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to Postsecondary Education ProspectsBy Stephen Clements and Edward “Skip” Kifer
From Talking Back
p. 55-64, published 2001
In this report, we have drawn attention to many features of the landscape of Kentucky education at the turn of the millennium. At the outset, we noted how state policymakers spent much of the past decade putting into place new mechanisms for operating and improving Kentucky’s elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education systems. About ten years ago, the General Assembly revised public schooling through KERA, which increased and more equitably distributed funding for education and also put new assessment, accountability, support, and local control programs in place. Then, in 1997, the legislature turned its attention to higher education and put in place a new governance structure, provided new resources, and set ambitious goals for system-wide improvement. The intent of both reforms has been to move Kentucky’s citizens forward economically and socially by upgrading their skill and knowledge levels.
A key component of this reform involved substantially increasing enrollment in Kentucky colleges, universities, and vocational-technical schools. The type of growth the Council has called for is certainly not unprecedented based on previous enrollment trends; there have been periods, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, when enrollments in Kentucky increased at a substantially higher rate than is anticipated over the next two decades.
However, the current conditions are different from previous eras when postsecondary enrollments across the country were exploding, the college-age population in Kentucky was growing, and the desire for higher education opportunities was expanding into the burgeoning middle classes. Today, Kentuckians’ attitudes toward higher education will have to be transformed for this kind of enrollment increase to take place and new policies will have to be put in place to encourage greater participation.
In addition, the socioeconomic context of the state suggests potential difficulties in terms of high levels of postsecondary enrollment growth. Because of the state’s history of low levels of formal education, greater-than-average percentages of students come from homes with parents who have no postsecondary education. Research has shown that students from these backgrounds tend not to take the key steps deemed necessary to make a successful transition from high school to college. Moreover, other conditions among Kentucky families, such as the increasing numbers of single-parent homes, particularly those in the most impoverished rural and urban areas, may make it more difficult for many students to position themselves well for higher education.
The heart of the report is our examination of Kentucky youth survey results. These revealed much about the college-bound students in Commonwealth high schools. From the perspective of academic credentials these students seem well prepared for successful pursuit of these education opportunities. They have high grade-point averages in what appear to be solid academic courses. They believe their preparation has been good as indicated by the high marks that they give instruction in mathematics, science, and language courses. Their preparation may be better than in earlier eras because they participated in schooling during Kentucky’s education reform efforts that began in 1990. No comparable data of students’ perceptions of schooling prior to 1990 exist, so it is not possible to be definitive about this. On at least one KERA initiative, they appear to be faring well: they view their computing skills, specifically, as being very good and say they learned some of them in school. It is logical to assume that the emphasis on technology in KERA has been translated into useful computing skills. Such success suggests that access to technology should be expanded in Kentucky’s public schools so that more students can gain software skills.
On the other hand, Kentucky’s college-bound youth do not devote much time outside of school to academic work, spending on average only about five hours per week on homework. This is about a fifth of the total amount of time they say they spend each week, on average, working for pay, hanging out with friends, and engaging in sports or hobbies, and only a little more time than they say they spend talking on the phone. However, the variation on these factors is roughly what might be expected. That is, students from homes with greater education and income levels and who aspire to more competitive four-year colleges and universities tend to study more and work less. No group of students, by the way, spends significant amounts of time volunteering or engaging in community service activities.
Other findings from this survey seem particularly noteworthy. When asked why they wish to continue education after high school, these students provide rationales that reflect those used to justify the recent reform of Kentucky’s system of postsecondary education. Indeed, they strongly endorse economic rather than traditional academic values for continued formal learning and do so at higher rates than the national average. Thus, the contemporary public discourse about higher education, which focuses almost exclusively on the economic benefits of more schooling, seems to be having a trickle-down effect on students.
Ironically, though sample students tend to see higher education as a route to a better-paying job and greater career options, they do not know much about the financial aid options that might be available to them when they pursue postsecondary learning opportunities. Most have not heard of the federal and state programs that are available, although the recently created KEES scholarship seems to be on the radar screen of many. Whether this relative lack of knowledge will have any significant effect on these students’ college attendance is unknown.
