Drew Purcell
Caroline Middleton, an incoming UK sophomore from Bardstown, received a one-time grant funded by a $10 million gift to the university from Mira Ball.
In August, more than 22,000 undergraduate students converged on the campus of the University of Kentucky for the start of fall semester. For many, including incoming UK sophomore Caroline Middleton, it’s a time of anticipation and excitement for the new academic year—accompanied with underlying stress about how much their families will be paying for the experience.
Middleton, an interior design major from Bardstown, said UK was her first choice for college, but it wasn’t the most affordable option for her family. Her parents, who work as a police officer and a nurse in Louisville, have taken out a loan and dipped into their savings to cover the expense, but the hefty price of attendance weighs on her, she said, and on many other students she’s met.
“I think it’s probably the main deciding factor for students when they choose to go to college,” Middleton said. “I’ve had a lot of people from my high school who are younger than me ask me about UK. And then they say, ‘I’d love to go there, but it’s too expensive.’”
In June, UK’s Board of Trustees approved a $4.2 billion budget, setting the cost of undergraduate tuition and mandatory fees for Kentucky residents this fall at $6,180. That equates to a 2.4 percent increase over last year for lower-division students, and a $30 decrease per semester for returning juniors and seniors, who were previously required to pay higher tuition rates than lower-division students. Combined with last year’s 2.5 percent increase, that represents the lowest two-year tuition hike in 30 years at UK. Since 2005, however, the tuition expense for in-state students has climbed by more than 100 percent.
For Middleton’s mother, staying ahead of the rising cost of postsecondary education for her three children can sometimes feel like a losing battle.
“No matter how much money you save up for your child, it’s never going to keep up with the rate that tuition increases each year,” Michele Middleton said. “You don’t have a choice but to rely on loans and scholarships. And if you have more than one child, it’s hard.”
But the Middletons got a little help last spring with a one-time grant of more than $500, funded through a $10 million gift to the university from Mira Ball and her husband, the late Don Ball. The endowed scholarship program funded by the Balls gives preference to students like Middleton who come from the Balls’ respective home counties of Nelson and Henderson. The program also supports a new financial aid initiative at the university called UK LEADS (Leveraging Economic Affordability for Developing Success), which aims to ease the fiscal pressure for more students by addressing unmet financial need—the gap between the cost of attendance and the ability of a family to pay for it, even after all grants, loans and work-study options are exhausted.
Targeting aid to boost retention
In 2016, UK began a concerted effort to shift a larger portion of its financial aid from merit-based to need-based awards for students, with the targeted goal of boosting student retention rates to 90 percent, said Todd Brann, UK’s director of analytics. His team considered multiple factors in determining how best to apply the university’s finite resources to achieve that aim, he said, and the data showed that for students who were managing unmet financial need of $5,000 or more, the likelihood of their returning to campus for another semester dropped precipitously.
“That $5,000 threshold was really key,” Brann said. “At that point, the student’s ability to be retained really began to decline. It also disproportionately impacts in-state students.”
“The mission of the UK LEADS program is to identify the students whose only barrier to success is financial and to try ... and provide them with the ability to succeed at the University of Kentucky to the best degree possible.” —Todd Brann, UK’s director of analytics
Through UK LEADS, the university has invested in targeted one-time grants to reduce the financial shortfall for students most at risk of not returning, said Kirsten Turner, UK’s associate provost for academic and student affairs. In addition, UK has expanded its student financial wellness office and tied institutional aid to required financial counseling to encourage more long-term planning, Turner said. The university has also instituted four-year Kentucky Futures scholarships, awarded to students based on both their academic performance and their unmet need, to attract top recruits and address potential retention issues before enrollment.
“The mission of the UK LEADS program is to identify the students whose only barrier to success is financial and to try … and provide them with the ability to succeed at the University of Kentucky to the best degree possible,” Brann said.
