While several Louisiana colleges were forced to shut down for the semester following extensive damage from Hurricane Katrina, every college in border-state Mississippi will offer courses this semester.

Although some facilities have been irreparably damaged and some campuses will not be operational until at least January, alternative arrangements have been made to serve all of the state's college students.

"All of our universities are open and all of them have accepted displaced students, primarily from Louisiana, some from community colleges in Mississippi," Carol Mead, spokesperson for the Mississippi Institutions for Higher Learning, said.

The IHL governs the state's eight public universities, and Mead said every university in the system experienced some damage.

"The University of Southern Mississippi's main campus is damaged significantly but able to continue," she said. "Even the University of Mississippi, which is 300 miles in from the coast, had significant damage."

USM's satellite campus in Gulfpark however, will not be able to continue this semester.

"It's unimaginable how much it was damaged down there," Mead said. "There are buildings that were there that aren't there anymore … they're going to have to make decisions about whether to bring that campus back at all."

In the interim, USM has provided room at its main Hattiesburg campus for displaced Gulfpark students.

The Mississippi State Board for Community and Junior Colleges lists only one of its campuses as "destroyed," that being Pearl River Community College's Waveland campus.

According to Chuck Abadie, PRCC director of public relations, the Waveland campus was not a standing campus, and the building that the college leased space in was "wiped out." Abadie said they are currently in the process of moving trailers to Waveland and the campus aims to resume classes Monday, Oct. 3.

While Hurricane Katrina destroyed Waveland's facility, PRCC has two other campuses that also experienced significant — and costly — damage.

"All total, our damage assessment is between 20 and 25 million dollars," Abadie said. "Our coliseum where we play basketball has got to be torn down."

That figure represents only a fraction of the total cost the state of Mississippi faces as it tries to rebound from Hurricane Katrina, however.

The IHL made public initial estimates of at least $673 million to Mississippi's higher education community last week. The figure takes into account $598 million in damage to the IHL's eight public universities, $52 million to the state's community colleges and $23 million of damage to Mississippi's private colleges.

"In terms of repair and damages and getting back to where we were, I think we'll be dealing with the effects of this storm for several years," Mead said. "The magnitude of the destruction and the area that it covers in Mississippi is staggering."

David Tisdale, USM Assistant Director for News and Marketing, said the state's colleges have seen a significant change in their student bodies since the hurricane forced some Louisiana schools to cancel the fall semester.

"We've lost some students [whose] … situation just prevented them from being able to come back," Tisdale said. "But we've gained some students who transferred from either community colleges or colleges in Louisiana that had to close because of the storm."

Some Mississippi students have been forced to drop out of college this semester, as many families struggle with the crisis and find additional financial aid from the state to be scarce as the state tries to recover from the hurricane's devastating aftermath.

"[T]here's just lots of students on our campuses that had the financial resources to pay the tuition until Katrina hit," Mead said. "Katrina hit, and some of these families have lost everything … It's a statewide experience we're going through and it's just very mind-boggling what happened to us when Katrina came through."