ALEXANDRIA, Va – The National Science Board released its biennial State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2024 report with key indicators impacting Louisiana. The report also confirms the level of research growth at LSU.
Every two years the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) prepares a Science and Engineering Indicators report which can be used to inform local and national policy makers to help improve science and engineering outcomes.
In addition to tracking national-level trends, the report analyses state-level performance against approximately sixty indicators which fall with the 6 categories of elementary and secondary education, higher education, workforce, financial research and development inputs, research and development outputs, and science and technology in the economy (which looks at business activity in industries with high employment in knowledge/technology-intensive fields and early-stage, high-risk capital investments).
The 2024 report assesses Louisiana as being ranked twenty-seventh place when it comes to the science and engineering labor force, twenty-sixth in terms of the state’s gross domestic product (GDP), and thirty-ninth in R&D performance.
The percentage of people in Louisiana earning science and engineering degrees compared with degrees in other fields is 29.6%, lower than the national figure which sees 35.7% of graduates earning science and engineering degrees.
The percentage of people in Louisiana who hold doctorate degrees and who are employed in the science, engineering, and health sectors is .3% which is also less than the national percentage of 0.52%.
Louisiana also performs lower than the national outcomes for research and development as a percentage of GDP at 0.56% compared with the national percentage of 3.33%.
The U.S. is seeing a sharp decline in elementary and secondary student mathematics performance since the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2019 to 2022, average mathematics scores of fourth and eighth grade students dropped to levels last measured approximately 20 years ago.
Bucking this trend, New Orleans public schools announced in 2024 that student performance had improved by over two percent. Orleans Parish saw the highest increase in mastery rates for African American students among comparable districts, rising from 19% in 2023 to 22% in 2024. Overall math proficiency also rose, from 21% to 24%.
Enrollment of international science and engineering graduate students at U.S. institutions has rapidly increased from approximately 200,000 in 2020, a pandemic-era low point, to nearly 310,000 in 2022. In addition, the U.S. is the largest performer of research and development, with $806 billion in gross domestic expenditures on R&D in 2021 and the federal government is the largest supporter of academic research and development, funding 52% of all R&D performed by higher education institutions and supporting 15% of full-time science and engineering graduate students in 2021.
The National Science Foundation data confirm that LSU , for example, had record research expenditures of $488 million in fiscal year 2023 which represents 14% growth in research expenditure compared to 2022. The growth reflects increased research activity across the LSU Family, especially on the flagship campus and at LSU Health New Orleans and LSU Health Shreveport.
The national ranking of LSU’s five research campuses—the flagship in Baton Rouge, the LSU AgCenter, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and the two LSU Health campuses—improved from 71 to 69. This ranking is more impressive when taking into account the fact that the average growth of U.S. research universities was around 11%.
According to LSU, its research adds an estimated $1.3 billion to the Louisiana economy each year. The numbers confirmed by the National Science Foundation recognize LSU as especially strong in federally grant-funded research in life sciences, geosciences, math and statistics, and computer and information sciences. This aligns with the data-driven research priorities of the LSU Scholarship First Agenda to create new solutions for agriculture, biomedicine, coast, defense, and energy.
“This NSF report confirms our focus on research growth to meet the needs of the state as well as our dedication to LSU’s Scholarship First Agenda,” said Robert Twilley, LSU vice president of research and economic development.
