Back to Preface and SummaryBy Stephen Clements and Edward “Skip” Kifer
From Talking Back
p. 1-12, published 2001
During the past decade, Kentucky policymakers have set ambitious achievement goals for the Commonwealth’s education system to meet. The state has gained national prominence since 1990 when the legislature passed the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) aimed at rejuvenating its elementary and secondary school system. Created after years of wrangling over deficiencies in elementary and secondary education and in the wake of a lawsuit declaring the state’s entire public school system unconstitutional, KERA broke dramatically with Kentucky’s education past. The reform measure increased school funding by about $400 million per year and distributed these resources more equitably among school districts. KERA also revamped school governance mechanisms, set lofty achievement targets for students, and launched an unusual accountability approach to pressure schools to improve.(1)
Though many questions remain regarding the effects of KERA’s implementation on the state’s schools, Kentucky policymakers have held firm to this reform approach, making only minor adjustments in the original legislation. Around the tenth anniversary of KERA’s passage, both the Prichard Committee for Excellence in Education and the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) published reports that claimed the reform had resulted in at least modest benefits for students.(2) Though debate about the academic and social effects of KERA will likely continue, the reform era has shown that Kentucky lawmakers and the state’s political leadership are supporting public school teachers, administrators, and parents in their struggles to help children perform better.(3)
More recently, Kentucky’s General Assembly turned its attention to higher education improvement, an issue that had become a chief agenda item for Governor Paul Patton, who won office in 1995. In the spring of 1997 and at Patton’s behest, the legislature passed House Bill 1 (HB 1), a measure that reformulated Kentucky’s postsecondary education system and committed the Commonwealth to spend dramatically more funds on this enterprise. The state’s community colleges, which had been part of the University of Kentucky (UK), were separated from that institution (with the exception of the Lexington Community College) and joined with the technical colleges to form the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. The legislation provided resources to help the University of Kentucky work toward becoming a “Top 20” national research university.
HB 1 also envisioned the University of Louisville (U of L) becoming a major metropolitan university, and it provided incentive funds with which Kentucky’s regional universities could significantly enhance specific academic programs and departments. The legislation authorized creation of a “virtual” university, to provide Internet-based higher education opportunities to students who did not have easy access to colleges or universities. Supervising this revised system would be a Council on Postsecondary Education, which would have more comprehensive governance authority than the previous oversight body. The Council would be the referee for the changes made and would work to help reduce the political jockeying for state funds that had traditionally taken place among these institutions and had arguably fragmented and weakened higher education in Kentucky. These changes would result, HB 1 proponents averred, in the transformation over roughly two decades of a mediocre public postsecondary education infrastructure into one of the best systems in the South.
Kentucky’s General Assembly has kept its fiscal commitment to higher education reform, even when revenues have been limited. Indeed, since HB 1 became law in 1997, state support for postsecondary education has increased 45 percent, to about $1.1 billion per year. In addition to general fund support, Kentucky has also provided an additional $230 million in a “Bucks for Brains” program. These are substantial investments for a state that has many demands placed on its budget.
Hence, in less than a decade, Kentucky’s political leadership substantially raised the bar for the state in terms of educational expectations at all levels. The state’s public schools would be prompted by KERA’s accountability mechanisms to increase educational achievement to ever-higher numbers of students. And Kentucky’s postsecondary institutions—the two large universities, the six regional universities, the many community colleges and technical colleges, and the 19 private colleges (which together enroll about 20 percent of the state’s 4-year college students)—would be expected to distinguish themselves in terms of their niches within the higher education edifice, and to educate greater percentages of traditional and nontraditional students than ever before. Amidst the national education reform fervor in the United States since the recession of the early 1980s, these ambitions seem unexceptional. Yet they are momentous indeed when considered against the backdrop of social conditions within the Commonwealth, as well as the state’s minimal support for formal education before the 1950s.
The basic socioeconomic conditions in the Commonwealth are worth noting at the outset. A small, largely rural, upper-tier southern state, only 14 percent of the state’s adults possessed a bachelor’s degree as recently as 1990. By 2000, circumstances had improved somewhat, as the estimated percentage of the population over 25 years of age with at least a bachelor’s degree rose to 17.2 percent, but remained well behind the national average of 25.1 percent and continued to rank near the bottom (48th) nationally.(4) Approximately one fifth of the state’s children live below the poverty line, although the percentage is drastically higher in some of the state’s poorest counties, which are among the most impoverished areas in the nation. And estimates of the numbers of Kentuckians who struggle with literacy problems are high: according to a 1997 survey, about 40 percent of citizens, ages 16-64, functioned at the two lowest literacy levels.(5) Though the state has made much progress in recent years—many of the high school dropouts in Kentucky are among the older members of the population, and students in past decades have graduated high school at rates close to the national average—Kentucky has a serious legacy of educational malnourishment to overcome.
