Katrina Accelerates 'Brain Drain'

Joe Ann Clark, the executive director of the Louisiana State Nurses Association, said she gets recruiting calls every day from hospitals across the country desperate to hire away as many of New Orleans' roughly 13,000 displaced nurses as they can.

With the nation facing a nursing shortage, Clark is struggling to keep nurses in Louisiana so they can return to work if and when the decimated health care system is rebuilt. But it has not been easy. One California hospital is offering $42 an hour and a $13,000 signing bonus, she said.

"My gracious," said Clark, a retired nurse. "It's hard to compete with that."

New Orleans civic leaders and inside observers fear that the near destruction of the city's vibrant university system and the reluctance of an emerging biotechnology industry to return will further extend Louisiana's brain drain. And this time, many fear their city won't recover.

William Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a policy-research center, has studied population migration in Louisiana. Long before Katrina, New Orleans and Louisiana both bucked growth trends seen elsewhere across the New South, he said.

"Basically, Louisiana has been a poster child for brain drain, especially whites with college degrees," Frey said.

Experts like Frey and Dean Robert Sumichrast of LSU's E.J. Ourso College of Business Administration attribute the problem to the state's lagging economy, poor image and inability to attract new residents since the mid-1980s.

Losing many of the city's best-educated residents could further damage the limping economy and tear apart the city's social fabric, experts say. But some other professionals, such as lawyers, architects and engineers, have said that Katrina has provided her share of opportunities for them.

Health care is the No. 1 employer in Louisiana, but Katrina almost obliterated the hospital, nursing home and mental health systems in New Orleans. They employ tens of thousands of people, including many at its two medical schools and research institutions at Tulane and Louisiana State University hospitals, said John Matessino, president of the Louisiana Hospital Association.

"The health care industry was one of the few industries in New Orleans that was growing," said Dr. William "Kip" Schumacher, CEO of The Schumacher Group. His medical-staffing company in Lafayette, La., provides physicians to 10 medical facilities within the affected areas. "It's hard to quantify how many are at risk of flight from the state, but it's huge. Just the number of physicians is 5,000."

Schumacher and other experts wonder how the medical centers at Tulane and LSU in New Orleans can retain their nationally recognized scholars and researchers when it might take years to rebuild their classrooms and laboratories.

Many of Schumacher's competitors already are actively hunting for medical professionals, especially for doctors, nurses and technicians who were at a premium even before the storm, he said. Like Clark, the retired nurse, he has seen recent radio and print ads from Florida and Colorado calling for professionals dislocated by the storm.

Sharon Vercellotti is president of the biotech firm V-Labs in Covington, La., and vice president of the Louisiana Alliance for Biotechnology, or LAB. LAB's mission since 1999 has been to enhance biotech research and business development by connecting the academic and private sectors.

A handful of small biomedical companies had sprung up in New Orleans before the storms, but many in the city were banking on the burgeoning industry's future.

"We fear the origin of ideas will simply diminish" if the growth stops, Vercellotti said.

But all is not bleak in the medical and academic communities.

Tulane University President Scott Cowen, who sits on Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission, said he expects the health care industry to rebound completely within five years. Tulane's hospital will reopen in the next several months, he said. University students, staff and faculty also will be back by mid-January, he pledged. The Louisiana Academy of Family Physicians said none of its 1,300 members has expressed a desire to leave. Spokeswoman Linda Foster said she's heard only that members are excited to rebuild.

Although the state certainly will lose talented and educated people, the migration out will include many more of the poor and less educated Louisianans, Sumichrast said, raising fears of a more homogenized New Orleans.

"But for those who stay behind, there is a high degree of rootedness, a great sense of community," Frey said. "I just think they are very reluctant migrants. I believe it will be a while before haze subsides for these people, if it ever does, but then they will try to go back if they can."

Still, professionals are more mobile, so when Louisiana took economic and public-relations hits in the past, they often were the first to leave, he said.

Because Katrina is unprecedented, the future is difficult to predict, Frey said. Not only were hundreds of thousands displaced, but unlike the '30s Dust Bowl or 1910-30 Great Migration of blacks to northern cities, this was instantaneous and hit all socio-economic levels, he said.

Frank Neuner, president of the Louisiana State Bar Association, which has temporary offices in Lafayette, said he doesn't expect an exodus from New Orleans' 5,500-member legal community.

The state Supreme Court and U.S. federal court will reopen in the city. And at least two large Houston firms plan to open offices.

Plus, lawyers have an incentive to stick it out.

"After the storm, there will be a lot of legal issues for us to tackle," Neuner said. "So I don't think there are too many lawyers who will leave."