College-bound public high school grads on the rise

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Louisiana education officials say 23,517 public high school students who graduated in 2017 enrolled in college in the fall.
  
That’s a record for the state. Tuesday’s news release from the Department of Education says it’s an increase of more than 500 from the previous year and it’s up by more than 3,000 since 2012.
  
The department said school systems in Calcasieu, Lafayette, Livingston, Orleans and Bossier parishes account for more than half the increase in recent years.
  
Those parishes represent 22 percent of graduates but 31 percent of the increase in college enrollment from 2012 to 2017.
  
The number of college-going high school graduates deemed economically disadvantaged increased by 56 percent over those five years and the number of college-bound minority graduates increased by 16 percent.