"Nearly 4,000 University of Kentucky freshmen recently marched into Commonwealth Stadium on an unseasonably cool August night.
As the pep band played and the cheerleaders and dance squad performed, students learned traditional cheers and the UK fight song. Surrounded by a sea of blue, I was reminded again how much excitement can be generated on a college campus.
Yet, even as I was wrapped up in the moment, I was thinking about the future as well — the future of these young women and men and the future of our commonwealth. And I wondered about our role as educators in it.
Ten years since the reforms of Kentucky higher education, progress has been made. More young Kentuckians are attending college. Our universities are engaged in more service to communities. And with the support of the Kentucky General Assembly, our two research institutions — UK and the University of Louisville — have dramatically increased their efforts, hiring faculty and earning more external resources to push the boundaries of discovery and find cures to the intractable diseases that for too long have held our state behind.
But time is not our ally. And we have much more progress to make if our state is going to reach the ambitious goals we have set. Some 210,000 more Kentuckians, for example, must have bachelor's degrees by 2020 just to reach the national average. It is the most important measure of our future economic success: Will we have the educated citizenry necessary to compete for the best-paying jobs in a 21st century economy?
Whether we will rests entirely on the strategies we put in place today and the investments we make over the next few years. But our public universities should not expect a blank check. We must be accountable for the investments we need to fuel our plans and power our ambitions.
In my judgment, we in higher education need to demonstrate three things in the clearest possible way:
1.We are doing everything possible to increase access to higher education: Not enough young Kentuckians think a college education is possible. In response, UK is committing an additional $5.4 million — the 2020 Scholars Program — over the next few years to increase access to college to underserved populations and provide incentives for more students to take math and science courses in high school. We also added incentives for those students who first pursued an associate's degree in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. It's a good starting point. But more needs to be done system-wide.
2. We are committed to more than just expanding access: It's not enough for students to enroll. They must graduate. At 60 percent, UK has the highest graduation rate among Kentucky's public institutions. To be competitive with the Top 20 public institutions, we have to have a graduation rate over 70 percent. The strong economies of today and the lasting economies of tomorrow are and will be built on knowledge. This year alone, UK is spending $35 million on our "war on student attrition," which includes strategies designed to increase retention and graduation. Our top priority next year is to ask the governor and the General Assembly to continue funding our Top 20 Business Plan. That investment will allow us to continue to add faculty, lower class sizes and provide the resources to students necessary to help them be successful. We also will go to the legislature this coming session and ask for additional classroom space through the construction of a new Gatton College of Business and Economics. This building represents a double shot because it addresses a need to help produce more business leaders and entrepreneurs for Kentucky, while also freeing up significant classroom space in the heart of the campus.
3. We must accelerate our efforts in discovery and research. UK research expenditures increased to a record-high $324 million last year, but Kentucky needs us to do even more. Consider that more than 70 percent of all economic advancement today is based on research. And nearly all of that has its starting point in a university lab. One small, but profound example: at the Trover Health Clinic in Hopkins County, our dental researchers are working on the challenge of pre-term, low-weight babies. An increasing body of research shows that poor oral health leads to a host of debilitating health issues, including pre-term, low-weight babies. In Hopkins County two years ago, 18 percent of babies were born prematurely and 10 percent suffered from low birth weight. In both cases, that's above the Kentucky average and well above the national average. Through a program called "Centering Pregnancy with Smiles," UK is working with 600 to 800 women per year. The percentage of pre-term births among these women has dropped to 5.4 percent. The national average is 12.5 percent. The percentage of low birth weights has dropped to 5.2 percent; the national average is 8.1 percent.
Next year, we'll ask the governor and legislators to fund construction of an additional research building on the site of our "Medical Campus of the Future." This building, like our existing Biological/Biomedical Sciences Research Building, really means we are creating a high-tech research factory, with hundreds of high-paying jobs, designed to conduct cutting-edge research into the most complex health care and science issues.
That facility is helping us create new companies, the kinds of companies that will be the foundation of our state's economy in the future. Just last year, for example, the Lexington Venture Club invested $35 million in 54 companies. Thirty-two of those companies had UK connections. With the lab research being conducted in our Biomedical Sciences Building — and the ones we hope to develop in the future — that investment, and the high-paying jobs that come with it, will only grow.
It's another way we can be directly accountable to you for the investments you make in this institution.
Over the next two months, I'm crisscrossing the state, spending time in schools, speaking directly with our state's future — our children -- about the importance of higher education and how we are being accountable to you. We're calling it the "See Blue" Tour. When you think of UK Blue, we want Kentuckians to not only have a sense of pride. We want them to envision what our state can be. And like that recent night in August, as I looked at our freshmen enveloped in a sea of blue, I want us all to think with excitement about what that future holds for all of us, given a continued investment in higher education.
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