Colleges Make a Range of Offers for Displaced Students Seeking Fall Enrollment

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

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Colleges and universities across the United States are offering admission for the fall semester to undergraduates and graduate students whose hurricane-battered campuses will remain closed for months. And a handful of institutions -- including Cornell University, Vermont's Green Mountain College, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History -- say they will offer temporary positions to faculty members from the affected colleges.

At the very least, the offers for undergraduates include waivers of late fees, help with financial-aid arrangements, and extra instructional support. Several states -- including Texas, to which many Louisiana residents fled -- say they will allow out-of-state students displaced by the hurricane to enroll at in-state rates. Law schools and other graduate programs are extending offers as well.

Some undergraduate colleges -- among them Franklin Pierce College, in New Hampshire, and John Brown University, in Arkansas -- are offering displaced students full tuition, room, and board. Great Basin College, a community college in Elko, Nev., says it can fly in 30 to 50 students on a chartered flight, enroll them in classes, put them up in the community, and set up a meal plan for them. Harvard University says it will admit 25 displaced students as visiting undergraduates free of charge, and will offer housing on a space-available basis. "Priority will be given to students rendered homeless by the storm," the university's announcement says.

Other institutions that are accepting displaced students -- such as the University of Miami, which has already received more than 400 inquiries -- are trying to keep in mind both the needs of the students and the well-being of the universities that found themselves in the Katrina's way. These institutions say they will collect tuition from the displaced students but hold it in escrow for the colleges the students normally attend.

Mark A. Emmert, president of the University of Washington, sent out a campuswide e-mail message saying the Seattle institution expects 50 to 100 inquiries from displaced students, primarily from Tulane University. "Our plan is to accommodate students in a program comparable to the one in which they were enrolled and to have the tuition revenues that would normally go to Tulane continue to be directed to that institution," wrote Mr. Emmert, who is a former chancellor of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.

"It is critically important for Tulane and other universities affected by this disaster not to lose revenue and to have students return to their universities as soon as they reopen, whenever that may be," he added. Tulane has announced that it will be closed for the fall semester. (See a related article.)

A number of institutions are offering to assist students from particular areas, and many offers are contingent on the students' being academically qualified to do well at the colleges taking them in.

The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, will let "academically-qualified Philadelphia-area undergraduates" take classes at no cost on a space-available basis, while Bates College says Maine undergraduates will be welcome in its classes.

Green Mountain College, in Poultney, Vt., will accept up to 20 students "from the New England, New York, or Pennsylvania area," according to a message on its Web site, in addition to two or three faculty members who would help teach the displaced students.

Duke University is extending an offer of free tuition and housing to North and South Carolina students, siblings of current Duke students, and children of Duke faculty and staff members and alumni.

With fall classes already under way or soon to begin at most institutions, the offers left admissions officials at many institutions scrambling to answer difficult questions, such as what kind of documentation to seek from the students. Smith College, which is offering tuition-free instruction for students from affected institutions, says the students "will be asked to provide a high-school transcript and a college transcript if, and when, one becomes available."

Some college officials turned to e-mail discussion lists to ask colleagues for advice about such tricky topics as enrolling foreign students. And many institutions warned that their dormitories were already full for the semester ahead, although officials promised to help find housing for any displaced students who do enroll.

A partial list of offers is available on the Web site of the Society for College and University Planning. Another list is available on the Web site of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.