Though these students are strongly influenced by the potential economic pay-off of postsecondary education, their basic decisions about what kind of learning opportunities to pursue are influenced primarily by their closest acquaintances. In addition to themselves, the students are most influenced by their parents and their friends. With the exception of their high school teachers, who also have a modest influence, the school seems to play only a small role in their postsecondary choices.
A particularly striking finding regarded how early these students say they decided to pursue higher education. Nearly half say they decided to pursue higher education in elementary school, and an overwhelming majority decided by the end of middle school. This renders problematic the notion that student attitudes toward higher education can be easily shifted, given that most decisions seem to be made early in life while extant policies for persuading students about college focus on the mid- to late-high school years.
As noted, Kentucky’s students, like their counterparts elsewhere across the United States, spend a substantial amount of time outside of school working for pay. This contrasts dramatically with how students in other countries say they spend their time. Although many sample students do not work so much that their academic work is likely to suffer grave harm, about 40 percent of these students work more than that threshold amount (more than 15 hours per week) that is associated with academic decline. In addition, even though more U.S. students pursue higher education than students in other countries, they spend less time out of school preparing for those experiences than their international counterparts. This could be due to the economic rationale for more schooling that dominates political rhetoric and creates expectations that educated persons are good consumers but not necessarily better citizens, a more traditional outcome of higher education and one more likely to be found among faculty members in institutions the students will attend.
Although a number of Kentucky’s students who are among the academically best prepared for higher education choose to go out of state for their college or university experience, the evidence of a massive brain drain from the Commonwealth is limited. Both in terms of the differences in numbers of students leaving the state and those coming in from other states, Kentucky is in the middle of the pack nationally. The Commonwealth is neither a large importer nor a large exporter of students. Of course, because these results are in terms of numbers of students rather than how successful their high school academic experiences have been, it is true that some talented students are leaving Kentucky. This raises interesting questions about whether such students tend to return to the state and bring with them the skills, knowledge, and insights gained from being educated in other states’ colleges and universities.
Moreover, these highly able students who wish to leave Kentucky for college also tend not to try as hard as other sample students on the state’s CATS assessments, nor do they tend to view Kentucky as a place where they can succeed. Why these students have such negative attitudes toward the state is unclear from the survey and warrants greater attention.
Our inclination is to allow Kentucky citizens to examine these survey results thoughtfully and draw their own conclusions based on the findings. However, we would like to offer a few of our own opinions about Kentucky’s college-bound high school students—although these largely echo many of the findings that have already been discussed above—as well as a few recommendations for policy action in the coming years. First, most of the students in our sample appear to fare well academically and socially and compare favorably to college students across the nation. We are therefore optimistic about the future of higher education in the Commonwealth, at least as far as the regular pipeline supplying students into Kentucky colleges and universities is concerned. Though the survey reveals that some academically able students anticipate going outside the state for college, Kentucky also imports talented students from other states, and many of those who study elsewhere, even in prestigious colleges or universities, presumably return to the Commonwealth after they complete their formal education.
We are less sanguine, though, about the state’s non-college-bound youth, most of whom did not respond to our collaborative survey. We do not know, for example, if middle class students from around the state who are postponing decisions about college will decide to heed the Council’s call for greater enrollment or will choose other routes. And both research and experience strongly suggest that students from the educationally and economically disadvantaged sectors of Kentucky society will likely face substantial barriers to college attendance and will need special attention by policymakers and school personnel if they are to participate in higher education.
It also appears to us that Kentucky students may be too intellectually invested in the notion that higher education opportunities should be pursued because of economic benefits. We certainly understand the political value of arguments regarding the economic usefulness of higher education; such arguments probably must be made to convince skeptical taxpayers to fund elementary, secondary, and postsecondary initiatives such as KERA and HB 1. We believe, however, that if such arguments are not balanced in public discourse by the other strong rationales for higher education, Kentucky’s students may become disillusioned with the college experience. They may eschew courses and experiences in the arts, humanities, and social sciences that could broaden their perspectives as citizens and enrich their lives, yet do not provide an obvious occupational or career benefit. It is true, for reasons having to do largely with our market economy, that many careers vital to our quality of life are not well remunerated; one thinks of teaching, social work, law enforcement, and other vital public service roles. It is possible that students who have heard the slogan “education pays” offered over and over by political and social leaders will turn away from such careers if public discourse surrounding postsecondary opportunities does not place greater emphasis on noneconomic rationales for higher education.
