If they're not prepared for postsecondary education, they probably won't ever graduate

The statistics are sobering.

Unprepared students entering Kentucky’s four-year postsecondary institutions face poor odds they’ll ever graduate.

That point was made by this graph presented to the Kentucky legislature’s Interim Joint Education Committee yesterday by Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education president Robert L. King.


The orange bars on this graph show the odds of a Not College Ready student graduating in four, five or six years from a four-year college program in Kentucky. Even after six years of study, these students have notably less than a one in two chance they will ever get their degree.

In truth, even those students who are considered “College Ready” upon admission still face serious challenges. Only two of three prepared students get a degree even after six years in what should be a four-year program, as the blue bars show.

Note that this graph only considers recent Kentucky high school graduates, which makes it very pertinent to discussions of supposed success under KERA.

King’s statistics for the situation in the Associates’ Degree programs look much worse, as the next graph shows.


Even after an extra year of study, only about one in five students gets an Associates’ Degree in this state.

The hopeful news in these slides is that King projects the picture will improve as the impacts of Senate Bill 1 (from the 2009 regular legislative session) start to take hold. But, those are just projections at this point. It’s going to take a lot of changes in Kentucky’s public education classrooms to make those targets become reality.