That state leaders have undertaken recent measures to overcome this deficiency is evidence of their growing awareness of the economic consequences of an undereducated populace. During earlier portions of the last century, the state’s economy relied heavily upon industries that did not require significant levels of formal education—agriculture (particularly tobacco), manufacturing, and coal mining. In recent decades Kentucky has made much progress in modernizing and diversifying its economic base. Manufacturing is still a cornerstone of the Commonwealth; the state ranks high among southern states and the nation in producing coal, food products, apparel, wood products, chemicals, automobiles and parts, and industrial equipment. But Kentucky has also seen expansion of services, transportation, and technology-driven industries. Though the state has added many jobs in higher-paying, higher-skill sectors, business and political leaders still recognize how far Kentucky has to go.(6) These leaders look with envy upon the success of other areas in the Southeast, such as the Research Triangle region of North Carolina or the Atlanta metropolitan region in Georgia. Kentucky policymakers have stated repeatedly that the state’s ability to compete economically in the national and international arenas will depend upon a better educated, more professionally and intellectually agile population. This argument has been stated and recapitulated many times to support education reform efforts such as those embarked upon during the 1990s.
Since HB 1 was passed in 1997, the state’s reformulated Council on Postsecondary Education has been charged with the task of developing programs and initiatives to implement that legislation. In this task, the Council has been led by a President with two decades of experience supervising Virginia’s higher education governance system. One of the more noteworthy goals set by the Council is to increase the postsecondary attendance levels of Kentuckians over the next 20 years by roughly 50 percent, from some 161,000 students enrolled to about 240,000. This is the enrollment expansion the Council calculates will be necessary to bring Kentucky’s postsecondary attendance levels to the national average.
Moreover, students will need to finish degree or certificate programs in a timely fashion, else the higher attendance figures will fail to yield the desired effects. This increase, incidentally, will likely have to come during a period in which demographers predict the overall population of the state will grow very little, a finding which apparently formed the basis for a recent Educational Testing Service projection that Kentucky will see no postsecondary enrollment growth through the year 2015.(7) Nor can this goal likely be met by increasing dramatically the percentage of high school students who matriculate in postsecondary institutions—quite simply, there are not enough high school graduates each year to raise enrollment by 50 percent. Hence, nontraditional students will have to account for a significant portion of postsecondary enrollments.
How will the Commonwealth achieve this extraordinary enrollment goal and what are the likely constraints Kentucky educational institutions will face in expanding student participation, especially among high school students? These questions, and particularly those involving the state’s high school students and their plans for and knowledge about higher education, are at the fore of the postsecondary aspirations project, which has been conducted jointly by the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center and the University of Kentucky’s Policy Analysis Center for Kentucky Education (PACKE). In an effort to learn more about what Kentucky high school students think about the pursuit of learning opportunities after high school, and how they are investing their time in anticipation of possible postsecondary attendance, these entities jointly created a student survey during the spring of 2000. During the spring and summer of 2000, the survey was administered to a large sample of Kentucky 16- and 17-year-olds by the University of Kentucky Survey Research Center (UKSRC). By that fall, nearly 1,100 survey responses had been returned to UKSRC, and we have extensively analyzed these data.
Accordingly, the pages that follow represent our report on the survey results. But our intention is not simply to discuss the survey findings. Rather, we intend to place Kentucky’s postsecondary growth plans into a broader social and historical context, so that readers can appreciate the nature of the educational task to which state leaders have called them. To accomplish this, we will devote the latter half of this section to some information about the growth of postsecondary education in Kentucky over the past century, so as to examine the precedents for the enrollment projections the Council has called for. We devote a second section of this report to a more detailed look at the social and educational background of Kentucky’s youth, against the backdrop of research evidence about who goes to—and who succeeds in—college in the United States. In the third section, we turn to the survey results themselves and our interpretation of the findings. Finally, we conclude with our reflections on the quest to better educate an ever larger number of Kentuckians and the policy changes that might be necessary to accomplish state leaders’ goals.
