LSU is No. 443 on The Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education second annual college rankings, which looks at how well public and private higher education institutions prepare students for life after graduation.
The list includes 800 colleges and universities, with Harvard University taking the top spot on the list followed by ivy leagues like Columbia, MIT, Stanford and Duke.
The ranking is based on 15 factors in four categories: student outcomes/graduate salaries, academic resources, engagement and diversity of students and staff. Colleges and universities can earn a maximum overall score of 100, with considerable weight given to student outcomes and academic resources.
LSU has an overall score of 50.1, as does Loyola University New Orleans. LSU scored 18.7 out of 40 points in the outcome category; 10.5 out of 30 points in the resource category; 16.3 out of 20 points in the engagement category; and 4.6 out of 10 points for environment.
The rankings note LSU has student-faculty ratio of 23:1 and spends about $13,640 per student. Graduates earn about $46,000 about 10 years after starting college, and 5% of graduates have defaulted on their student loans.
The ranking also includes a survey that asked roughly 109,000 students a series of questions to determine the extent to which they felt engaged in their education and whether they would choose their school again. About 82% of the LSU graduates surveyed said they would attend LSU again if they had the chance to start their college career over, and 79% said the university was effective in helping them secure internships that helped them prepared for their chosen career.
Also on the list is Tulane, which ranks No. 71 and is tied with the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Xavier University ranks No. 357.
Eighty of the bottom 100 institutions on the list are public colleges and universities, while just two public schools made the top 30.
“The fact that there are only two publics in the top 30 is part of the narrative that there is a crisis in public higher education,” says Phil Baty, Times Higher Education rankings editor. “We are seeing some real challenges in terms of resources, and I think this kind of inequality, this defunding of great American public schools, is a serious issue.”
Read the full series and learn more about LSU’s ranking on the list.
