Looking at a situation is simple; it only takes good eyesight. Seeing opportunity takes a bit of vision, the cerebral type of vision.

Fortunately for southwest Mississippi, Alcorn State University President M. Christopher Brown II has good eyes and great vision.

Alcorn, the oldest public historically black land-grant university, has long considered its Lorman campus as its home.

The main campus remains the university’s bread and butter for traditional university students who want to experience college life.

But Alcorn, like many universities, is also seeing a growing trend — less traditional students. Increasingly, today’s students seek to earn university degrees while holding down jobs, raising children and doing other things that are considered non-traditional by university standards.

Last week, as Alcorn celebrated a new location for its Vicksburg satellite campus, Brown’s thoughts were focused on how to better serve the communities of Vicksburg and Natchez, which also has a satellite campus of the main university.

Brown said the university was rethinking its plans for the Natchez campus, which has traditionally only offered nursing and masters of business administration degree programs.

“I think you’ll see a lot more courses and academic majors being offered at the Natchez campus in the future,” Brown said.

That’s great news for Natchez and for all of Southwest Mississippi. Our corner of the world is plagued by many problems; the solution to many of them is in increasing the basic level of education our population has. Alcorn’s plans could be a great step in the right direction.

We’re happy the university is showing commitment to southwest Mississippi with the vision for growing Alcorn’s offering in the area.