The outset of this report is a fitting place to consider the overall higher education picture in Kentucky because postsecondary learning has expanded during the previous century. This, after all, is the setting in which the Council’s aggressive postsecondary enrollment growth campaign will take place. The initial historical point to note is that during the first half of the 20th century only miniscule percentages of Kentuckians pursued higher education to begin with, and the state invested relatively few resources in postsecondary schooling. Indeed, as the last century dawned, Kentucky’s postsecondary infrastructure consisted primarily of State College, the Agricultural and Mechanical land-grant school in Lexington that later became UK. As a former state historian once noted, in 1904 the Commonwealth contributed $36,380 to support State College, this in a year when the city of Louisville spent more than this amount on Male High School alone, and when the state of Wisconsin provided $471,500 to its flagship university.(8) Kentucky had no regional colleges or universities of its own, although it did support the small State Normal and Industrial Institute in Frankfort, a training institution for Kentucky’s African-American population. Louisville had a collection of medical colleges and a law school that eventually coalesced into the University of Louisville, but these institutions were supported locally, not by the Commonwealth. Hence, higher education at this point in Kentucky history was almost entirely the domain of small, private institutions. And given that most state legislators had attended private colleges inside or outside of Kentucky and that members of the business elite often sent their children to northeastern colleges or Ivy League schools, there was relatively little support for expanding the state role in higher education.
As the century progressed, however, Kentucky’s General Assembly began in earnest to build a higher education system. In 1906, the legislature established normal schools in Richmond and Bowling Green that eventually became Eastern Kentucky University and Western Kentucky University, a feat which it repeated in 1922 to create the institutions that became Morehead State University and Murray State University. In 1908, State College became UK, after which financial support from the General Assembly and other sources began to grow substantially.(9) As Table 1 shows, by 1930, as the Depression era began, Kentucky universities were educating approximately 9,000 students annually. Enrollments suffered severely during the 1930s, when family resources were scarce and state budgets were hammered by dismal national economic conditions. But by mid-century, state institutions had rebounded and were educating nearly as many students as were the state’s private colleges.
Table 1: Enrollments in State-Supported Postsecondary Institutions in Kentucky, 1930-1950
From the latter 1950s onward through the early 1990s, the higher education landscape in Kentucky—and most other states—began to shift dramatically as postsecondary enrollments exploded during segments of that period. As the chart below shows (see Figure 1), beginning in 1956, Kentucky’s state universities enrolled a total of about 22,000 students. This was approximately the number of students in the state’s private colleges at the time—and there were fewer than 1,000 students in community colleges. Just one decade later, state university enrollment had nearly doubled, and community college enrollment numbered nearly 5,500, a reflection of the fact that these new institutions were being built in strategic locations across the state. After another decade and a half, by about 1980, state university enrollment had more than doubled again, and community college participation had soared to nearly 20,000 students.
Figure 1: Enrollment in Kentucky Public Postsecondary Institutions, 1956-1999
Hence, in overall terms, Kentucky postsecondary enrollment increased by more than 100 percent between 1956 and 1966 and by an additional 110 percent or so between 1966 and 1980. Enrollment dropped off somewhat after 1980, presumably in response to several factors, including changes in federal student aid policies and practices and double-digit tuition inflation at many colleges and universities for much of the decade. By the latter 1980s, however, public sector enrollments picked up again to peak in the early 1990s, after which they tapered off somewhat to around 150,000 students. Note that the system picked up an additional 10,000 or so students in the late 1990s as technical college students came to be added to the count and as LCC students were counted separately from those at other community colleges.
Enrollment trends over this same period at Kentucky’s independent institutions differ and reflect the difficult financial realities private sector colleges and universities must face as well as the increasing competition posed by the explosive enrollment growth among public sector institutions. As Figure 2 shows, private college enrollment in Kentucky increased about 60 percent between 1958 and 1966. But enrollment declined over roughly the next decade, then held steady at around 19,000 total students during the 1980s, then rose in the early 1990s and remained around 23,000 students during that decade. It is noteworthy that over one half dozen private colleges have either closed or merged with others during this period of burgeoning public university enrollments. Given that Kentucky has never supported these schools directly, it is remarkable that private colleges have fared as well as they have. It seems likely that they will continue to educate approximately one fifth of the state’s four-year postsecondary students. Note in Figure 2, as well, the near disappearance over four decades of the two-year private colleges in the state. Presumably the public community colleges and the state’s public and private four-year institutions have absorbed the students who once attended independent “junior colleges.”
