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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — LSU officials say the freshman class this fall has the highest average ACT score and highest average grade point average in the university's history.
The student body, as a whole, is also LSU's most diverse ever — with 5.3 percent of its more than 30,000 students identifying as Hispanic, 11.2 percent as African-American, 3.5 percent as Asian and 2.2 percent as two or more races.
"I think we're appealing to more students with more diverse backgrounds," President and Chancellor F. King Alexander said in an interview with The Advocate (http://bit.ly/1yb2cHs) this week.
For Alexander, who came to LSU from California State University at Long Beach a year ago, the stats are important — making LSU more diverse while also striving to improve its academic standing.
When he first came to LSU, he said he had questions about outreach to Hispanics and African-Americans, in particular.
"The country is changing," Alexander said. "The country is looking more like the (United Nations), and we want to be aligned with that."
It presents a clear shift from the history of LSU — the state's largest public university.
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Information from: The Advocate, http://theadvocate.com
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