The economic boost of more education
Efforts to increase educational attainment levels of Kentuckians can bring local economic benefits, too, said Elodie Dickinson, Lexington’s workforce development manager, by increasing the pipeline of qualified workers for many high-demand industries in the Bluegrass, including healthcare, business and communication. As the home of UK, Fayette County leads the state in this regard, with 41.8 percent of its citizens age 25 and older holding bachelor’s degrees or higher, Dickinson said, and that educated workforce matters to many local businesses.
“An examination of the educational level of our workforce is a vital part of any company’s decision to expand or move its operations to Lexington or the Bluegrass region. Many local businesses require a bachelor’s degree, at minimum,” Dickinson said. “People with a college degree generally earn higher wages than those without a degree. Higher earnings help boost our local economy.”
The city works with multiple job placement services and career development centers at UK, as well as Transylvania University and Bluegrass Technical and Community College, to connect students with local companies in need of their talents, Dickinson said. According to recent data from the Kentucky Center for Statistics, almost half of UK’s students, or 48.2 percent, are employed somewhere in Kentucky three years after graduation. That figure is even higher for BCTC (74.8 percent) and Transylvania (50.7 percent) graduates.
“Insufficient financial resources can be an obstacle for many families,” Dickinson added. “Programs like UK LEADS provide an opportunity for a student to complete his or her degree, which directly impacts the student, the University of Kentucky and our local economy.”
Moving the needle
Since UK LEADS was implemented in 2016, the number of one-time grants awarded to first-year students has grown from 178 in its first year to 485 in 2018, Brann said. UK’s targeted financial support is only one of multiple intervention strategies that UK is using to support student retention, and the early results have been promising, Brann said. UK’s second fall retention rate (the percentage of students returning for their second fall semester) rose from 81.7 percent before the program began to a record-high 83.3 percent for students who started at UK in 2016, and jumped again to 84.5 percent for those who started in 2017.
“It’s so difficult to move that needle when you get above 80 percent,” Brann said. “Being able to move it three percentage points in a couple of years really helps reinforce the success that we are seeing at the individual student level.”
At the same time, the shift of resources from more merit-based aid to more need-based scholarship awards has not reduced UK’s academic standing.
“Nationally, this conversation has been set up as a trade-off of financial need versus merit, but meritorious students also have need. It’s not a binary issue, and these are not mutually exclusive,” Turner said. “We have actually seen our academic profile increase. It’s at the highest it’s ever been, while our unmet need is at the lowest it has been since 2014.”
With UK LEADS as one aspect of the university’s comprehensive $2.1 billion “Kentucky Can” fundraising campaign, the goal is to fund a total of 2,100 LEADS scholarships and raise $300 million for a broad range of scholarships, said Mike Richey, UK’s vice president for philanthropy and alumni engagement. UK received a record $212.1 million in total gifts and commitments in the 2018-19 fiscal year and surpassed the halfway mark for its “Kentucky Can” campaign, with $1.245 billion raised so far. The university estimates the total unmet financial need of its students statewide to be roughly $60 million. While moving the LEADS initiative forward, UK is also working to fund a variety of philanthropic scholarship investments at all levels, serving not just the university as a whole, but also its individual colleges and even specific Kentucky counties.
“It all blends together to support student success and do what we can financially to reduce the cost of college at UK. If we can make our services for the state of Kentucky better through UK, then we all win.” —Mike Richey, UK’s vice president for philanthropy and alumni engagement
“It all blends together to support student success and do what we can financially to reduce the cost of college at UK,” Richey said. “If we can make our services for the state of Kentucky better through UK, then we all win.”
While Turner acknowledges that UK’s approach isn’t a “panacea solution” for all students, she said it is the answer that best fits the specific needs of UK students and the Commonwealth.
“We are not just driven by the numbers,” Turner said. “Throughout all of our work, we are very grounded in knowing that each number represents a person and a family in Kentucky. We believe that a college degree at UK is transforming for that person and that family, and there are both private and public benefits that are derived from that. …. We all feel very confident that this is the right thing for us to be doing to serve our state.”