The future of higher education in Kentucky. 5 questions for Aaron Thompson.
Aaron Thompson is the president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education.
We’re coming up on two years since everything changed for college campuses because of COVID-19. From your view, what are some of the long-term effects of the pandemic on higher education in Kentucky? We did a very good job in the last few years of looking at the safety of our students, the safety of our faculty and staff, and putting that within the context of learning, whether it was online or some other virtual mode, or whether it was in-person. So that’s one of those things that’s going to forever be in place now, we’re going to have more hybrid learning, more online learning. We’re going to have to engage students more in those settings.
But we’re also going to be thinking carefully, because I think there will be possibly other pandemics, about how we’re going to be able to consistently be able to do that. We’ve got a lot of triage techniques that we’re putting into the norm: how we isolate people and keep them safe, how we make sure that we have protocols on our campuses that keep us safe that kept us at a lower positivity rate that the communities we’re in. We didn’t have madatory vaccines, but we did put in place reasons why you want to be vaccinated to be on the campuses.
I think for higher ed now, we approach learning differently in the modality, but we also do it in the way that we think about safety and we’re also going to do it in a way that we think about engagement and the way it’s going to happen. The other piece is that we already had a low college-going rate in the state of Kentucky, those who are graduating from high school and going to college. But we may have not had all of our students prepared as well, coming out of P-12 and going into college. COVID is going to have an effect on that.
... it’s not just academic loss that they’re going to have, they’re having social, emotional loss. They’re having more mental health issues that come. We already knew there was mental health issues that we were going to have to address before COVID. This really exacerbated it, and it’s clear in our minds. We know we’re going to have to think about those wraparound services as part of our campuses. Many of our campuses have doubled and tripled the mental health counselors on our campuses. And those are things we know already, this is going to be the standard norm.
It’s a budget year in Kentucky, as I’m sure you’re well aware, and CPE has submitted its requests for funding. What are CPE’s priorities with the budget, and what are the top needs for higher education in the state? There’s a lot of top needs, but we had to prioritize. We asked for performance funding, $67.5 million in the first year and $90 million in the second year. We asked for asset preservation. We have about $7 billion-plus of need, just to maintain our current buildings. We asked for Bucks for Brains for our campuses who are research-based, to keep building their research facilities as well as the capacity to do what’s needed to do here in Kentucky. We asked for things for Kentucky State University, for the land grant and later on, another ask we had was the $23 million to make them whole for this year.
In the governor’s budget, we got all that and more. In the CPE budget, we asked for $20 million in health care, to be able to facilitate some health care employers and campuses to build a pipeline for needed health care workers. That didn’t make it in the governor’s budget, but it did in the house. The governor gave us that, plus, he also proposed the Better Kentucky Promise that would give KCTCS basically free community college. We also asked in the budget to give KCTCS some workforce dollars to build out what they need, and that was in the governor’s budget. The House gave us not that much, but they gave us a lot. That now has passed the House, and we’ve got to get it past the Senate.
Both of these budgets are the healthiest budgets we’ve seen in higher education in a long time. The government gave each campus two new buildings they could build, in addition to asset preservation. We were hoping to get some of those in the House budget and the Senate, at least one of those. But, Bucks for Brains was lowered, but it was in the House budget. We’re really appreciative of the Governor’s budget and the House budget to do this. All of this is really going to student success. All of this is really about putting the student in the center of what we consider is our work.
You mentioned Kentucky State University, which is under state oversight right now, with CPE heavily involved. Where do things currently stand with KSU? We needed $23 million to make KSU whole for this year, the 2021-22 budget. The governor put that in his budget, though he had caveats that CPE would oversee those dollars. The house has it in a bill.
KSU is going to have to have that to move forward, period. I could say other pretty things, but that’s the bottom line. Now, without a doubt, we have to do things in addition to that. We are putting together a management improvement plan, a re-organizational plan, and we’re focusing on programs. KSU has to cut $7 million more out of next year’s budget, so they’re in the process of putting together a really organized, strategic way of taking that $7 million out of their current budget.
At the same time, we have to keep our students in mind as first. Those students are essential to our state and to the states they come from. Remaining a strong, independent HBCU has always been my goal. We know that we’re going to have to do some programmatic movement down the road to help KSU thrive, and we’re going to do that. We’re in the process of a presidential search, where CPE is heavily involved. The Board of Regents, obviously, are the fiduciary responsible members for that campus and they hire the president, but CPE in conjunction with the staff and the board are working to make sure that we have the right president for KSU.
So that’s going on at the same time as all these other pieces. ... We feel good about where we’re at. We are never going to be satisfied until we get to a place where we’re not only going to come back here again, but to a place where we’re helping KSU thrive.
Along with that too is the presidential search that CPE is helping facilitate. What do you envision or hope for with the next president of KSU? Several things. We hope to have it done so that the person can take over July 1. The person is going to have to be an innovator, someone who believes in the HBCU mission, and no doubt believes in the land-grant mission. We have a heck of a land-grant on our campus, and one of the best agriculture centers in the world. A person is going to have to have the heart of a leader, the values of a leader. A person is going to have to be fiduciary sound, with budgeting and administration of the budget. They’re going to have to have a business acumen. A person’s going to have to really understand the role of good faculty and staff, and what it means to create a progressive agenda for KSU to look beyond just where they’re at now, to how they see themselves in the future thriving.
In your mind, what does the future of higher education in Kentucky look like? When I took over this role four years ago, I was very clear about what I thought we had to do in Kentucky to position higher ed in a place that I feel it always should be. We started doing return on investment reports. We started looking at Kentucky data, Kentucky people, Kentucky students.
This is what we know: For Kentucky to have a strong, sustainable and thriving economy, and this is true around the nation, you’re going to have to have a strong, sustainable and thriving educated workforce. Educated workforce is the key, and the only way you can do that is to have a strong higher education system. That’s the most direct correlation. Higher education is a strategic investment, it’s not just something else that you need to fund. It’s a strategic investment that we’ve shown gives the state a 62% return on investment. ... If you don’t have higher ed, you’re going to be on unemployment more, you’re going to have worse health, you’re going to be on Medicaid more, you’re going to be in prison and jails more. I can keep on going forever.
You’re also going to see more in the future where we’re looking at educational attainment, with the 60 by 30 — 60% educational attainment by 2030. We want to make sure that our mix is going to be there and we’re going to stay on track to do that. COVID will hurt us, and it is hurting us to get there. How do we mitigate that? More innovation. How to get more adult learners back in the system, and you’ll see more of that. How to get more out-of-state students to come in here and stay here after they get their degree or credential, so you’ll see more of that. You’ll see us doubling down on student success. You’re going to see us focused heavily on the quality of higher education, so students will know they got a quality education. ...
You’re going to see far more work-based learning, you’re going to see a focus on strong teacher prep programming. You’re going to see a stronger connection between K-12 and higher education in building that pipeline. We have to build a pathway, so we have to make sure the pipeline is flowing strong.
This story was originally published February 20, 2022 at 6:00 AM.