Back to IntroductionBy Amy L. Watts
From Education and the Common Good
pp. 5-8, published 2001
Most data show that the attainment of education beyond the secondary level among Kentucky’s population has been poor. While its status has improved, the Commonwealth still ranks near the bottom in the portion of its adult population that has a college education. As of 2000, Kentucky ranked 42nd in the country in the percentage of adults 25 years old or older with a bachelor’s degree or higher.(1) Figure 1 shows that over the past 20 years we have made considerable progress in this area, but continue to lag the nation’s progress. The percentage of adults in Kentucky with at least a four-year postsecondary degree has increased by approximately 67 percent over the latter part of the century, from 12 to 20 percent, but falls short of the nation’s average of 25 percent.
To close this gap, obviously more Kentuckians must enroll in postsecondary schools and persist until they graduate. Unfortunately, Kentucky falls short on these measures. In 2000, 56 percent of Kentucky’s high school graduates entered college the following fall, compared with a national average of 65 percent.(2) The percentage of first-time degree-seeking freshmen who return one year later has been particularly low for Kentucky’s eight four-year public universities, ranging from a high of 80 percent to a low of 61 percent in 2000.(3) With 20 percent to 40 percent of our first-time freshmen dropping out after only one year, student attrition can be a considerable drain on public resources that supplement the cost of educating college students.(4) Last, graduation rates are the final, critical step in approaching the national average of adults attaining a degree in higher education. In 1999, Kentucky’s six-year graduation rate of 37 percent was lower than the 43 percent of first-time, full-time baccalaureate students graduating within five years nationally.(5) So, we not only have fewer college graduates, students also take longer to complete their education, which again drains the public resources that help meet the costs of a college education.
Policy responses at the state and the local level are remedying these deficiencies. The Commonwealth’s leaders have taken numerous steps to elevate the quality of the state’s educational infrastructure at every level, instituting a long-term quest for excellence and successfully improving educational achievement in the state. For example, in a special session of the General Assembly in May 1997, Kentucky passed the Postsecondary Education Improvement Act (House Bill 1), committing to changing the status quo and providing a structure to support that change. The statute created a new coordinating board, the Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE), to oversee the implementation of the Act’s reforms. The Council recognized that the first step to increasing Kentucky’s average level of educational attainment is to increase enrollments. Thus, the CPE set a target of increasing undergraduate enrollments to the national average by the year 2020. According to a study by RAND, this would require the state’s public institutions of higher education to increase undergraduate enrollment by 80,000 students.(6)
The goal of enrollment and other reforms is to improve the quality of life in the Commonwealth. Both the rhetoric supporting passage of the bill and the language of the bill itself, which contains repeated references to a better quality of life for all Kentuckians, reflect a broad commitment to the greater purpose of higher education, that of improving the well-being of all citizens of the state.
In response to this immense challenge, the Council was charged with creating a strategic agenda for achieving the reforms intended by the Act. Nowhere are the social benefits of education at the postsecondary level better illustrated than in this document’s section entitled "The Vision." Authors of the legislation ask citizens of Kentucky to envision several criteria for how the state will be recognized by others. They include:
educated citizens who want advanced knowledge and skills and know how to acquire them; and who are good parents, good citizens and economically self-sufficient workers;
globally competitive businesses and industries respected for their highly knowledgeable workers and the technological sophistication of their products and services;
vibrant communities offering a standard of living unsurpassed by those in other states and nations;
scholars and practitioners who are among the best in the world, dedicated to creating new ideas, technologies and knowledge; and
an integrated system of elementary and secondary schools and providers of postsecondary education, committed to meeting the needs of students and the Commonwealth, and acclaimed for excellence, innovation, collaboration, and responsiveness.(7)
The one direct and most obvious criterion, a better all-around school system, is listed last. By contrast, the first four criteria represent some of the social benefits of a higher education system, which promise a better life to all, including good parents, vibrant communities, and globally competitive businesses. Here, we focus on ways of measuring some of these outcomes from an improved postsecondary educational status.
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This U.S. Census Bureau, March 2000 Supplement to the Current Population Survey, "Educational Attainment in the United States: March 2000," P20-536 (update), 3 Jan. 2001 http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/educ-attn.html. Return to text.
The state level indicator was obtained from Patrick Kelly of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education on May 1, 2001. The national level indicator was taken from The Condition of Education, 2000 by the National Center for Education Statistics. Both statistics refer to high school students attending all postsecondary institutions the fall following graduation in 2000. Return to text.
Council on Postsecondary Education, Developing Key Indicators of Progress (draft). Return to text.
1999 Status Report to the Governor and the General Assembly. Return to text.
1999 Status Report. Return to text.
George Graves, "More Undergraduates Wanted—Lots More," Foresight 7.1 (2000): 5. Return to text.
2020 Vision: An Agenda for Kentucky’s System of Postsecondary Education. Return to text.