SHREVEPORT – Growth in the undergraduate student population underpins LSU Shreveport’s record spring enrollment, the University announced Wednesday.
LSUS’s enrollment of 10,959 is a spring semester record, topping the Spring 2025 record of 10,925.
Undergraduates experienced a nearly nine percent increase from Spring 2025, expanding to 2,892 students.
“We’re continuing our healthy growth in undergraduates, and that’s a result of the hard work our faculty and staff are doing to support student success as well as our increased efforts to recruit,” said LSUS Chancellor Dr. Robert Smith. “Our Student Success Center is doing an excellent job in supporting our students, which has led to higher retention rates.”
The undergraduate surge has been on a steady incline, up more than 24 percent since Spring 2023 (an increase of 562 students).
Since LSUS redesigned and expanded targeted student support systems in 2022, the university’s retention rate climbed more than 10 percent (Fall 2023 cohort) higher than the previous four cohorts on average.
Improvements include a redesign of the First-Year Seminar class, which helps incoming students transition to college, and a peer leader program in which upperclassmen assist first-year students through mentorship.
“We built our support systems around helping all of our students be successful,” said Angie Pellerin, associate vice chancellor of student success. “Most everything we’ve done is targeted at that first year and even the first semester, but what we’ve found is that those interventions are having a lasting impact into the third year (in the Fall 2023 cohort).
“The stuff we’re doing at that foundational level is having a lasting impact, even though we haven’t actively targeted specific barriers that second-year students are facing. We’re in the process of doing that now.”
LSUS is benefiting from its membership in the Gardner Institute’s inaugural cohort (2023) to transform the early college experience and its partnership with Complete College America, which aims to increase college completion rates and close institutional performance gaps.
The university is continuing its trend of enrollment growth as one of the fastest-growing regional public colleges in the nation.
From 2010-2023, LSUS ranked No. 3 nationally in that category as its enrollment more than doubled (120 percent increase), according to a
After five consecutive semesters of record-breaking enrollment, LSUS experienced a typical enrollment dip in the spring from its all-time record high of 11,359 students this past fall.
But students are taking more credit hours on average than in previous years, and more students are enrolled full-time.
Total credit hours are up more than three percent from this past spring, and the increase in credit hours means that LSUS has enrolled the equivalent of just 19 fewer full-time students from that Fall 2025 enrollment record.
That means LSUS’s budget remains solid in a time where many higher education institutions are slashing spending and cutting programs.
“We’ve been adding new programs that meet workforce needs in the region, and we’re continuing to analyze and evaluate new programs,” Smith said. “And we’re continuing to grow despite record graduation numbers.
“We graduate more students than any Louisiana university other than LSU Baton Rouge, and we’re attracting and retaining students at levels that keep our enrollment on an upward trend.”
Recent program additions include undergraduate degrees in nonprofit administration and occupational physiology and graduate degrees in applied behavior analysis and clinical rehab counseling.
Additional programs are in various stages of approval or planning.