We certainly believe, of course, that most students who obtain a college education will benefit economically from that investment in learning. Indeed, the families of our own sample students illustrate the striking relationship between education and income. As we reported in Table 5, just over 36 percent of these students come from homes with annual incomes of $40,001 to $70,000, and almost another 30 percent from homes with incomes above $70,000—this in a state with an average per capita income of $21,551 in 1998 and an average private sector wage of $25,359 in 2000.(33) Of the students in these two highest income categories, nearly six in ten of them had one or both parents with a college degree. Of those in the above-$70,000 category, almost three fourths had one or both parents with a college degree. On the other hand, about a quarter of those in the $20,001 to $40,000 category had one or two college-educated parents, while 40 percent of those in the top two income categories had parents with no college degree. Our point in reciting these statistics is simply that possessing a college degree increases the likelihood of a good income, but cannot guarantee one. We think political leaders should balance their promotion of the economic payoff of higher education with equally forceful rhetoric about the social, personal, and civic virtues of postsecondary learning.
Third, and perhaps relatedly, Kentucky high school students, even the most gifted ones, devote little of their time—and possibly their attention as well—to academic matters. As noted, these students do not seem to be spending their time differently from other American youth. Nor are we in favor of turning our youth into scholastic automatons. Rather, we think young people ought to lead well-balanced lives that help them mature and introduce them to many aspects of community life. It concerns us, however, that both general American culture and an increasingly consumerist- and entertainment-oriented youth culture pressure high-school-age youth to spend so much time in paid employment and undefined socializing with their peers and such a modest chunk of their time enhancing their academic skills. This general situation implies a lack of commitment to learning that is hard to reconcile with the Council’s goals for advancing higher education in Kentucky. We have noted, of course, that survey students appear to be academically sound, based on their GPAs and on the college prep courses they say they have taken or plan to take. It appears to us, however, that both the students and the institutions in the state would benefit in both tangible and intangible ways if students took scholastic work more seriously. Doing so would certainly make the transition to college less traumatic for many, and it would increase the likelihood that those with more modest postsecondary aspirations might elevate their goals as they become comfortable with the college experience.
Fourth, and in a more positive vein, Kentucky’s investment in education technology in public schools, which has been a component of KERA from its inception, seems to be reaping rewards as far as students’ facility with software is concerned. Of course, given the rate at which computers have spread to homes across Kentucky and the rest of America, many students would be learning these skills even if schools had nothing more than antiquated typewriting equipment. Yet these survey results suggest students are learning many key skills in schools, and that schools can help close the digital divide that may exist between homes that can afford computer equipment and Internet services and those that cannot. It is perhaps an irony, of course, that students with first-rate technology skills might accept well-paying technology job offers even before they graduate from high school and therefore choose not to enroll in a postsecondary program. Indeed, if Kentucky succeeds in attracting high-technology businesses due to solid computer training in the state’s high schools, this problem could worsen.
Finally, we are struck by several findings, which together suggest the magnitude of the problem Kentucky faces in dramatically increasing postsecondary enrollment. For one thing, college-bound youth in the state set their sights on higher education much earlier in life than we anticipated and do so at the behest of family members and friends rather than school personnel. For another, high school students, even those from well-educated and sophisticated families, seem to know very little about financing higher education or about how much college actually costs. Presumably their parents might have a better idea of college costs and financing options, but that is a matter for another study. Nevertheless, given these findings, it is unclear to us exactly what roles schools themselves can play in addressing the college aspirations of students in first-generation families or their need for technical knowledge about such things as finance options.
Our recommendations—which we cast in general terms—follow from the survey results and these general observations, although they are offered here in no particular order.
