re: To what extent would LSU be more prestigious if it were in a safer location?

You mean like another state?

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LSU is in the bottom half of the bottom half

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Yet, it trails only Vandy, A&M and Florida in grads' mid-career income. I'll take that "prestige" instead of some irrelevant measures.

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To what extent would LSU be more prestigious if it were in a safer location?

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Safer location? Off the top of my head, go look at the locations for the following and get back to me: Yale, Notre Dame, Duke, University of Chicago, Emory, John’s Hopkins, and USC.

At the end of the day, it’s the state, flagship university for one the dumbest and poorest states in the country. Can it better? Absolutely. But, in terms of rankings, at the end of the day, it’s only going to be so good.

Academic rankings are mostly fake and made up anyways (subjective).

Its funny people in Louisiana that have been born and bred here still don't get it. The understanding is certainly there deep down inside yet 97% choose to fully ignore and then defend the state day in day out.

It is quite literally a one of a kind place in that regard.

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LSU grad here, but actively persuaded my kid to go to college out of state. BR crime problems was one of the main reasons. He is a smart kid and got a very good scholarship out of state, but its still more expensive than it would have been had he gone to LSU. Another reason is, since he is smart, going out of state gives him a better shot of not moving back to Louisiana after school. We genuinely want him to live somewhere else besides Louisiana.

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This is where we are as well. Our kids are not even into middle school yet, and we're trying to figure out the chess moves to get them out of here. We have too many elderly family obligations at the moment, but that will likely not be the case when they wrap up high school.

The best plan so far is to encourage the eldest to go out of state, ideally to a state we'd consider relocating to, then retire there. That's a long ways away and a billion reasons that it might not line up that way.

I see no reason why BR or this state will ever improve. The trends are all in the wrong direction with no magic formula to fix it.

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The hood around USC is far worse than Baton Rouge

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There are more issues on USC's campus than LSU's too. USC might be the best example of a huge (and growing) university that's damn near surrounded by some dangerous neighborhoods. Some of it creeps onto campus. It's far worse than LSU (or any SEC school that I can think of) except that there's obviously far more $$ spent on local infrastructure in Los Angeles so at least the main routes in the USC appear to be merely "sketchy" rather than totally abandoned. Don't get lost and make a wrong turn around there though....yikes.

Add Johns Hopkins, U of Chicago, Drexel, University of Detroit, Columbia, NYU, Rutgers, University of Memphis, U of Houston, and Yale to the list of mid sized or large institutions that are either in shitty neighborhoods or directly adjacent to them. Duquesne university and Pitt are near Pittsburgh's ultra shitty Hill district and there is definitely some issues on those campuses.

Marquette, U of Cincinatti, and Georgia Tech are near city centers and are very close to some pretty big inner city ghettos, but have somehow kept most of the issues off campus. U of Pennsylvania and Wayne State are still in sketchy areas, but are seeing some gentrification.

One side of Berkeley is in an extremely shitty part of town with homeless camps everywhere, although the other side up the hill is super nice. Berkeley's own students join Antifa light the place on fire every few years so I'm not sure if that counts.

I bet an even greater percentage of medical schools are in really shitty areas compared to older universities.

Would you want to live in Baton Rouge?

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I’ve always felt safer in the west village of NYC where NYU is located than almost anywhere in Louisiana. We were there in June when our daughter was considering NYU as one of her school choices.

I also don’t subscribe to the theory that LSU is being held back solely by the crime in BRLA.

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NYU's area usually isn't considered bad, Columbia for years was the school in NYC where the neighborhood was awful, though it's improved a lot recently despite one really sad high publicity murder that happened there a couple of years ago.

Admittedly haven't read this whole thread but Johns Hopkins is another where the location isn't great, but it does well despite that because of the prestige.