LSU has signed a data-sharing agreement with the University of New Orleans that will allow students applying to the Baton Rouge flagship campus for the fall semester to be offered a spot at what is soon to become LSU New Orleans.
The agreement is part of the transition plan to usher UNO back into the LSU System, which will reverse action legislators took 14 years ago to move the New Orleans campus into the University of Louisiana System after it had been affiliated with LSU since its founding in 1958.
UNO’s transfer back to LSU follows a long-running enrollment decline at the school, leading to a fiscal crisis. The university had a student body of around 17,000 before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and saw an immediate drop to 6,000 after the storm. For the fall 2025 semester, total enrollment at UNO was 5,670.
UNO will officially become LSU New Orleans once it joins the system officially on July 1.
UNO transition committee chairman Rico Alvendia, a UNO alumnus and member of the LSU Board of Supervisors, said the new data-sharing agreement is the first step in growing UNO’s enrollment.
“For those who may not be admitted [to LSU], we are sharing those applications with UNO, and many of those students are choosing to go to UNO,” Alvendia said. “We’re able to redirect a lot of those qualified students, great students, back here to UNO and say, ‘Welcome to the family.’”
LSU requires applicants to have a minimum 3.0 high school grade point average or a 22 composite ACT score. Its acceptance rate is 73% based on a U.S. News and World Report data analysis. The minimum GPA for acceptance at the University of New Orleans is 2.0 or a 23 on the ACT. UNO also accepts 73% of all applicants.
Despite more stringent GPA requirements, LSU has repeatedly broken its own admissions records, enrolling 37,825 students for the fall 2025 semester.
The data-sharing agreement is among the early accomplishments of the transition committee.
Alvendia said the transition team, which includes LSU administrators, was able to write off $250,000 of UNO’s debt and collect $1.3 million in fees owed to the university. The transition committee also identified and prevented overbilling of $75,000 by a vendor and secured $220,000 in recurring annual funds for cybersecurity.
The transition team was also able to work with the UNO Foundation to find scholarship funds for 100 students who were going to be dismissed from the university because they couldn’t pay their tuition, Alvendia said.
The next steps in the transition include sprucing up the campus grounds and investing in the rebranding of the university. The committee will also seek funding from the legislature for infrastructure and create a strategic plan for UNO campus construction and repairs.
There is also a plan to move UNO online programs under the LSU System.
The finance, human resources and information technology offices at UNO will also be converted to the LSU System.
The transition team must also submit a final master plan for the overall transfer to state lawmakers no later than April 1.