Opinion leaders in the state, from lawmakers to newspaper editorialists, teachers and principals, business people, mayors and magistrates, members of the clergy, and factory workers should consider altering higher education discourse to promote noneconomic justifications for postsecondary education. As we noted earlier, there is not always a direct or clear linkage between higher education and financial rewards, so we should not be misleading students along these lines, thus setting them up for disillusionment, or unintentionally preparing them to reject enriching learning experiences that might not have a direct economic payoff. Put more positively, a better conversation about higher education could create more consistency between what students expect and what they might find in postsecondary institutions. We believe Kentucky colleges and universities can become centers for creating citizens who are both humane and thoughtful, as well as knowledgeable and successful. In our estimation, we are more likely to achieve this goal by modifying our collective discourse about higher education to emphasize noninstrumental rationales as much as economic ones.
Fortunately, Kentuckians can find inspiration for such discourse that is but two decades old. In 1981, a special committee of civic activists led by sage and elder statesman Ed Prichard released a report on higher education in the Commonwealth. That report provided a detailed listing of the purposes of higher education the committee viewed as important, most of which centered on the development of humane, healthy, broad-minded citizens and only secondarily emphasized the economic benefits of postsecondary learning. This stands in contrast, we believe, to the more recent documents produced by the Council, which focus more on the monetary payoff of higher education and minimize goals such as self-fulfillment and good citizenship. (Excerpts from Prichard’s report and from the Council’s 1998 blueprint are provided in Appendix C.) There may be a curious paradox here. A criticism of traditional justifications of higher education is that schools trained workers, while colleges and universities educated an elite. The economic rationale for the current postsecondary initiative is egalitarian in the sense that it wishes to train everyone. We believe it would be valuable to the Commonwealth to have a serious conversation about the purposes of higher education. Perhaps we would conclude that if there is to be more education for more persons, then everyone should be educated to a higher level than they are now.
It is also likely that such a public conversation about higher education would help us as Kentuckians think more coherently about what might be reasonable targets for postsecondary enrollment growth in the coming decades. The Council has provided us with one set of goals, along with a rough set of steps its members believe we should take to achieve them. But there is no reason to believe other viable approaches to postsecondary enrollment growth might not be considered and possibly pursued—we simply do not know the likely outcome of such a discussion.
Policymakers will need to develop new mechanisms for encouraging postsecondary enrollment. Current programs and efforts alone seem to us insufficient to meet the Council’s higher education enrollment growth goals. The focus of new efforts should not be students such as those in our survey, who already intend to pursue formal learning after high school. Rather, students who are not currently deemed to be college bound, and especially first-generation students, should be targeted, and targeted early—by middle school, if not elementary school—if they are to be convinced of the importance of higher education and learn the steps they must take to be successful.
We are not sure how best to structure such efforts, and suspect that approaches might differ from community to community. We are also loath to place this burden on the public schools, which are already being asked to do more than they can. Perhaps one approach would be for entities other than elementary and secondary schools to undertake this task of educating youngsters about higher education and about the financial options that might make it feasible for them to attend—local businesses, YMCAs, Rotary clubs, local libraries, churches, even colleges and universities themselves could all be involved.
Another approach might be to encourage Kentucky’s public universities, community and technical colleges, and independent colleges to make introductory-level postsecondary courses more easily available to high school juniors and seniors, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Course credits could count toward high school graduation or college (or both). Such exposure to courses, professors, campuses, and more mature students would familiarize high school students with the college setting and expectations, and might convince many of the feasibility of higher learning for them. Such an arrangement would take an enormous amount of cooperation and coordination among institutions that have traditionally not intersected one another very often. It would also take changes in many extant policies and probably funding from Kentucky’s legislature and local boards of education. But this might be an effective means of increasing postsecondary enrollment. It might also increase the high school completion rate by providing new options for students tired of the regular secondary school setting. It might even reduce the pressure on high schools that have a hard time staffing certain teaching positions. We suggest that Kentucky’s P-16 Council, which includes members of the Kentucky Board of Education and the Council on Postsecondary Education, pursue this strategy, and suspect some of this may already be taking place in certain communities in the Commonwealth.
