Posted on 09/03/2005 7:26:51 AM PDT by kellynla
Freshman Jennifer Powell had just moved into her dorm room at Tulane University in New Orleans when the announcement came: Go home. So she packed three days' worth of clothes and drove out of New Orleans, expecting to be back in Louisiana within the week.
Instead, Powell, 18, was signing up for courses at San Diego State University on Friday, one of scores of displaced students being taken in by California colleges, part of a nationwide effort to deal with the fallout from Hurricane Katrina. "It has been a roller coaster ride," said Powell, who's from Northridge.
San Diego State is one of several campuses in the California State University system offering refuge to students displaced by Hurricane Katrina, which struck just as the fall semester began.
CSU, the nation's largest four-year system, is relaxing some paperwork requirements and also offering storm refugees the same tuition-free deal as California residents, taking annual costs down from about $13,000 to $3,000.
Officials estimate that thousands of college students were affected by the storm, which damaged close to three dozen universities in the New Orleans area.
At San Diego State, officials had received more than two dozen calls from students looking for a place by Friday, campus spokesman Jason Foster said.
Numerous other schools, including Loyola Marymount and Mills College in Oakland, were trying to find places for students. At the 10-campus University of California, President Robert Dynes said individual campuses were working out how to help displaced students. At least one campus, UC Riverside, was planning to offer the lower, in-state rates.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
Tuition plus room and board at Tulane runs something like $40,000 a year...Jennifer Powell is a California resident so she would qualify for in-state rates anyway. If she decides to stay at SDSU, she'll save her folks a ton of money.
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