New Orleans College Recruiting Runs Dry After Katrina

At college fairs in high schools and convention centers around the country, recruiters draw lots of questions from parents and prospective students. But these days Mark Rasic also is getting something else: plenty of wisecracks, skepticism and sympathy.

Rasic is the Los Angeles-based western representative for Loyola University New Orleans, a 5,500-student Jesuit school that escaped the worst of Hurricane Katrina and is scheduled to reopen in January.

Still, like other universities in the hurricane-ravaged city, Loyola faces a monumental marketing task in trying to lure high school seniors from California and other parts of the country.

The university won’t get an inkling of the payoff until freshman applications arrive, starting with an initial deadline Dec. 1.

In the meantime, crowded college fairs can be bruising experiences for those selling the virtues of New Orleans schools.

Even though New Orleans recruiters receive kind expressions of support from many parents and enthusiasm from prospective students, the zingers make a hard task even harder.

During a fair at Simi Valley High School last week, a mother attending the event with her daughter stopped briefly before Rasic’s display table and asked, “Do you offer swimming programs?” A little later, a man inquired, “Are you guys underwater?”

For his part, Rasic, 36, a former middle school and high school English teacher, gamely maintains an upbeat attitude. When he hears the jibes, “I just smile,” he said. “Sometimes people just need to say something.”

Rasic also is quick to point out that Loyola, like its neighbor Tulane University, suffered relatively light damage and is well along in its preparations to reopen. Still, parents occasionally are perplexed by his optimism.

“Sometimes I sense that they don’t believe me,” he said.

When Rasic has more extended conversations -- typically during daytime visits to high schools -- he tries to highlight a bright side of the disaster: more opportunities for community service.

“Students who really want to see what it’s like to go out there and help people rebuild their lives ... they’re going to have experiences like you couldn’t have anywhere else,” Rasic told students at Marymount High School, on the Westside near UCLA.

For some of Rasic’s counterparts, it’s not easy to remain cheerful.

“It’s clearly the most trying situation I’ve ever encountered in my 20 years of working in higher education,” said Darren Rankin, vice president of enrollment for Dillard University, a historically black school in New Orleans that was hard hit by Katrina. “We’re dealing with a real public relations nightmare here,” he added.

Rankin predicts that Dillard will lose many of its current freshmen and sophomores when it reopens, on a temporary basis, on the Tulane campus in January. And when Dillard greets its next freshman class next fall, Rankin predicts there will be only 300 first-year students, versus the usual 700.

“New Orleans, contrary to popular opinion, isn’t easy to recruit to anyway because of the whole crime issue and problems that New Orleans has been having for some time, even before Katrina,” he said. “But this time around ... it seems that the paranoia and concern are on a different level.”

On the other hand, Dave Seaver, who oversees the recruitment staff for Tulane, said his university was encouraged about the attitudes of prospective students.

High school counselors, he said, tell him that parents are expressing reservations about sending their children to New Orleans, but the students themselves appear enthusiastic.

Seaver, who two weeks ago wrapped up a 10-day recruiting trip to Los Angeles, said the pivotal time will come just before the beginning of May, when students must indicate whether they will attend.

“If we can have some creative programs on campus that will entice admitted students to at least take a look at us, I think that’s going to be the key,” he said.

Loyola’s Rasic, though, first has to get past some logistical challenges as he makes his rounds from high school to high school. During his stops, Rasic hasn’t been able to distribute a recruiter’s typical stock in trade, color brochures. His supply is in New Orleans, inaccessible. He has relied instead on black-and-white photocopies.

And when Rasic has hit the road in California and in other Western states, he has gone without his usual prospecting intelligence; he hasn’t been able to call up the files, stored on the computer system at Loyola, about teenagers who previously expressed an interest.

At some high schools that Rasic visited, the only ones interested in speaking with him were the college counselors.

Rebecca Wandro, director of college counseling at Convent of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic high school in San Francisco, said two seniors in her 54-student graduating class had previously expressed a strong interest in Loyola of New Orleans.

That ended with the hurricane, she said: “Their thoughts were that it’s already going to be such a challenge in the first place going to college, why go to a city that has so many challenges ahead?”

But at 8:55 a.m. last Monday, Rasic got his recruiting day off to a good start with a visit to Marymount High School. Seven students at the all-girls Catholic school showed up, a strong turnout at a campus with a graduating class of not quite 100.

Rasic tackled the hurricane issue first.

“Obviously, on the news, it looks as if the whole city has been wiped off the face of the Earth, and that is not the case,” he told the girls.

“Our campus fared beautifully. We had no flooding, we had very little damage -- broken windows, tree branches down, that was about it,” said Rasic, who has his office in his Eagle Rock home and hasn’t been to New Orleans since Katrina struck.

Marymount students asked about on-campus activities, study-abroad programs and religious services, as well as whether Rasic thought Mardi Gras celebrations would be dampened this year.

“I actually keep telling people this is the year to go to Mardi Gras, because there won’t be as many tourists. It’s going to be the people of New Orleans, and they’re going to be so ready to just explode with celebration,” Rasic replied, drawing chuckles from the students.

The 35-minute session was a hit with Marymount High senior Jordie Youngblood.

“He did a great job of not only explaining his school, but explaining the situation,” she said.

She and her twin sister, Julie, also a Marymount senior, plan to apply to New Orleans schools, following the footsteps of their older sister Ashley, a Tulane graduate.

“I’m confident New Orleans is going to be fine in the long run,” Youngblood said.

From Marymount, Rasic visited college counselors at two other Westside schools. Then he headed out to the west San Fernando Valley to meet with two students at Chaminade High School before leaving for the evening college fair at Simi Valley High. At the fair, parents and students flocked to displays for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, UCLA and USC.

Only a smattering came by Rasic’s area, including a couple who made hurricane-related jokes and others who offered their best wishes or confused his school with Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Debbie Gurnari, an accountant from Simi Valley with a daughter who is a high school sophomore, was one of the skeptics. Based on news accounts of the troubles in New Orleans after the hurricane, she said, “it just doesn’t appear to be a very stable, friendly place to send anybody, let alone a young adult.”

By the end of the night, only five students filled out cards seeking more information about Loyola of New Orleans.

Rasic had hoped for at least a few more but said he was pleased by the turnout at Marymount and the conversations he had at other schools that day. He noted that California has been a big market for Loyola, with a record 68 freshmen last August coming from the Golden State.

Rasic conceded it will be hard to match that this year, but his strategy remains: “You always keep positive and you keep plugging away.”