By JIM SMILIE
Having earned national championships in gymnastics and baseball in the past year and football in 2019, LSU President William F. Tate, IV, recognizes Louisiana State University is well known nationally for its athletic teams.
“We have incredible teams at LSU,” Tate told members of the Alexandria Rotary Club Tuesday afternoon in Convention Hall in Alexandria. “They are not just in sports. We have academic teams, staff teams, and more.”
Tate, who is starting his fourth year as president of the LSU System, said he is focused on centralizing LSU’s Scholarship First agenda. That includes increasing enrollment and funding for research while ensuring students have the tools and support they need to be successful.
“We’re in the opportunity business,” Tate said, noting one of his goals is to ensure people have the opportunity to improve their lives through education. “I believe it is better to go to school and flunk out than never go at all,” he said. “In America, you can be born poor and have the opportunity to go to school and improve your situation to get on the positive side.”
Tate said he is constantly looking into communities for people who can be helped and working to find ways to give them the opportunity to improve the quality of their life as well as the community they live in.
So far, that approach is working in terms of enrollment as every school in the LSU system saw record enrollment this fall, with more than 55,000 students enrolled system-wide.
Tate specifically recognized Louisiana State University of Alexandria for its record enrollment growth and for achieving its goal of 5,000 students two years ahead of schedule. “Most schools set enrollment records in the fall,” Tate said. “LSUA broke its enrollment record in the spring – nobody does that. That’s taking an opportunity and being serious about it.” This year, LSUA posted a 35.5 percent increase over last year with more than 5,400 students, making it the fastest growing public university in the state.
As part of the Scholarship First agenda, Tate said the university is focusing on five key topic areas, which he referred to as “the pentagon.” Those fields are agriculture, biomedical, coast, defense and energy. “People often ask me, where does English, or science or math fit into that,” Tate said. “Those are all a part of each of those areas.” For example, he said, history or math majors may be working in fields concerning coastal erosion while English majors may be in the military or working in the energy sector.
Tate considers each of those areas to be vital to Louisiana and he believes investing in those areas will benefit students and the state. “People ask me, ‘is education worth it?’ We’re pulling people out of poverty. We’re changing lives.”
As further proof of the benefit of higher education, Tate noted LSUA grads, for example, earn an average salary of roughly $67,000 per year compared to the state average of roughly $51,000 per year. He also noted 81 percent of LSUA graduates stay in Louisiana to live and work. “The taxpayers are getting a good bang for their buck when students go to LSUA,” he said. Across the LSU system, roughly 70 percent of graduates stay in the state, he said, reinvesting in the community.
In addition to focusing on the five key study areas in the pentagon, Tate said he wants to see greater emphasis on research to drive innovation.
A tool Tate uses to measure innovation is patent registrations. He showed the audience a chart highlighting the parts of the country with the highest number of patent registrations. The bulk were in California, the New England area and the upper Midwest.
“There is not a lot in Louisiana,” Tate said, noting minimal activity in the Gulf coast region. “We’re relying on other people to solve our problems.” That’s a problem, Tate said, because the leading patent-producing areas don’t face the challenges Louisiana faces, including hurricanes and coastal erosion. “You don’t have hurricanes in Big 10 country,” he said.
Tate recalled that when he arrived at LSU, one of his first observations was that research dollars were stagnant. He set a goal of increasing research funding by 10 percent each year and to get LSU into the ranks of the top 50 research institutions.
Last year, LSU set a record with $488 million in research funding, an increase of 14 percent over the previous year. Still, Tate notes they still have a long way to go as he estimates it will take $700-800 million in research funding to get into the top 50.
Research funding received a huge boost earlier this year when LSU was awarded the largest grant ever awarded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, providing up to $160 million to support Louisiana’s energy industry, create jobs and develop the energy workforce.
Louisiana’s team, called Future Use of Energy in Louisiana, or FUEL, includes private energy companies, universities, community and technical colleges, and state agencies that will work together to drive technology and workforce development in support of Louisiana’s energy industry.
Tate noted energy is one of the five “pentagon” programs of emphasis and that the program is driving innovation locally. “We need to encourage Louisiana-centric solutions to the challenges we face,” he said.