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NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Elizabeth Brothers is 17 and looking for her dream college. Her search took her to devastated New Orleans.
To college recruiters, the aspiring military officer from Midlothian, Virginia, was a welcome sight. Without a steady flow of students coming to poke around, New Orleans' long academic tradition could dim to a memory. Some of the city's premier colleges rely largely on tuition from out-of-state students.
Final enrollment numbers for the fall semester are not in yet, but colleges expect to improve from the spring, which saw about 20,000 fewer students in Louisiana than before Hurricane Katrina. More than a third of the state's 244,600 college students were displaced by the storm.
"The bottom-line is that students, and more than that, high-caliber students, are the lifeblood of the institution," said Winston Brown, dean of admissions at Xavier University, a highly regarded historically black college that's taking in a freshman class that's been halved since Katrina. The school started its fall semester Tuesday.
For now, colleges like Tulane and Xavier aren't talking about folding. And despite the destruction from Katrina, families are still coming here to find the right campus. But they're coming in fewer numbers, and recruiters at colleges in the path of Katrina's destruction are involved in an all-out effort to entice high school graduates.
City on the mend
How do you do that? You play up what Katrina didn't destroy.
David Burks, a Tulane admissions counselor, explained to Elizabeth Brothers and her mother, Joanne, that Tulane is located in one of the few parts of town largely spared from major damage, so they wouldn't have seen it in news reports.
"We're Uptown, so this is not where Anderson Cooper hung out," Burks told mother and daughter during an introductory chat, referring to the CNN correspondent.
Elizabeth liked what she saw at the private college. "It's green and there are trees!" she said. "It's really nice, and I really like the city, and that's a plus."
Burks and other college recruiters are painting a picture to prospective students that New Orleans is a city on the mend, a place where learning was not trumped by the nation's costliest natural disaster.
The facts are largely on the side of colleges: The French Quarter, trendy Magazine Street and the city's suburban shopping malls -- the places where students flock -- are all open for business.
What's more, some of the city's half-dozen or so college campuses were not flooded severely, and those that were have still resumed classes -- albeit sometimes in radically changed circumstances. One college, Southern University at New Orleans, has been entirely transplanted to an open field and is temporarily housed in 400 government trailers. Another college, Dillard University, is now located inside a downtown hotel.
Fighting negative perceptions
But winning over students and parents is still tricky.
College head hunters say they're up against a perception that New Orleans is tumbling into an abyss where crime -- murder, beatings, rape, the gamut -- has taken the upper hand.
College officials argue the perception is largely unfounded, an unfortunate outgrowth of the national media's focus on New Orleans since Katrina. Some of that focus of late has been on a spike in violent crime. In June, five teenagers were gunned down while sitting in a sport utility vehicle, sparking the return of state police and National Guard troops to help keep the peace in the city. Over the Labor Day weekend, four people died in 13 shootings in and around New Orleans.
Deborah Stieffel, dean of admissions at Loyola University, a private Roman Catholic college next to Tulane, blames the media for some of the city's public relations problem.
"We've shot video, shot pictures over time, sent out DVDs, to give folks a sense, picture-wise, movie-wise, of what the city looks like," Stieffel said. "I don't want them to think they will be living in a gutted house."
But the return of the National Guard and the rash of murders is not the kind of news that will comfort any parent, especially those of this generation, who have a reputation for over-involvement, said Kevin Crockett, president of a college enrollment consulting firm that's worked with Louisiana colleges.
The start of fall classes also coincided not only with the one-year anniversary of Katrina, but the height of the Atlantic hurricane season. With those reminders, it's no surprise recruiting is priority No. 1 at local colleges. "The recruiting staff is everyone on this campus," said Victor Ukpolo, the chancellor at Southern University at New Orleans.
Recruiters are going to more college fairs, hitting more high schools, sending out more brochures, moving into new markets and offering more online classes.
Still, even with the stepped-up recruitment, college life in post-Katrina New Orleans isn't for some.
After months of sharing a trailer on the campus of Southern University at New Orleans, Matthew Hines, a 19-year-old transfer student from Jacksonville, Florida, isn't sure coming to New Orleans was such a good idea. Campus looks more like a refugee camp, some say.
"I'm thinking about going home and dispensing with my education," the aspiring businessman said.
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