Kentucky whites seriously lag in two-year college completion rate

I’ve been writing about a new report from the College Board (which creates the SAT college entrance tests and runs the AP program). This report is loaded with educational comparison data for the 50 states and Washington DC.

Yesterday, I discussed one of the most disturbing graphs in the report, which shows that Kentucky seriously lags the national average for completion of Associate Degrees as of 2007.

Now, I’m going to cover some even worse news.

Figure 9.2h on page 154 in the report ranks each state’s white students’ Associate’s Degree graduation rate. Kentucky could not place much lower. Only in two states, Arkansas and West Virginia, is the graduation rate for Associates' Degrees for white students lower than in Kentucky. Kentucky's two-year degree graduation rate for whites is only 31.2 percent, over 10 points lower than the national average rate of 43.5 percent.

Since Kentucky’s population runs around 85 percent white, our predominant racial population group is doing terribly compared to their counterparts in the rest of the nation. We simply must fix this!

Note that these white students graduated from high school in 2004 or later, so they spent their entire K to 12 school experience in KERA-influenced schools. Also, most two-year students in Kentucky are from in-state high schools, so this is a reflection of KERA, not out of state education systems.

The report also has a graph for black students' graduation rates in all 50 states. Only 23.7 percent of the state's black Associate's candidates got their degree within three years as of the 2007 results, which is below the national black average of 26.4 percent.

As I mentioned yesterday, this should not be a big surprise to our long-term readers since the Bluegrass Institute has stressed for some time that our remedial course requirements for recent high school graduates who go on to college are very high.

But, it’s sad to see that our extensive spending on KERA has not created better results for the state’s two-year college candidates from 2007.