Developing these and other initiatives will take creativity and at least modest resources. Yet without these things, we predict both that the Council’s enrollment goals will likely not be met and that postsecondary learning will remain a middle- and upper-class luxury.
We think it appropriate for various state agencies, including the Council and the Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority (KHEAA), to work more closely together and more vigorously to provide financial information about postsecondary education opportunities to Kentucky families. KHEAA, which is part of the state’s Finance and Administration Cabinet, already maintains a website (www.kheaa.com) with a range of information about college costs, scholarships, loans, and so forth, and also publishes hard copies and electronic versions of helpful publications. Given our survey results, however, we think KHEAA should be assisted in its education task by the Council, Kentucky colleges and universities, and other organizations in spreading the word about actual postsecondary costs, innovative financing approaches, and the like. Kentucky might also engage the talents and inspiration of high school students who are studying technology by encouraging them to design their own websites or learn games around the nuts and bolts of higher education. This might be a way to combine the previously cited leveling effects of technology education in schools with worthwhile learning exercises about postsecondary opportunities and benefits. This could be especially beneficial, we would add, as opportunities increase for Kentucky students to pursue higher education either in part or completely over the Internet, a trend we expect will accelerate in coming years.
We also commend to readers a study just released that was commissioned by the Association of Independent Kentucky Colleges and Universities.(34) As that report notes, the 19 member institutions are geographically distributed across Kentucky, and many are actually in or adjacent to 59 of the 66 counties the Council has targeted as most lagging in enrollment. In addition, on average, they cost 36 percent less than the national average for these types of institutions, and two of them—Berea College and Alice Lloyd College—target economically deprived Appalachian youths and charge no tuition at all. As discussed in the first section of this report, these institutions now educate about a fifth of all four-year college students in Kentucky. They could, with encouragement and incentives, educate a greater portion of the state’s new postsecondary students. Yet HB 1 has focused most attention, and virtually all additional resources, on public institutions in the state. We suggest that the Council and state legislators seriously consider the various recommendations in this study to strengthen these institutions and enhance the role they can play in meeting Kentucky’s postsecondary enrollment and completion goals.
We are reluctant to offer the traditional parting comment, “More research is needed!” However, this survey has revealed numerous questions that we believe ought to be pursued more systematically, through various methodologies, and over longer periods of time than a snapshot survey allows. For example, we need to know more about the brain-drain issue. Do gifted Kentucky students come back to live and work in the Commonwealth, or does their departure for college elsewhere signify that they will not likely return? Also, what are the characteristics of the students that Kentucky imports, and do these students journey back to their own states or settle in Kentucky after graduation? Another issue ripe for inquiry involves the role, both actual and potential, of utilizing guidance counselors for encouraging greater postsecondary enrollment. As noted earlier, these individuals barely registered as influences on the higher education decisionmaking process of the students in our sample. Are counselors too occupied with other concerns to provide information about higher education, or are they effective in engendering postsecondary interest among the types of students who are not in our sample?
Here, we have only scratched the surface of a great many issues. We believe policymakers and researchers ought to collaborate to field a survey that results in a random sample of Kentucky high school students so that we can learn more about students who are not currently planning postsecondary attendance. If they are influenced for or against higher education by different people and at different stages in their lives, this would be crucial to know. Moreover, results of a survey with a larger and more representative sample of all Kentucky high school students could be compared with information that will be emerging over the next year or two based on the 2000 Census. The latter data should allow us to say much more about demographic, economic, and social trends within Kentucky, especially its rural and growing metropolitan areas. These should, in turn, help us understand how population shifts may affect postsecondary enrollment and either lessen or magnify the challenges to its increase.
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33 Figures on income and wages from the Kentucky profile in Southern Growth Policies Board, Invented Here: Toward an Innovation Driven Economy, June 2000. Available at: www.southern.org. Return to text.
34 MGT of America, The Role and Effectiveness of the Independent Colleges and Universities in Kentucky May 2001. Return to text.
