Mississippi reconsiders whether it needs 23 public colleges and universities

Bill to merge six college districts died after petition drew 750 opponents

State Rep. Trey Lamar, a Republican from Senatobia, introduced House Bill 1284 in January to merge six of Mississippi’s community college districts. College leaders and students quickly organized against the measure, and the bill died in committee. The question behind it — whether Mississippi still needs 23 public colleges and universities — did not.

Lamar, who also serves on the House Select Committee on Consolidation, said he wanted the bill to prompt a broader discussion. “I wanted to start a conversation,” Lamar said. “What worked for our colleges decades ago doesn’t always work today.”

The bill would have merged Coahoma Community College with Mississippi Delta Community College, Meridian Community College with East Mississippi Community College, and Southwest Mississippi with Copiah-Lincoln. No campuses would have closed under the plan. Instead, it aimed to cut administrative costs by consolidating the state’s 15 community college districts into 12, and Lamar said any savings would have been put back into the community college system.

Rep. Donnie Scoggin, a Republican from Ellisville who co-chairs the House Select Committee on Consolidation, said Lamar’s bill intensified discussions about college mergers. Scoggin, who also chairs the House Colleges and Universities Committee, said he allowed the bill to die because there was not enough time to study the issue. “We didn’t want to do anything that was rushed and just start closing colleges,” Scoggin said. “But now we’re taking time to examine all factors to make informed and better decisions.”

Mississippi funds its public universities and community colleges through a mix of state appropriations, federal funds, student tuition and local tax revenue. Overlapping districts can leave some property owners paying taxes to support multiple colleges — a situation Lamar said is unfair. Meridian Community College serves Lauderdale County, which is also part of East Mississippi Community College’s six-county district; merging the two districts could reduce duplicative administrative costs, Lamar said. Legislators’ discussions have also questioned whether colleges in overlapping communities offer duplicate academic programs or services, and whether students are earning credentials that lead to jobs.

Population declines in the affected districts are also driving the discussion. Over the past decade, thousands fewer residents have lived within the Coahoma and Mississippi Delta community college districts. Coahoma County’s population fell from 26,000 in 2010 to 21,000 a decade later, according to Census data. In Sunflower County, home to Mississippi Delta Community College, the population dropped by 4,000 people over the same period.

Cole Cooksey, a sophomore studying pre-political science at Southwest Community College, said attending the school was the next logical step after high school graduation: scholarships covered his first year of tuition, and the campus’s proximity to his parents’ home in McComb made college more affordable and accessible. When Lamar’s bill threatened to merge Southwest with Copiah-Lincoln Community College, rumors of closure began circulating online. Cooksey launched an online petition titled “Stop The Progression of House Bill 1284” on Jan. 23. It drew more than 330 supporters in its first day; by the time the bill died, it had 750.

Cooksey said he wanted to raise awareness about the importance of the state’s oldest public college system and its benefits to students in rural and underserved communities. “Community colleges help fill in the gaps of support and education that high schools are not able to do and they fill in the gaps that universities refuse too,” Cooksey said. “The more conversations we have about their benefits and services, the more we are able to open other people’s eyes to the good community colleges do within our state.”

Under state law, the Mississippi Community College Board operates as the statewide coordinating board for each of the 15 colleges, while each college maintains its own local board of trustees. The local boards are responsible for day-to-day operations, local administration, facilities, personnel decisions and local tax support for their campuses. Lamar said the state should not have to maintain separate community college boards in areas serving fewer people.

Legislators are asking similar questions about the state’s eight public universities. Sen. Nicole Boyd, a Republican from Oxford, is pushing the trustees overseeing the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning to tie state funding to graduation rates, job placement and earnings. The state college board’s performance-based funding formula would aim for universities to meet the state’s workforce and education attainment priorities. In June, the trustees took a step toward adopting the proposed formula, which would tie a portion of state money to graduation rates, student retention and workforce outcomes. As of October, the board is still working to define specific metrics and goals for the universities, and it remains unclear when the formula will be fully implemented.

The funding debate predates this year’s community college bill. In 2024, Boyd introduced Senate Bill 2725, which would have created a 10-member task force to examine funding formulas as Mississippi approached a looming enrollment cliff driven by a predicted sharp decline in high school graduates. That same year, former Sen. John Polk, a Republican from Hattiesburg, authored Senate Bill 2726, which would have required college board trustees to close three universities based on factors including graduation rates, enrollment and student retention outcomes.

An enrollment dropoff could put particular pressure on the state’s regional universities — Mississippi University for Women, Delta State, Alcorn and Mississippi Valley State — by forcing them to compete with the flagship University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University for a shrinking pool of students. Boyd said the conversations around university funding are about more than finances. “These conversations are a cultural shift for Mississippi,” Boyd said. “We just want to make sure students aren’t leaving school saddled with debt and now worse off because of it.”

Consolidation opponents warn that merging smaller campuses would fall hardest on rural students. Pernell Goodwin, vice president of Copiah-Lincoln Community College’s Natchez campus, said consolidating the state’s smaller colleges could hurt rural students’ access to higher education, because having to travel farther for college would make it more difficult to visit campuses and would increase students’ overall costs. Accessibility, he said, was the goal behind the creation of Mississippi’s community college system. “It was to ensure that no matter where a student attends college, he is at least within a certain distance from his home to get to campus and access education,” Goodwin said.

Bruce Hanson, who served as a state representative in the 1980s, has pushed back against closing or consolidating universities. As chair of the Citizens Coalition for MUW and the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, Hanson has sought to protect the two campuses from consolidation proposals targeting schools that enroll fewer students. Smaller public universities, he said, play a crucial role in providing affordable tuition and easy access to higher education, and they generate millions of dollars and produce graduates essential to the state’s economy and workforce. “If these institutions disappear, where will the children in our community go?” Hanson said.