact, in proportional terms the greatest five-year expansion of the student population occurred during Jindal’s time, five percent between AY 2009-14. That almost reversed entirely in AY 2014-19, when Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards took over, with about half regained from AY 2019-24. The reason why: population changes statewide, where in calendar year 2009-14 it increased 3.38 percent; in CY 2014-19 it advanced a miniscule 0.1 percent, and with Edwards’s impact fully on display. fell 1.61 percent in CY 2019-23. Simply, with a governor more interested in pumping up government to confiscate more wealth to redistribute than in aiding citizens in wealth creation, whose policies to do that Republican-led Legislatures insufficiently resisted, the number of jobs retrenched, wages lagged inflation, and people up and left the state.

That impeded efforts to boost college enrollment statewide, but the effect particularly was felt among the three New Orleans public institutions. Understandably, they took big hits after the hurricane disaster of 2005, but recovery never has been complete. Delgado saw a nice recovery in AY 2009-14, but then plunged downwards thereafter. SUNO stabilized then dropped, and UNO shed students in every five-year period. Without the losses at these three, the rest of the state’s enrollment would have been up not just over 3,000 in the past two decades, but more like 20,000.

This is because the three are substantially commuter schools serving the greater New Orleans area – and that metropolitan statistical area has seen a significant population decline in that period. Keep in mind this not only includes Orleans Parish, but several others (and for 2023-24 analysis purposes, the new Slidell-St. Tammany-Covington MSA that was split off). Over that time span, population has dropped 5.9 percent even as the state eked out a 1.8 percent gain. Area governance, particularly the increasingly woke direction of New Orleans around which the area revolves, has to stand as the explanation buck the trend.

Still, the particular plunges in enrollments far exceed the diminishment of the primary market. Some of this has to do with larger declining enrollment trends in academia related to the precipitous drop in confidence in higher education in the American public, likely due to the increased alienation academia triggers as collectively it ever rushes away from educating a free society in critical thinking ability towards promoting inchoate faddishness and social change based upon a warped understanding of the human condition. More and more families don’t see throwing away gobs of money on a product that doesn’t teach rigorous analysis and thinking for oneself, when entering the workforce or on-the-job technical training nets for the capable a good salary in a world increasingly dependent upon skills in acquiring and evaluating information that can be picked up outside of academia.

But among the three New Orleans schools, the one in fiscal crisis and whose enrollment never came close to recovering has been UNO. Its revenues from tuition and fees remained fairly stable in the $55 to $60 million range for many years, but in recent years the bottom dropped out, falling to $34 million in AY 2024. Coupled with reduced taxpayer support after a few years of dramatically higher amounts after the hurricane disaster of 2005, its deficits before extraordinary items and capital outlay, which by AY 2019 had fallen to just over $1 million, by AY 2024 had ballooned back out to over $5 million, and after a string of years prior to AY 2019 in the neighborhood of $15 million and as high as $35 million in AY 2009. Even at this reduced level, the looming shortfall it puts the university in financial trouble because the reserve well has run dry.

Prompting this has to include faulty governance that lost focus. Perhaps the example of one bad decision best explains why. As woke craziness began busting out of academia and into the public consciousness, UNO decided to start up, and award a doctorate in, “Justice Studies,” an academically suspect enterprise that more promotes political advocacy than genuine scholarship and learning. If this is indicative of the decision-making of UNO administrators in the past 20 years – throwing away money on this drivel instead of shuttling towards strengthening bread-and-butter general education requirement teaching, or in recruiting, or in retention, etc. – no wonder it has fallen into such a sorry state.

Not that the current leadership inspires much confidence that it can reverse the slide the chancellors since Gregory O’Brien had ridden down. Current Chancellor Kathy Johnson, who declared UNO needed to become more relevant to the population, in her previous position couldn’t have acted more in opposition to that by seeming more interested in righting bogus wrongs that allegedly prevent “inclusion” and “equity” of women and racial minority members in academic fields covering the sciences, technology, engineering, and math.

In short, in an overbuilt academic environment that will punish a school vulnerable to forces creating weak enrollment, caused by societal trends and recent past policy (as well as a history of liberal populism) both statewide and nearby, and an indifference to pursuing a genuine academic mission, will land a school in big trouble. UNO has found itself caught in this vortex, with no easy and/or quick solutions ahead.