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By MICHAEL CRIMMINS
Glasgow News 1
College admissions may soon be easier for students if the Kentucky Student Success Collaborative and the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education gets their way.
The Barren County Economic Authority estimates that roughly 26.3 percent of the county’s population has some form of postsecondary credentials and 16.7 percent have some college but no degree.
Recently, the collaborative released a report entitled “Redesigning College Admissions in Kentucky: A Case for Collective Action” that contains a statewide plan to redesign some aspects of the college admissions process.
“As Kentucky faces workforce demands and increasing questions about the value of a postsecondary credential, we must reexamine every point at which higher education touches a student’s life,” Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education President Aaron Thompson said in a letter. “One of the critical, and often overlooked, is the moment of entry: admissions.”
Several of the recommendations involve automating parts of the admission process. For example, the council is working with the National Student Clearinghouse to create the KY Postsecondary Transcript Exchange, which will enable schools to retrieve dual credit transcripts automatically, at no cost to students, a press release from the council stated.
Identified strategic priorities and actions include:
- Launching a centralized transcript retrieval system allowing institutions to retrieve student records with their consent.
- Establishing and training high school personnel on a common high school transcript submission protocol.
- Ensuring financial aid award letters comply with guidance from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and clearly identify total costs and renewable support.
- Creating a scholarship database within Futuriti.org, the state’s education and career portal, that shows institutional scholarships available at Kentucky colleges and universities.
- Raising awareness of Kentucky’s guaranteed transfer policy for associate degree graduates with a GPA of 2.0 or higher.
- Strengthening proactive communication between two-year and four-year institutions using intent-to-transfer flags.
“This plan is informed by hundreds of reflections from Kentucky high school seniors and postsecondary practitioners,” said Lilly Massa McKinley, collaborative executive director and assistant vice president for student access and success at the council. “The priorities we’ve identified will promote earlier and more frequent outreach to prospective undergraduates and increase transparency around college costs, financial aid awards, housing, credit transfer and degree pathways.”
This effort is supported by a $150,000 planning grant from Lumina Foundation, which sponsors the Great Admissions Redesign, a national movement to make college admissions more accessible, transparent and streamlined.
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