TIGER TV ONLINE REPORTER
Friday morning, a representative from each of LSU’s campus’s met to speak about their schools current performance issues at the board of supervisors meeting.
The meeting began at nine thirty and opened with President Vince Lombardi discussing the objective of the meeting.
“We want to make sure that what we do at our campuses results in value to the state,” Lombardi said. “Today we are going to look at what our campuses are doing overall for the state.”
The meeting was held to discuss the current performance at the schools: targeting enrollment rate, graduation rate and retention rate. The information was being taken into consideration by the board in order to produce two sets of data. The first set of data showed the performance of each campus and the second set showed the financing for and the revenue from each campus.
In the first part of the meeting, the representatives each gave an approximate ten-minute presentation talking about the progress they’ve made over the past years in performance. Most of the schools limited their data to years after 2005, post Katrina years, but some schools dated farther back such as the Pennington Biomedical Research Center that dated its data back to 1991. After each presentation members of the board were able to ask further questions.
The second part of the meeting was six integrated committee meetings: academic and student affairs, achievement and distinction committee, finance, infrastructure and core development committee, property and facilities committee, athletic committee and an audit committee. This part of the meeting was designated to talk about some of the issues in closer detail.
Overall the campuses each have been steadily increasing their performance.
For the most part LSU’s main campus, LSU A&M in Baton Rouge, has been steadily increasing areas of excellence according to Chancellor Mike Martin. However, this year it did have a lower freshman enrollment rate than in past years. Martin does not see this as a negative reflection of the school however.
“Recently the number of high school graduates in Louisiana has decreased and accompanying that are lower ACT scores,” Martin said.
Martin explained that because of these factors, the University has been focusing on its transfer and graduate enrollment. This year’s graduate enrollment increased by a couple hundred students.
Martin said the University is trying to focus on graduation rate rather than enrollment.
One of the main objectives of the University is to make sure that students are taking enough credit hours each semester to graduate in four to six years. Currently the average number of credit hours taken per semester at the University is 14.2 which is noticeably higher than the state average of 11 credit hours.
After finishing his presentation, Martin had to dash out the door to go enjoy the campus Fall Fest. He apologized for leaving early but invited everyone on the board to come and enjoy a hot dog in the quad.
“I love spending time with you all, but I love my students just as much,” Martin said.
