A new study finds Louisiana's overall well-being has improved over the last year. Yet, Barry Erwin, the Chief Policy Officer of Leaders for a Better Louisiana, says the state still ranks among the worst in the country for health outcomes including poverty, food insecurity, life expectancy and low birthweight babies. As the Louisiana Radio Network (LRN) reports, the findings come from Better Louisiana’s Louisiana Fact Book: Facts for the Future. The report is an online resource that monitors the state’s progress in five key areas:
- Education & Workforce
- Economy
- Health & Wellbeing
- Infrastructure
- Environment & Energy
Within those five keys areas is a list of 35 indicators which measure overall well-being. This 2025 study becomes the Fact Book’s third year of release. This collective analysis reveals the 20 indicators that are trending upward this year, compared to 16 seen in the August 2024 report. Thirteen indicators are trending downward compared to 16 the prior year. Two remain unchanged.
But some of these indicators come with much-needed context behind them, without which their meaning may become muted, at best. Case in point: The High School Graduation Rates Indicator. As the 2025 report spells out:
“For a number of years, Louisiana saw a general improvement in its high school graduation rate. About a decade ago, the statewide graduation rate was 74.6%. It rose to an all-time high of 84% in 2020 and then began inching downward, falling to 82.7% in 2022. It rose slightly to 83.2% in 2023. Some of the recent earlier declines are likely a result of the disruptions to public education caused by COVID and a rash of major hurricanes that hit Louisiana in 2020 and 2021. It is worth noting that economically disadvantaged students graduate at a rate of about five percentage points below other students. This is often more clearly seen in some of the state’s larger, urban school districts where graduation rates are in the 70s. The state goal is to achieve a 90% graduation rate or better.”
But this large amount of information (see highlighted paragraph above) to determine the value of a single indicator demonstrates the complexities involved in accurately assessing the causal relationships in student setbacks and improvements, not simply correlational data, which may or may not be useful in analysis. I am referring to the five words any young researcher would likely never want to be hear: "Post hoc ergo propter hoc." That is Latin for "after this, therefore because of this." In other words, just because event B follows event A, that does not necessarily mean A precipitated B, only that they are correlated by timing.
“The good news,” says Better Louisiana CEO Adam Knapp, “is that the number of indicators trending upward is the highest we have seen in the three years since we have been tracking this data. Erwin says he’s also encouraged about the progress seen in education indicators, especially when it comes to reading and math in the early grades. “The data is out there that shows as our population becomes more educated, as we get more skills and hire levels of education, those other health outcomes, those poverty outcomes, even low birth weight baby outcomes, they improve.”
For some background on the organization behind the study, back on January 1, 2025, an announced merger of two prominent government advocacy groups – The Committee of 100 for Economic Development (C100) and the Council for A Better Louisiana (CABL), created the new civic organization called Leaders for a Better Louisiana.
