Brad Cowgill is interim president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education. Prior to his appointment to succeed Dr. Tom Layzell, Cowgill served as state budget director. In this interview with Business Lexington's Tom Martin, Cowgill discusses efforts to make college accessible to more Kentuckians and how that outcome could impact the economy of the commonwealth.
TM: To paraphrase an article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education, ten years ago, Kentucky, a poor state and a perennial low scorer on measures of educational attainment, vaulted onto the national stage with a bold effort to reform its public higher education system. Let's fast forward to today in 2007. Has there been improvement in Kentucky higher education?
BC: We've certainly improved in the area of educational attainment. I would say that we're probably still to be considered a poor state in the sense that per capita income in Kentucky still hovers at the rate of about 81 to 82 percent of the national average, and that's enough to characterize Kentucky as a poor state. In the area of educational attainment, we've made a lot of progress and there's a direct relationship between the two. I suspect that we would not have made the gains that we have made in per capita income over the course of the last ten years were it not for the fact that we have made some progress in the area of educational attainment. We've made progress, but unfortunately so has the rest of the country and in fact so has the rest of the world. ... The people who were involved in educational reform in Kentucky in 1997 were fascinated with the connection between the level of attainment that Kentuckians have on the one hand and our per capita income on the other and realized that really you can't improve one until you improve the other.
TM: A "chicken and the egg scenario?
BC: Well it is