On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana as a Category 3 storm, with sustained winds of 205 kilometres per hour and a storm surge reaching between 4.6 and 5.8 metres in eastern New Orleans. The storm remains one of the deadliest ever to hit the United States, with millions of people displaced and more than 1,800 killed in the hurricane and ensuing floods. By 31 August, around 80% of New Orleans — the most affected city — was underwater.

Katrina had a profound impact city-wide, causing $17 billion in damages in Orleans Parish — the local county — alone. The burden of damage and the recovery efforts that followed fell unevenly. Environmental-justice scholars, such as Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University in Houston, argue that disasters are not great levellers, but follow lines of inequity that are already written into a city.

The academic sector suffered with the city. All ten of the main colleges and universities in the metropolitan area were affected. Some 84,000 students and 15,000 faculty members were displaced. Louisiana’s public universities collectively sustained between US$500 million and $600 million in physical damage, lost more than $150 million in tuition fees and revenue and faced $75 million in immediate budget cuts.

More than two decades on, the picture across the academic sector mirrors that of New Orleans as a whole: an uneven but impressive recovery. The reasons for divergence provide lessons for other institutions around the world looking to rebuild after a disaster.

A city emptied of its people

The physical damage to the city’s institutes was shaped in part by geography. Most of New Orleans sits below sea level in a natural bowl, with the higher land running alongside the riverbank.

Institutions on higher ground, such as the Uptown campuses of Tulane University and Loyola University New Orleans, remained structurally intact. But lower-lying establishments faced substantial flooding, including the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (LSUHSC). Also heavily affected were Dillard University, Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO) and Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA), the city’s three historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) — a category of around 100 US institutions founded before 1964, predominantly in the southern states, to educate Black students at a time when other universities excluded them.

The storm’s eye passed east of the city; the flooding was caused by the failure of federal levees and floodwalls in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, Gentilly and Lakeview. “The first disaster was the disparate way that communities were protected by levees,” says Bullard. “Those preconditions set up the disparate impact on every aspect of Black life in New Orleans, including the HBCUs.”

The ground floor of every building on XULA’s campus was flooded with around 2 metres of water. SUNO experienced 1.2 to 3.4 metres of flooding and Dillard was submerged under more than 2 metres of water. The basements of all buildings at the LSUHSC were severely damaged and two of the city’s teaching hospitals were forced to close. (One temporarily reopened before closing permanently in 2015.)

“Low-lying [land] is one variable and one factor”, but there were others at play, Bullard says. He points to redlined neighbourhoods — those systematically disadvantaged by a federal practice of marking neighbourhoods as too risky for mortgage lending on the basis of racial or ethnic makeup, initiated in the 1930s. These areas were among the hardest hit and most likely to be denied loans. Those factors affected education, schools and universities during the recovery.

The early stages

Even before the water receded, efforts to mitigate damage had begun. At Tulane, staff spent more than two months working to save the fifth-floor nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers. Generator-powered freight elevators allowed them to manually transport liquid nitrogen, which prevented the superconducting magnets from losing their magnetism. “There was heroism in terms of some of the researchers who were saving cell cultures, topping off nitrogen tanks and making sure all of the research stayed intact,” recalls Lee Hamm, dean of Tulane University School of Medicine, who was at the institution throughout the recovery.

All of New Orleans’s principal institutions cancelled their 2005 autumn semesters. Across the country, colleges and universities offered to take in displaced students: Princeton University in New Jersey partnered with Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to welcome Dillard students; Loyola students were rehoused by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities across their 27 member institutions; and medical students from Tulane were relocated to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “The money that they were paying for their tuition actually came to Tulane still, which was an unbelievable gift,” says Hamm.

Marguerite Giguette, provost at XULA, describes the depth of collaboration across institutions and the local community. XULA’s registrar, who evacuated to Dallas, Texas, ran operations from a university there. A hotel in central New Orleans housed students and faculty members from Dillard, one of the most affected institutions, and once XULA reopened in January 2006, it provided laboratory space for Dillard students to complete their science courses because their campus remained unusable.

XULA, Tulane, Loyola and Dillard formalized and expanded a pre-existing agreement that allowed students to take courses at neighbouring institutions at their home tuition rate. “It was a way that we could help each other with the staffing we had … and the facilities,” says Giguette. The consortium still operates today.

The rebuild

As private universities, Tulane and Loyola had insurance and large endowments to cushion the immediate blow, but many others did not, notes a 2025 analysis from the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington DC. For example, the city’s three HBCUs had much smaller safety nets.

Federal aid compounded existing inequities. When Congress allocated $200 million of federal disaster-relief funding to higher education in 2005, the money was split equally between Louisiana and Mississippi, even though Louisiana faced more than four times the damage of its neighbour. Smaller institutions in Louisiana, including all three of the HBCUs in New Orleans, were also disadvantaged by the formula used to allocate aid by the state’s Board of Regents — the governing body in charge of supervising higher education — thereby further under-resourcing them, notes the Brookings analysis.

“The structural inequity and the systemic inequality was pre-storm,” says Bullard. “But when [post-storm] policies got implemented, those preconditions got baked into the recovery and the resourcing of institutions.”

Then came a second blow to public institutions. In 2008, only three years into the rebuild, the global financial recession hit. Although most of Louisiana’s state spending consists of mandatory obligations, higher education is not protected by the state constitutions in the way that primary and secondary education are. Thus began a period of sustained disinvestment in public higher education in the state, which was not reversed as the economy recovered. At the University of New Orleans, for example, state funding dropped from $55.3 million in 2005 (around $90 million in 2025 when adjusted for inflation) to $30.5 million in 2025 — a 44.7% decline in nominal terms over 20 years.