Dive Brief:

• The University of Missouri-St. Louis is blaming an unexpected drop in student enrollment on the Michael Brown shooting death and subsequent protests and rioting in Ferguson, which is four miles away.
• The university is implementing a hiring freeze because of the enrollment decline, which has created a $2 million budget shortfall, the Associated Press reported.
• Tom George, the university’s chancellor, said “widespread anxiety” about the area was responsible for the budget shortfall.

Dive Insight:

The school has an enrollment of about 12,000 students, which is expected to drop by about 600 students in the spring 2015 semester compared to one year earlier. A university spokesman said some new and returning students had mentioned the fallout from the Aug. 9 police shooting of Brown as their reason for not enrolling. This was in spite of the fact that looting and arson in the wake of the shooting and a grand jury’s failure to indict the police officer who killed Brown was confined to certain sections of Ferguson. The hiring freeze is effective immediately, but exempts part-time student workers, graduate assistants, and certain adjunct faculty.