BATON ROUGE, La. — Last month, Cherie Allen, an 18-year-old first-year college student, successfully accomplished what many teenagers struggle to do: wake up on time.
She made the 8 a.m. shuttle bus that comes once an hour to take Southern University students to campus with some time to spare and arrived at her 9:30 a.m. class early. But as she waited, someone walked into her class to make an announcement at 9:29. All classes in the 9:30 block had been canceled because of a power outage.
“I was like, ‘Son, I’m already here. What are you talking about?’ and we didn’t get an email or anything from the school,” the pre-nursing student said.
For years now, frequent power outages at the historically Black college have disrupted classes and campus life, leaving students frustrated that paying for an education doesn’t guarantee the basics.
Over the past three weeks, Allen, a New York native, has spent countless hours on the phone with her mother, working out her options, including how to transfer. Allen chose Southern to honor her great-grandmother, who attended the university. But that family connection has not been enough to keep her there. Over the first month of classes, power outages have cost her more than a week of instruction, she said, leaving her struggling to catch up.
“It is terrible,” Allen said. “I want to stay, but it feels hard to see how that makes sense. How are we expected to go to a school without power? Think about it.”
The crisis at Southern brings two pressures facing students at historically Black colleges and universities into sharp relief. Students interviewed by Capital B were already familiar with prolonged outages in the Black communities they call home. Now, they are paying for an education that unreliable electricity keeps interrupting.
For many, that education also means borrowing. According to a U.S. News & World Report analysis, Southern students graduate with the fourth highest amount of debt of all U.S. colleges. The school struggles to offer adequate financial aid and just 10% of students graduate within four years, so debt accumulates.
At Southern, officials have traced recent outages to failures in the university’s own aging electrical equipment. University leaders say years of deferred maintenance have left the campus facing repairs that could cost close to $60 million, according to Chancellor John Pierre. The university will consider both public and private partnerships to address the price tag of a sustainable grid.
For students, those pressures converge in a place meant to offer opportunity, not a new struggle.
Aging infrastructure and funding woes deepen crisis
Sitting outside the student center, Rodney Anderson, a 25-year-old sophomore studying electrical engineering, was playing catch up with his classwork. He said he has been forced to do that a lot this school year.
The crisis is something he believes young students shouldn’t be left to deal with on their own, especially considering the financial situation many of the young people find themselves in.
“A lot of people have to borrow money to go to school. Having power should be a basic necessity that the school provides,” Anderson said.
The Baton Rouge native grew up with outages and saw how they impacted Black communities like Gary, Indiana, this summer. “I don’t know what the root cause of all this is, but it does seem to be impacting Black cities a lot, and it means we’re going without water and lights for too long,” he said.
The outages at Southern are part of a broader struggle over access to reliable electricity. Across the country, Black communities experience more frequent outages and longer periods to get power restored.
With temperatures hovering around 90 degrees in mid-October, Pierre said the weather is causing additional strain on the campus’ electrical grid.
Communities with higher concentrations of people of color and poverty experience an average of three outages per year that last at least eight hours, compared with one in the least vulnerable counties. Researchers found that Black households in Texas went nearly 59 hours without electricity after a major storm hit in 2021, compared with about 35 hours for white households.
For students whose families also contend with unreliable electricity at home, the campus failures compound an existing burden, said Frederick Bell, a community organizer with the Louisiana-based nonprofit Alliance for Affordable Energy.
“They’re being doubly impacted by this,” he said. “At home, Black kids are facing these outages and they’ve always impacted their academics and also their ability to live, to eat, to enjoy themselves.”
Surveys of college students facing prolonged power outages have found that the interruptions correlate with difficulty concentrating, sleep disturbances, anxiety, and frustration, and subsequently poor academic performance.
Years of disruptions leave Southern facing an uphill battle
When the power went out in Sontee Myles’ dorm during her first year at Southern in 2023, she headed to friends’ homes off campus to shower, cook, and escape the heat that lingered into the southern Louisiana fall. Classes, she said, naturally took a backseat to figuring out how to meet her basic needs.
Three years later, the outages at the historically Black university have only become more of an inconvenience.
Southern faces an uphill battle in fixing this situation. Southern’s budget draws on state funding, tuition and fees, and grants. But the university has operated for decades with substantially less state support per student than Louisiana State University, its predominantly white land-grant counterpart.
In 2023, federal education and agriculture officials estimated that Southern would have received an additional $1.12 billion between 1987 and 2020 had Louisiana funded it at the same per-student level as LSU. That is money that could have supported infrastructure and student services, school officials said at the time.
Davante Lewis, a Louisiana public commissioner who represents the area where Southern is located, said he’s worked with the university to secure more than $9 million in energy efficiency funds so it could improve its campus infrastructure.
Southern faces other challenges, however. As a single-metered institution, the entire Baton Rouge campus is measured by one meter for all buildings, which reports to the utility company Entergy. The school does not have its own electrical department and lacks technology to diagnose issues connected to a single meter. Lewis said this makes it difficult to identify and solve a problem.
In addition, although Southern has significant maintenance needs, Lewis said the university also bears responsibility for not requesting funding to address its electrical infrastructure.
Pierre, the school’s chancellor, said more than $2 million has been poured into fixing immediate issues related to its transformers, which regulate high voltages from power lines, making the power suitable for residential use.
Nonetheless, a lasting fix will require substantially more money than the university has secured so far. Last year, the university requested $19 million for infrastructure from state legislators. Instead, legislators approved $6.6 million in one-time money that went to other priorities outside of infrastructure.
“If you’re an institution and you have a small deferred maintenance budget, a transformer is not going to be on your top priority list when you got a dorm that has no AC, or you have a classroom that has no light, or a building that is full of mold,” Lewis said.
Pierre has said university leaders plan to seek additional support from the Legislature. Some of a recently announced $3.3 million federal award will support the electrical system, but that funding must also cover technology and academic needs.
Students say they are still waiting for solutions.
“This is just frustrating,” Anderson, the 25-year-old student, said. “It feels like we’re not worth getting all this fixed.”
Allen, the first-year student, agreed. “When you ask people that have gone here, they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s been going on for years,’” she said. “Who knows if they’re gonna fix it now? And who cares outside of the students if they don’t?”
Myles said she doesn’t know a student who hasn’t thought about leaving the university at some point, but at the same time, she questions if there are any other Black schools equipped to better their experiences. She’s determined to finish at Southern.
Pierre said the university has done its best to minimize the outages’ impact on students. In response to students exploring transfer options Pierre said: “We’re not going to panic because a few students said that they would transfer, but that comes with the course of dealing in higher education.” He added the university has begun testing and repairing weak spots for Wi-Fi across the campus, another complaint students have shared.
For Bell, the outages are a reason to look beyond emergency repairs toward how the university could generate more of its own electricity. He pointed to work by a professor who had explored a solar-powered microgrid utilizing solar power for Southern.
“Community solutions, especially when it comes to power generation, is something to consider and look into. It is an all hands on deck situation,” he said.
Read More:
- Why Upgrading the Nation’s Electric Grid Is a Racial Issue
- From Memphis to Gary, Black Communities Are Being Left in the Dark
National education reporter Alecia Taylor contributed to this report.