Figure 2: Private College Enrollments in Kentucky, 1958-1998
One further enrollment topic worth considering involves minority students. During the many decades of segregation practices in Kentucky, the state’s minorities—the vast majority of whom have been African Americans—were obliged to leave the state for higher education or to attend Kentucky State, the lone historically black college within Kentucky’s borders. Though these practices formally ended about four decades ago, the state has struggled during much of that time to boost African-American student enrollment, retention, and graduation. During the early 1980s, Commonwealth leaders launched “The Kentucky Plan” to increase minority student postsecondary involvement and success rates. As of the mid-1990s, Kentucky had succeeded in sending her African-American students to postsecondary institutions at roughly the same rate as the white population; approximately 10 percent of Kentucky high school students are minority group members and about 60 percent of high school graduates—whites and African Americans—pursue some form of postsecondary schooling. However, retention rates among minority students have been lower than among whites, and the overall college completion rates of African Americans in Kentucky still lag considerably behind that of whites. In addition, the state has been unable to reach its goals in terms of minority hiring at colleges and universities for faculty, administrative, and staff positions, although the state has made some progress on these various employment fronts. Minority student issues and Kentucky Plan implementation continue to be monitored by the state’s Committee on Equal Opportunities, which is appointed by the Council and periodically provides reports on the state’s progress in this area.(10)
From a longer historical perspective, then, it appears that the Council’s goal of a 50-percent increase in postsecondary enrollment is neither unreasonable nor unprecedented. On the other hand, the enrollment increases Kentucky experienced during the period roughly mirrored enrollment expansion levels elsewhere. From 1966 to 1980, for example, national higher education enrollment rose from 6.4 million students to 12.1 million, a rough doubling of the numbers.(11) Not surprisingly, total higher education revenues rose dramatically during this same period, from $7.4 billion nationally in 1965-66 to $42.2 billion in 1980-81. (12) What accounts for this stunning growth in postsecondary enrollments in Kentucky and across the nation? A 1966 report issued in the midst of this vigorous growth period by a Kentucky higher education study team appointed by Governor Ned Breathitt cites a range of reasons for the increasing emphasis on education at the time. First, notes the report, the United States had by that point truly become a science-oriented society, and the signposts of science were everywhere, from the space program to airplanes to medical research breakthroughs. At the same time, the economy was shifting from manufacturing jobs to service and professional opportunities, and many citizens understood that thriving under these new conditions would require higher education. In addition, advances in communication capabilities, changes in value commitments toward civil rights and personal betterment, and a growing knowledge base in most arenas of life also contributed to interest in higher education. In short, the study concluded, vastly increasing numbers of individuals during this period saw higher education as a key to self-sufficiency and to opportunity in the shifting economic structure of the nation. This fact, combined with substantial population growth at the time plus the expansion of postsecondary opportunities through community colleges and expanding capacity at state universities, fueled the attendance growth of this roughly 30-year period.(13)
Numerous other factors doubtless played a part in this dramatic higher education expansion as well. In the decades after World War II ended, the American middle class began to grow, which enabled families that had hitherto been unable to afford to send children to college to do so. During the 1950s and 1960s as well, virtually every state in the nation dramatically expanded the number of campuses available to students, which facilitated enrollment increases. By the late 1960s, the federal government had gotten involved in higher education finance by launching the grant and loan mechanisms that were the precursors of today’s Pell Grant and Stafford Loan programs. Following the federal government’s lead, by the 1980s, many state governments began creating their own tuition subsidy programs to enable academically qualified students to attend postsecondary schooling. In Kentucky, the Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority emerged to help coordinate these programs. And in the 1990s, states began experimenting with large-scale merit-based award systems, the most noteworthy example being Georgia’s lottery-funded HOPE scholarship program, which promises free tuition at state universities to high school students who earn a certain minimum grade point average. In 1998, Kentucky created the Kentucky Excellence in Education Scholarship (KEES) to serve basically the same purpose.
