BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - After years of enrollment declines amid repeated budget cuts, Louisiana's university systems are reporting an uptick in their student counts this year.
The Advocate reports that enrollment figures from the LSU System, University of Louisiana System and Southern University System show a 1.3 percent increase in student count across their campuses. Nearly 151,000 students are attending their universities.
The growth comes after enrollments statewide dropped annually for the prior seven years, a 6.6 percent reduction, according to numbers compiled by the Board of Regents.
Individual campuses had different results.
For example, LSU's flagship campus in Baton Rouge counted 751 fewer students this year, a 2 percent drop, with about 31,000 in its headcount. Southern University had about 2 percent more students on both its New Orleans and Baton Rouge campuses.