Hurricane Katrina landed on Tulane University’s campus on Aug. 29, 2005. Twenty years later, Tulane’s enrollment has slowly rebuilt.
“In the Fall of 2004, just prior to Hurricane Katrina, overall enrollment at Tulane had been steadily increasing and had reached a total of 13,214 students,” said Shawn Abbott, vice president for enrollment management and dean of admission.
Of the total 13,214 students, 1,603 were first-year students.
Tulane closed for four months following Katrina. As part of the Association of American Universities, 492 universities enrolled Tulanians as “provisional students” for the fall semester of 2005.
“Nearly all students had kind of evacuated somewhere where they were enrolled,” Torbjörn Törnqvist, professor of geology, said “You know, most students actually went back to their hometown and went to a nearby school.”
Törnqvist was set to start his first year teaching at Tulane that fall. The day after he moved to New Orleans, the city was ordered to evacuate.
“I remember I turned on the TV, and that’s when Katrina turned into a total, monster hurricane. You know, it was up 275 miles per hour … I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like that before,” Törnqvist said.
Eighty-eight percent of students returned to Tulane on Jan. 17, 2006, with a normal spring semester followed by a “lagniappe semester.”
“We had a special extra semester referred to as the Katrina semester, which was right after the spring semester. So it was kind of a little bit like a summer semester,” Törnqvist said. “I think it was about six weeks. But it was meant as a way to teach additional classes so people would not fall behind.”
Despite the university’s efforts to maintain Tulane’s legacy, the school year following Katrina saw an overall enrollment drop to 10,606 students, 6,533 of whom were undergraduates, with 1,110 first-year students.
As a result, Tulane announced the Renewal Plan on Dec. 8, 2005. The plan created the undergraduate college, later coined the Newcomb-Tulane College. NTC combined the all-female Newcomb College, which had 2,302 students in 2004, and the all-male Paul Tulane College, which had 1,735 students.
All undergraduate students now apply to the NTC for admission and then join an academic school by the end of their sophomore year.
In addition to administrative changes, Tulane also faced major academic restructuring. The School of Liberal Arts, previously the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was developed as part of the post-Katrina Renewal Plan. By 2007, Tulane had phased out the Department of Exercise and Sports Science, two programs in the A.B. Freeman School of Business and eight programs and departments under the School of Engineering. In fact, the School of Engineering ceased to exist — instead, Tulane established the School of Science and Engineering which included limited engineering departments.
“[Civil engineering] was a department, one of several departments, that was closed after Katrina and of course, people were upset about that, and that’s all very understandable, but it’s also true that Tulane suffered massive financial damage, and the only way to survive was to make big cuts, and so that’s what they did.” Törnqvist said.
Twenty years after the storm, Civil engineering returned as a major option in 2025 following its establishment as a minor in 2023.
Following Katrina, Tulane partnered with Loyola University New Orleans, Dillard University and Xavier University of Louisiana to “accelerate Tulane’s ongoing diversity efforts … in closing the racial divide” through a consortium agreement.
In the past 20 years, African American students experienced a 2.5% increase in enrollment and Hispanic students a 6.5% increase. Asian and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students experienced a less than 1% increase. In 2024, 63.2% of Tulane’s campus identified as Caucasian compared to the 77.6% recorded in 2006.
The Tulane Education Research Alliance was developed in 2013 by Douglas Harris, Tulane economics professor and Department Chair of Economics, to study New Orleans reform following Katrina. A report by Tulane’s Education Research Alliance concluded that “smaller but significant racial gaps” in New Orleans.
Despite this, ERA found that New Orleans college entry rates saw an increase of 8-15% by 2014. Tulane University first saw a 34,000 applicant pool in 2008, less than three years after Katrina, and has maintained an applicant pool of over 30,000 in 2025.
“Enrollment began to rebound quickly after Hurricane Katrina, illustrating Tulane’s remarkable resilience,” Abbott said. “By the Fall of 2007, first-year enrollment ballooned to 1,324 and has grown over the last several years to a steady state of roughly 2,000 new first-year students each fall and spring.”
This fall marks the 8th consecutive year that Tulane University has had a total enrollment exceeding 14,000 students and the 15th year that undergraduate enrollment has exceeded 8,000 students.