Why LSU will not improve in the near future

This isn’t a rant about the hiring of Tate, although to be blunt I am complete against it and think it will set back LSU significantly for a variety of reasons, and none of which have to do with his race in and of itself.

As a former alum and someone in academia, LSU’s issues have lied in many aspects in its selectivity for the student body or more aptly it’s lack of selectivity.

To get into the upper echelons of universities in this country and in general in the world, you must have set standards for the students you bring in and students need to meet those standards if they are to attend.

LSU actually addressed this significantly in the 90s when they killed off the significant number of remedial courses that were being offered for students that were accepted but not at a level to take on the college courses. That happened largely in part to the lack of a legitimate community college system in Louisiana to give those students an opportunity to get a strong foundation before attending.

LSU’s reputation improved great after that, but has since fallen for a variety of reasons including reducing the standards to try and bring in more Underrepresented minorities and poor hires from a teaching standpoint in many key departments. I want to clarify that this isn’t about minority hires, just really shitty hires that were awful on the teaching end and purely research hires.

Now, LSU is looking to reduce those standards even further for specific demographics with the current and incoming leadership. This will in no way improve the quality of education at LSU. Again, those students are not prepared well enough and so there are two options:

1) Set those students up for failure by ensuring academic rigor is maintained.

2) Reduce the academic rigor to accommodate these students and thus harming the training value for the huge majority of your student body.

This is the main issue, and there are better ways to fix the supposed gap for URMs. The easiest is to offer opportunities with provisional acceptance into LSU and even scholarships if the students get foundation courses at a community college link to LSU. That helps everyone by keeping the rigor high, but ensuring those students get an opportunity to succeed and get a legitimate top tier education.

In the end, this won’t fly with the current admin because it won’t help inflate minority stats at the detriment of the bulk of the rest of e students, which to them is an okay consequence. It is also why degrees are becoming less valuable and meaningful in today’s society.

Sad times for my alma mater and I wish it wasn’t so.