King at Prichard

CPE President Bob King addressed the Prichard Committee at yesterday's fall meeting. From my notes, here are some of his thoughts on how to move forward on postsecondary achievement.

• The Kentucky Community and Technical College System is increasingly moving toward the technical side of its combined mission. We need to get a renewed focus on getting students to stay for associate degrees.
• The comprehensive universities have not fully engaged the 1997 call for a distinct focus at each institution. That concept could use sharper implementation, perhaps with one school being the premier place for education leadership, another arts, and another on STEM education.
• The research universities need new attention to the goals for graduate study and research.
• For students taking developmental courses, we have got data on how they persist, but we’re not devoting enough high quality resources to those students. We should add a much stronger push to graduate those students and to do that in fewer years.
• Kentucky has very high performing students who are not considering Kentucky public institutions, and we need to get those students to see our schools as serious options.