Mississippi Today
Are Mississippi’s colleges and universities prepared for the ‘enrollment cliff’? Lawmakers want to know
Starting next year, the number of high school graduates will start to fall in Mississippi. That’s the looming reality a joint hearing of the House and Senate Colleges and Universities committees zeroed in on Wednesday.
In Mississippi, this trend, called the “enrollment cliff,” will force the largely tuition-dependent colleges and universities to compete for a shrinking pool of students. Regional institutions like Delta State University, Mississippi University for Women and Mississippi Valley State University, all of which are already struggling with enrollment, will be especially hurt.
The state is poised to see the second-worst decline of high school graduation rates in the Southern U.S. by 2027 after Virginia, according to data presented by Noel Wilkin, the University of Mississippi’s provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.
The committee wanted to know: What is the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, the governing body for Mississippi’s eight public universities, doing about this?
“When can we expect a report to detail those recommendations and strategies for the future,” Sen. Scott DeLano, R-Biloxi vice chair of the Senate committee, asked Al Rankins, the IHL commissioner.
“Whenever you’d like to see a report,” Rankins responded. IHL has been talking about the enrollment cliff for years, he added, and has a working group focused on the regional college’s unique needs.
Kell Smith, the director of the Mississippi Community College Board, which operates differently from IHL, attended the hearing but did not present. He said MCCB doesn’t have a strategic plan for the enrollment cliff but some of the individual community colleges might.
“Very simply — how can we fix the problem to prepare for 15 years from now?” Rep. Donnie Scoggin, R-Ellisville the House chair, asked Wilkin.
There are few simple answers. The enrollment cliff is unavoidable, the product of declining birth rates that will be exacerbated by out-migration from Mississippi and deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic, John Green, a Mississippi State University professor, told the committee.
But the changing economics of higher education is largely the result of funding choices by the Legislature years ago. In Mississippi, the four-year public universities are all more dependent on tuition than they are state appropriations.
Rankins presented a chart showing that in 2000, state appropriations supported nearly 60% of the universities operating budgets, while tuition was 26%. In fiscal year 2023, that ratio had basically flipped, with tuition supporting 64% of operating budgets.
This raises the question: If Mississippi’s colleges and universities are increasingly reliant on student tuition, not taxpayer dollars, are they still a public service?
It’s complicated, said Rep. Lance Varner, a member of the House committee, whose 16-year-old daughter has started getting recruitment letters from out-of-state colleges hoping to attract her away from Mississippi.
“If you own a business, your goal is to try to get people to come to your business,” he said.
At the same time that he thinks higher education is a public good, Varner, R-Florence, said he bets the universities wish they could be even less dependent on state appropriations.
“Every one of those colleges is working hard to make sure they’re self-sufficient,” he said. “They don’t want to depend on the Legislature.”
At the University of Mississippi, tuition and fees now represent 78% of its total operating budget, according to IHL’s presentation, the highest of any public university.
A huge driver of that is the number of out-of-state students, who pay nearly three times more for tuition than Mississippi residents, now make up half the university’s total population of more than $21,000, Wilkin told the committee. This is one way Ole Miss is responding to the enrollment cliff, which it started preparing for in 2017.
“We have become a destination state for higher education,” Wilkin said.
University of Mississippi netted $62 million in tuition from in-state students in fiscal year 2023 — but brought in $188 million from non-resident students. It’s a crucial revenue source that, Wilkin said, allows Ole Miss to keep its costs down for in-state students.
“If I were to take all the revenue that comes from in-state students and all the state appropriations we get and compare that to what it costs us to educate those students, we’re still left with a multimillion-dollar hole,” Wilkin said.
Wilkin also discussed the “intangible” aspect of higher education that shapes if, why and where students attend college, especially in light of the fact high school graduates are becoming more diverse.
“All of us see there have been questions raised about the value of a higher education degree today,” he said.
By 2036, white students are projected to comprise 43% of high school graduates compared to 51% today. Black students will increase from 25% to 28%.
Smith, the MCCB director, said after the meeting that community colleges need to be focusing more on students who don’t have a high school diploma.
“We need to go after those students irregardless of what the enrollment cliff looks like,” he said.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1875
Nov. 2, 1875
The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from voting, resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the state.
A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black Mississippians had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to challenge Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state.
Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, including a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton.
The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan.
John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: “It was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.”
A federal grand jury concluded: “Fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Mississippi Today’s NewsMatch Campaign is Here: Support Journalism that Strengthens Mississippi
High-quality journalism like ours depends on reader support; without it, we simply couldn’t exist. That’s why we’re proud to join the NewsMatch movement, a national initiative aimed at raising $50 million for nonprofit newsrooms that serve communities like ours here in Mississippi, where access to reliable information has often been limited.
In a time when trusted journalists and media sources are disappearing, we believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without on-the-ground, trustworthy reporting, civic engagement suffers, accountability falters and corruption often goes unaddressed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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Every dollar raised strengthens our ability to serve you with fact-based journalism on issues that impact your everyday life—whether it’s covering local election issues or reporting on decisions affecting schools, safety and economic growth in Mississippi. Your support makes it possible for us to stay rooted in the community, offering nuanced perspectives that help Mississippians understand and engage with what’s happening around them.
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We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Hinds County loses fight over control of jail
The Hinds County sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.
Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, including a failure to protect detainees from harm.
However, the appeals court called the new injunction “overly broad” in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.
The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be removed.
The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – especially if the receivership has no end date.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion.
In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which holds people facing trial.
“But the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,” the appeals court wrote.
This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022.
The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the solutions they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in Jackson.
The county had a chance to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the death of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old infrastructure and use of force.
Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.
But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff.
The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference.
Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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