re: MS baws, tell me about Delta State University

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DSU is going through major problems and have lost 30% of their total enrollment in the past five years.

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A negative delta.

Cleveland is a pretty cool town. I have a customer there and I like to set up my overnight in Cleveland

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He's currently employed at Coastal Carolina in Conway, SC, so small town life isn't unheard of for them.

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Conway is far from small town life. It’s basically grown together with Myrtle Beach.

Cleveland Mississippi is a wasteland.

It’s a solid school for where it’s at.

Cleveland is probably the best of the delta towns it’s about 50/50 demographic wise. Downtown is nice it has some great local shops and restaurants.

Cotton house hotel





Papa Rocs
Bellazars
Airport Grocery
The Warehouse
Hey Joes
Delta Meat Market

All good restaurants.

Live on the west side of downtown or anywhere near campus. Avoid the southeast part of town and anywhere along hwy 61 south of hwy 8 interesection

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If you aren't from a small town and don't mesh well with southern towns....you aren't going to like it.

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I had to do a family practice rotation there during medical school over 20 years ago. The 'small southern town' Cleveland was nice, but back then everybody in the town knew about each other's business... the gossip in that little town was ridiculous.

When I took a medical history on a patient, not only did I get a complete family history, but the history of the neighbors, people they were working with... not just the casual gossip and rumors, but personal crap.

So if you have any skeletons... bury that deep.

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What’s causing the decline of the delta?

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Trade policies killed the textile and catfish industries

Cleveland is an underrated town in the Mississippi Delta, which is a place filled with history and great people. People from all over the world visit the area because of the Blues history.

Delta State has struggled with an identity crisis driven by poor leadership. The most recent president, a former DC lobbyist, tried to pull the school hard left.

Even blacks in the Delta are socially conservative.

Your friend needs to look at the things that worked in the 80s and 90s. The school needs a giant recruiting overhaul. It needs to tell its story. In the 1990s, Delta State was considered the best public institution value in the nation. Good academics, athletics and social life.

It also needs to emphasize agriculture as a curriculum more to keep Delta kids in the Delta. It needs to embrace what farming looks like in the future as well as agronomics. That resides at MSU now. Delta State needs to have offerings too.

He has a job ahead of him, but it can be a great place.

Title increase too. I think Dan is the Provost at CCU, so a promotion to President is a big deal.

I would believe that it gets him on his way to President at a larger school if he can be effective at Delta State.

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What’s causing the decline of the delta?

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In a word: farming.

Prior to the 80s/90s, you needed a decent amount of people to run a good-sized farm (we farmed about 1k acres and generally had 5-6 permanent farm hand positions). These were low to no-skill positions which paid minimum wage, but allowed for learning manual labor skills (engine repair, carpentry, etc).

For the Delta (and a lot of the South), cotton was the primary commodity. While increased automation throughout the 80s meant farmers needed fewer employees, the economics of the 80s killed thousands of farms.

Many farms run from short-term-loan to short-term-loan. They take out a loan at the beginning of the planting season then pay it back once they sell their harvest (at least, that's how it was when I was a kid in the 70s-80s). When inflation began to run rampant at the end of the 70s, Paul Volcker drove interest rates up to just over 20% at one point in order to try to bring inflation back down. While it worked, it caused many farmers to go under as they couldn't pay their notes.

This not only caused many farms to fail, but the many small towns and communities which were basically run on farming dollars went under as well. From towns like Ferriday to communities like Fort Necessity, the domino effect of farming's collapse rippled though these areas as pharmacies, dry cleaners, etc. no longer had enough customers to continue to operate. As those who owned those businesses shut them down then moved off, other businesses eventually followed as well.

The former farm workers, not having much in the way of marketable skills and now absolutely no place to work, either moved away to find other jobs or stayed and increased the amount of government assistance they qualified for. Those who stayed (which were many) ended up having kids who also had no way to learn skills nor places to use any they could develop.



Where this has been very prominent has been the Delta area as it was so deeply dependent on farming (but really you can see it anywhere farming is a foundation for the local economy).

So you now have fewer farm owners who make decent to good livings, and a lot of poor people with few (if any) opportunities but just enough welfare funding to not have enough incentive to move away to try for something better.