LSU’s battles with Alabama on the football field are high-profile affairs, with sports pundits hemming and hawing for days before and after games, and fans resting a season’s worth of hopes on the rivalry. Lately, though, the Tigers haven’t been up to the task of beating its longtime rival.
And as Business Report details in a feature from its latest issue, LSU’s inability to pummel the Crimson Tide isn’t just confined to the field. LSU is being trounced by Alabama—and other flagship universities in the U.S.—in another arena: Growth in enrollment, as well as applications from potential students.
Alabama has been one of the fastest-growing schools in the U.S. for more than a decade, and, as of 2016, the nation’s fastest-growing flagship. Applications at the school exploded by 205% from 2006 to 2016, far outpacing both LSU’s growth (67%) and the rest of the country’s flagship schools (79%).
The result? A 58% spike in enrollment at Alabama over that decade, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. By comparison, LSU has seen just 5% growth.
So how did Alabama do it? In part, by looking increasingly outside its state lines and throwing itself head first into a national competition for students. Those trends get at deeper issues about how universities operate in a world with declining state aid, and about the role of state universities and flagship institutions.
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