At a Glance
LSU admits 73.3% of applicants.
What You'll Actually Pay
See what families at different income levels actually pay after aid.
What families actually pay, by income level
After grants and scholarships. Before loans. Public school prices shown at in-state rates.
Source: College Scorecard / IPEDS, 2024-25
Where the Sticker Price Goes
Based on average need-based grant. Actual cost varies by family income — see chart above.
Shown at in-state rates.
Debt at Graduation
48.7%
receive need-based grant aid
$25,590
average debt at graduation
LSU graduates carry an average of $25,590 in debt.
Merit Aid
5,591
students received merit aid
$7,450
average merit award
Getting In
LSU admits 73.3% of applicants.
SAT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 7% of the class submitted
ACT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 40% of the class submitted
26% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What They Value
Academic
Nonacademic
Louisiana State University gives essays less weight than many schools — academics drive most admissions decisions here. Demonstrated interest is Considered — showing genuine engagement with this school may help your application.
Student Life
42.5% of LSU classes have fewer than 20 students.
Share of undergraduate class sections at each size, from CDS Section I-3. More red = more large lectures.
At LSU, 42.5% of your classes will have fewer than 20 students.
Class size data reflects all undergraduate sections including labs, seminars, and lectures. Large research universities often have smaller upper-division and graduate-level sections that improve the overall distribution. First and second-year students typically experience larger classes than these averages suggest.
Source: Common Data Set 2024–25, Section I-3 (class sizes)
21:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus Life
From out of state (freshman class)
39.4%
Live on campus
29%
Men in fraternities
17%
Women in sororities
24%
Who Attends
Racial and ethnic breakdown of enrolled undergraduates, as reported in each school's Common Data Set. "Unknown / Other" includes students who did not report or selected "other."
LSU's student body is 57.9% white.
Popular Majors
Will They Graduate?
LSU graduates 50.4% of students in 4 years.
Graduating late means paying for extra semesters. The 6-year rate tells you who eventually finishes — the 4-year rate tells you what it actually costs.
LSU graduates 50.4% of students in 4 years.
What finishing late actually costs
Based on each school's published cost of attendance. Public school costs shown at in-state rates.
LSU
50.4%
4-yr grad rate
Extra year cost: $34,705*
* In-state cost of attendance. Out-of-state students pay significantly more.
Graduation rate data from Common Data Set 2024–25, Fall 2018 cohort (most recent available). 4-year rate = students completing in 4 years or less. 6-year rate = students completing within 6 years.
68.8%
Overall 6-yr rate
57.6%
Pell recipient rate
An 11.2 point graduation gap between lower-income and overall students suggests financial or academic challenges for some students.
Freshman Retention
84.7%
84.7% of first-year students return for sophomore year.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Baton Rouge.
Baton Rouge is Louisiana's capital and a working river city rather than a quaint college town — the state capitol, the Mississippi, and the refineries and chemical plants along its banks are all part of the view. Campus sits a few miles south of downtown behind live oaks and Italian Renaissance rooftops, and it holds two prehistoric earthen mounds that radiocarbon dating puts at roughly 11,000 years old, the oldest known man-made structures in the Americas. Because campus is set apart from the city, the social centre of gravity stays on it, and in the autumn the calendar bends around football almost completely. Food is the other draw and it is genuinely regional — crawfish boils, Cajun and Creole cooking, and New Orleans about 80 miles down I-10. The trade-offs are heat and humidity that run late into the semester, a city built around driving rather than walking, and a downtown that is quiet next to the one an hour away.
Notable Alumni
Linda Thomas-Greenfield
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2021 to 2025, after a Foreign Service career that included running the State Department's Africa bureau and serving as Director General of the Foreign Service. She grew up in Baker, just north of Baton Rouge, and took her political science degree here as one of the few Black students in her class.
Class of 1974
Maxime Faget
The engineer who designed the Mercury capsule and shaped every American crewed spacecraft that followed, through Gemini, Apollo and the Space Shuttle. He took his mechanical engineering degree here and was later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Class of 1943
Ruth Fertel
Founder of Ruth's Chris Steak House. She finished a chemistry degree here at 19, and in 1965 mortgaged her house to buy a small New Orleans steakhouse that she built into an international chain.
Class of 1946
Bill Conti
Composer of 'Gonna Fly Now', the Rocky theme, and winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Right Stuff. He took his degree from the LSU School of Music and donated his original scores back to the university in 2020.