Hence, for several of the decades when postsecondary enrollments were growing explosively, various federal and state policies to expand public higher education and to make postsecondary learning affordable were put into place. However, this postsecondary policy structure has been in place for some time now, and enrollments have been roughly level for at least a decade. The most recent programs, such as Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship, appear to be having important effects. Recent analyses of HOPE suggest that it helps keep academically talented students from going outside the state for college, and modestly boosts college enrollment of 18- and 19-year-olds (by 7 to 8 percent). Such programs may therefore be desirable, but they should not be expected to increase substantially overall postsecondary enrollment in a state.(14) The challenge for Kentucky institutions will be to meet their enrollment goals during an era when higher education is not growing dramatically elsewhere in the nation.
Such is the present status of Kentucky’s postsecondary enrollment situation. Both the state and the nation saw massive expansion between the late 1950s and the early 1990s, although enrollments have been fairly level since then and have in some cases fallen during the latter 1990s. Institutional and individual student aid programs have been established during these decades to provide financial assistance to families. These programs have helped increase enrollment to current levels, although they have been unable to increase enrollments significantly beyond what they have been roughly over the past decade. In Kentucky, some four out of five college students pursue higher education in public institutions, whereas the remaining 20 percent attend private colleges. What socioeconomic factors seem to most directly affect postsecondary participation, and what do Kentucky youth currently think about their postsecondary school future? The remaining sections of this report take up these and other questions about higher education in Kentucky in the coming decades.
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Challenges of Educational Malnutrition
1 The most complete accounts of KERA implementation struggles are found in Jack Foster, Redesigning Public Education: The Kentucky Experience (Lexington, KY: Diversified Services, 1999), and Roger Pankratz and Joe Petrosko, eds., All Children Can Learn (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000). Return to text.
2 The Prichard Committee, an education advocacy group that has long supported school improvement in Kentucky, issued its report, Gaining Ground, in 1999; it is available at: www.prichardcommittee.org. The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) report, Results Matter: A Decade of Difference in Kentucky’s Public Schools 1990-2000, is available at: www.kde.state.ky.us/comm/commrel/10th_anniversary/. Return to text.
3 The Prichard Committee and KDE tenth anniversary reports both make this point. Return to text.
4 U.S. Bureau of the Census, www.census.gov, 7 Sept. 2001. Return to text.
5 Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, “Adult Literacy in Kentucky,” Spotlight on Postsecondary Education 1:2, 2000. Return to text.
6 For a recent statistical overview of Kentucky’s economic conditions, see “Invented Here: Towards an Innovation-Driven Economy,” by the Southern Growth Policies Board (state profiles available through the Board’s website: www.southern.org), as well as the annual reports of UK’s Center for Business and Economic Research (http://gatton.uky.edu/CBER/cber.htm). Return to text.
7 Anthony P. Carnevale and Richard A. Fry, Crossing the Great Divide: Can We Achieve Equity When Generation Y Goes to College? (Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 2000) 65. Return to text.
8 James C. Klotter, Kentucky: Portrait in Paradox, 1900-1950. (Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Historical Society, 1996) 164. Return to text.
9 Frank McVey, University of Kentucky president from 1917 to 1940, noted that UK’s student body increased from 1,204 students in 1917 to 6,242 in 1945, its library holdings expanded from 22,000 to 367,000 during the same period, and its physical plant went from 11 academic buildings to 42 buildings. See McVey, The Gates Open Slowly: A History of Education in Kentucky (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1949) 123. Return to text.
10 For a description of the current version of the Kentucky Plan, see “The 1997-2002 Kentucky Plan for Equal Opportunities in Higher Education,” Committee on Equal Opportunities, which is available at the Council on Postsecondary Education website: www.cpe.state.ky.us under the heading “Equal Opportunities.” Return to text.
11 Cecilia A. Ottinger, American Council on Education, 1984-85 Fact Book on Higher Education (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1984) 56. Return to text.
12 Ottinger 46. Return to text.
13 Survey Team for the Long-Range Study of Higher Education in Kentucky, Higher Education in Kentucky 1965-1975: A Program of Growth and Development (Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Commission on Higher Education, 1966). Return to text.
14 These are among the conclusions of two studies: Christopher Cornwell, David Mustard, and Deepa Sridhar, “The Enrollment Effects of Merit-Based Financial Aid: Evidence from Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship.” The paper is available at: www.terry.uga.economics/paperlst.html. See also Susan Dynarski, “Hope for Whom? Financial Aid for the Middle Class and Its Impact on College Attendance,” National Tax Journal 53.3 (2000): 629. Return to text.