LSU president Dr. Wade Rousse speaks to the audience during during Lane Kiffins opening press conference Monday, Dec. 1, 2025, at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La.
LSU president Dr. Wade Rousse speaks to the audience during during Lane Kiffins opening press conference Monday, Dec. 1, 2025, at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La.
LSU System President Wade Rousse said he wants to drive economic growth across Louisiana through ambitious changes at the system’s flagship university.
Louisiana ranks low in higher education attainment and labor force participation, so he’s charged with bolstering LSU’s academics to ensure students get jobs after college, he said in a speech to the Baton Rouge Growth Coalition on Wednesday. Rousse, whose background is in economics, said a focus on graduate employment will boost the state’s gross domestic product, which he describes as the “ultimate measure of success.”
Labor and capital drive economic growth, he said, and Louisiana is rife with the latter due to major companies building data centers and liquefied natural gas terminals in the state. But it needs to work on labor.
“If we have the labor there to meet that capital where it is, it will not be a one-time deal,” Rousse said of the money flowing into the state in his speech. “We’re going to wake up 10 years from now, and we’re not going to be talking about kids not wanting to come back home, that is going to be changed, because GDP per capita will be in the top corner. It’s very linear in my mind.”
The Growth Coalition is a nonprofit organization that promotes real estate development in Baton Rouge.
In the first academic year of Rousse’s tenure leading the system, he’s overseen vast administrative restructuring, though some top roles remain vacant, and set a goal to make LSU one of the top 50 research universities in the country. The restructuring has chafed many across the state, Rousse acknowledged in his speech, but said the new structure matches that of schools he wants to emulate, like the University of Michigan and the University of Florida.
“I’m not bowing down to everybody who wants to tell me how to run LSU, because I believe I know where we need to go,” he said.
During Rousse’s time leading the system so far, LSU has reinstated its test requirement for admission, launched a three-year bachelor’s program and a major in artificial intelligence. He said a “market-driven curriculum” will prime students for jobs once they graduate.
Louisiana has gotten used to “empire building,” leading to the growing pains from LSU’s reorganization, he said. But unifying the university system will make it more attractive to grants from institutions like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
“Everybody wants to protect their own little kingdom,” he said. “As a result of that, we rank 49th in higher educational attainment in the state of Louisiana.”
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