re: LSU is preparing for a freshmen class of 9,000 this fall.

I'll enjoy and support the sports programs, but as an alumnus I shake my head at the direction of the university. The LSU brand should be more than athletics. I know the model is strong athletics drives the university from an academic side, but they either underestimate the impact of lowering (and not requiring) standards or it's on purpose. I believe it was done to push demographics and at the cost of too much of what LSU was/should be. Tate can kiss my arse.

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Let’s be perfectly honest…it’s the primary reason Tate was shown the door

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Wait, the guy who wrote “academic” pieces about math being racist was a horrible university president?

Here here!

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The LSU brand should be more than athletics.

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And could be!

IMO, Auburn is doing this well. The post Covid migration ‘trend’ to SEC schools (relative high education cost / bad winter weather) from North and some colony states is great opportunity for LSU.

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More misdirected Tate hate.

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Okay, let me spread the criticism. F. King advanced it, the interim president (Galligan) did nothing to affect it, and Tate supported it. Expansion of nonresident enrollment combined with "full-file admissions" equals decreased quality of students and student life.

So they can all kiss my arse. Thank goodness Rousse is putting standards back into play, but they won't come into play until 2027/2028. Meanwhile, the damage is done. I get that the "standards are racist" crowd are giddy about the current trajectory, but that doesn't make it right.

I would like to see demographics of applicants

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all while becoming more selective in admissions.

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I doubt it. I’ll believe it once ACT standards are back in place and we see a continually rising average ACT score

73 percent acceptance rate

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LSU is one of those schools you apply to since you know you'll get accepted and probably get some sort of scholarship money.

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Not if you’re a white male identifying resident who graduated from a catholic high school.

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More misdirected Tate hate.
The lowering of standards (“holistic admissions”) was 100% the brainchild of F King.

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BS. Tate put effort on steroids.

Tate kept them and made them worse.

He kept or maybe even pushed voluntary ACTs that started in fall 2021 class with thousands not submitting that first class (King started holistic but at least kept ACT/SAT requirement which gave you an idea on grade inflation), to cover inflated GPAs he compared scores when voluntary to when mandatory starting the very first freshman class that made score submissions voluntary, then when needed he compared super scores to composite scores in 2023, and started pushing a score to students to only submit scores if at that score or above to increase scores again.

Tate oversaw a consistent annual drop in ACT/SAT scores submitted allowing for a consistent increase in inflated GPAs getting scholarships and into Honors college over more qualified students, and worst of all Tate put the extreme focus on rapid growth thru Pell grant eligible out of state students with GPA inflated awarded scholarships to make up the difference in funding to not only make LSU blacker (but more importantly to him less white) but also allow the black students to not accumulate a lot of student loan debt with school sponsored scholarships. Why do you think he was able to increase endowment?

Tate’s hires on the academic side were as political as many suspected when he was hired. His admissions committee should be investigated for recruitment focus and scholarships handed out.

Blacks made up 14.4% of incoming freshman class in 2019 (885 total incoming black freshmen), and this was increased to 28.4% in fall of 2025 (2,332 total incoming black freshman).

Whites at 66.7% or 4,079 total of the fall incoming 2019 freshman class and then at 48.6% or 3,995 total of the fall incoming 2025 freshman class.

So with applications and incoming freshman classes increasing whites decreased both in % and in number.

This was also happening as SAT/ACT scores submitted for admissions, honors, and scholarship consideration kept dropping.

Also, I went back to fall of 2019 due to King leaving, having interim, and especially covid making comparisons off, but the white incoming freshman totals actually increased in 2020 and 2021 while %s dropped a little, but in the first 100% Tate class for 2022 incoming freshman whites started dropping in total numbers and also dropped over 5 percentage points that first class (62.5% to 57.2%). The white freshman totals showed a much larger drop from fall of 2021 to the fall of 2025 than from the fall of 2019 - from 4,401 in fall of 2021 to 3,995 in fall of 2025.
https://www.lsu.edu/data/student-data/dashboards/retention.php