Class of 1963
Shaquille O'Neal
Four-time NBA champion and Hall of Fame center, who played here from 1989 to 1992 before leaving early for the draft. He came back to finish his bachelor's degree in 2000, and returned again for a master's in liberal arts in 2026.
Class of 2000
Donna Brazile
The first Black woman to manage a major-party presidential campaign, running Al Gore's 2000 bid, and later interim chair of the Democratic National Committee. She studied psychology here and has spent years since as a television political analyst.
Class of 1981
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
The City
Mid-size city
Baton Rouge, LA
Best For
Traditions
Saturday Night in Death Valley
LSU plays most home games at night, and the stadium announcer marks it: 'the sun has set in the western sky, and it's Saturday night in Death Valley.' The noise is not folklore — when LSU beat Auburn on a late touchdown in October 1988, the crowd registered on a seismograph in the geoscience building 500 metres away, and the game has been called the Earthquake Game ever since.
The walk down Victory Hill
Before every home game the Golden Band from Tigerland parades the football team down Victory Hill toward Tiger Stadium, playing the Pregame Salute, with fans packed along both sides of the street.
Mike the Tiger
LSU has kept a live Bengal tiger named Mike since 1936, when students raised the money for the first one. Mike VII lives in a habitat across from the stadium and is out in his yard all week; since 2017 he no longer goes into the stadium on game days, a change the university made on its veterinarians' advice.
Callin' Baton Rouge
The Garth Brooks song plays over the stadium speakers before kickoff and the whole crowd sings it. The recording used is the one made inside Tiger Stadium when Brooks played there in April 2022.
Purple and gold
The colours came from a shopping trip in 1893. Preparing for LSU's first football game against Tulane, coach Charles Coates bought ribbon at a Baton Rouge store stocked for Carnival season; the green had not arrived, so he bought out the purple and gold.
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Baton Rouge
St. Francisville
40 minutesA small river town in the Tunica Hills north of the city — antebellum houses, bluff trails and the closest real hiking to campus.
Lafayette and Cajun country
1 hourThe heart of Acadiana, straight west on I-10 — dance halls, boudin, and the Atchafalaya Basin on the way.
New Orleans
1 hour 20 minutesThe default weekend — the French Quarter, the music, Mardi Gras, and the region's professional sport.
Mississippi Gulf Coast
2 hours 15 minutesGulfport and Biloxi, the nearest beaches and the standard warm-weather day trip.
Houston
4 hoursThe long-weekend trip and the nearest global city — museums, professional sport, and the airport many out-of-state students connect through.
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport (BTR)
20 minutes from campus
For international flights: George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) — about 4 hours by road, or a short connecting flight from baton rouge.
Pro sports nearby
- New Orleans Saints NFL
- New Orleans Pelicans NBA
Career Proximity
Baton Rouge sits at the head of the industrial corridor that runs down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and that is what shapes recruiting here. ExxonMobil's Baton Rouge complex — one of the largest refineries in the country, plus a chemical plant — is minutes from campus, Dow runs the state's largest petrochemical operation at Plaquemine just south, and the engineering and construction firms that serve those plants, Turner Industries among them, are headquartered in the city. That makes chemical, petroleum and mechanical engineering the well-trodden paths out of LSU. Because Baton Rouge is also the state capital, government, policy and law internships are a short drive rather than a relocation, and Our Lady of the Lake anchors a large hospital system on the healthcare side.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- ExxonMobil
- Dow
- Turner Industries
- Our Lady of the Lake Health
- State of Louisiana
Baton Rouge itself — the state capital and the head of the industrial corridor; New Orleans is about 1 hour 20 minutes southeast
Who Thrives Here
LSU is a 34,242-undergraduate campus in Louisiana's capital, and a striking amount of its student life happens off it: 29% of undergraduates live in university housing, and Greek life is a real option here rather than the organising force it is at some of its SEC peers — 17% of men and 24% of women join. What holds the place together is football, and not as a figure of speech; when LSU beat Auburn on a late touchdown in 1988 the crowd registered on a seismograph in the geoscience building, and home games have been Saturday night in Death Valley ever since. Academically it runs at flagship scale — a 21-to-1 student-faculty ratio, 42.5% of sections under 20 students — and its degrees follow the industrial corridor it sits at the head of, with business and marketing taking 22.5% of them and engineering another 9.6%. Three numbers deserve a hard look before you decide. LSU meets 57.3% of demonstrated need, borrowers leave owing $25,590, and 50.4% finish in four years against 68.8% in six — so the in-state price is only the bargain it looks like if your student is in the half that finishes on time.