Native Son Propels Opportunities for Kentucky Students

In April, Dr. Aaron Thompson, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE), participated in the Attaining College Excellence and Equity Summit put together by the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute for Higher Education Policy. On the panel, “Selecting Evidence-Based Advising Strategies to Improve Student Outcomes,” Thompson spoke about equity being a top priority, noting that, if higher education does not serve its most disenfranchised populations, then it is failing.

Dr. Aaron ThompsonThe first African-American person and first native-born Kentuckian to hold the CPE presidency, Thompson knows how challenging the path to and through higher education can be. As the first person in his family to go to high school and college, he was largely left to fend for himself growing up in under-resourced and ill-equipped schools that served the Black community in rural Clay County, Kentucky.

“As an African American from Appalachia, whose father was illiterate and mother had an 8th grade education, I knew the value of college, and if I had a chance to express that with policy, process and procedures to help other people live out that generational dream, then I wanted to take advantage of that,” says Thompson. “My history as a whole told me that I needed to be in a situation where, if I have the opportunity…to help other people realize their dreams without having to go through all that I went through to get there, then I needed to do that.”

As indicated by several key metrics, over the past decade underrepresented minority (URM) students have made considerable progress in retention, graduation, and persistence rates. CPE’s 2024 Higher Education Matters Progress Report shows the graduation rate for URM in the Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) increased 15 percentage points from the 2016-17 academic year to the 2022-23 academic year. The graduation rate for URM at four-year public institutions (4YP) increased 9 percentage points from 2016-17 to 2022-23, and the graduation rate for low-income students increased 10 percentage points in that time period.

Building pipelines

After attending undergraduate and graduate school, Thompson built a career as a professor, administrator, and researcher/writer before joining the CPE in 2009 as senior vice president for academic affairs. He became executive vice president in 2013 and assumed the presidency in 2018.

CPE is a coordinating board that oversees Kentucky’s public universities, community colleges, and technical colleges. It also licenses nonprofit and for-profit higher education institutions in the state. Part of the CPE’s role is to bring about a positive return on the investment of public funds in higher education. It sets an educational attainment goal for Kentucky and serves as a policy advisor to the state. It collects, analyzes, and reports comprehensive performance data. The data show that attainment gaps are narrowing.

Thompson notes that students who participate in dual enrollment/credit — attending high school and a community college simultaneously — outperform other students when they get into college, but data showed there weren’t enough low-income and URM students entering that pipeline. If something is even perceived as being not fully designed for all students, Thompson says a redesign is called for to foster greater student success.

Dr. Amanda Ellis joined CPE in 2020 as vice president of K-12 policies and programs. She is currently engaged in working collaboratively with K-12, higher education, and business partners around dual credits.

“We have excellent outcomes on that; we have great support from our legislature that provides a dual credit scholarship that removes financial barriers,” says Ellis. “We recently set an attainment goal to increase the number of high school students that graduate with college credits—not just more, but more representative of our student body in the state. We are seeing steady gains with all of our different student populations, but we need to definitely increase our low-income, underrepresented minority students and students with disabilities in their participation in dual credit.”

The 2024 Higher Education Matters Progress Report shows a 16.1 percentage point increase in dual credit participation among low-income students from the 2016 senior class to the 2021 senior class.

Ellis says thanks to money from the Kentucky Department of Education, the last three summers CPE has invested in summer bridge programs for non-traditional students to engage early and find a sense of belonging on campus. Some programs are for academic preparedness, but other programming helps students find their way — building relationships and learning about available support services. Currently 29 campuses, both public and private, engage in this.

“We did an external evaluation for a couple of our cohorts to find that the greatest retention and success is actually with our students entering into community college,” Ellis says.

Defining moments

Working to change policies that were keeping many students behind has been a hallmark of Thompson’s presidency. Among those policy changes was eliminating the requirement for non-credit remedial courses, some of which were taken multiple times and led to students dropping out.

Dr. Amanda Ellis“Putting in place policies that would allow these students to experience good learning with the wrap-around services that they needed as well as to get coursework that would work toward their graduation was a huge movement,” says Thompson. “In my position, I had the power to discontinue all developmental education and create a new path for students to be successful.”

Thompson also helped create policies that allowed the development of wrap-around services, which propelled the success rate upwards. While total enrollment in KCTCS has declined since 2012, URM enrollment has increased.

“Some of the better moments is seeing the way we’ve been closing gaps, especially for our underrepresented populations,” says Thompson. “Working with our campuses, we’ve put in place high standards to raise their overall retention rates, overall graduation rates and overall attainment rates.”

Toward that end, Thompson praises Dr. Dawn Offutt, executive director of access, engagement, and belonging, for creating programming that helps campuses be culturally competent for everybody. This includes a cultural competence certification program.

Offutt has been with CPE since 2018. She explains that one of CPE’s policies dictates that postsecondary institutions should be graduating students who are culturally competent. The question was posed to institutions as to what that should look like. From there, she began to work with representatives — faculty and staff — from both two-year and four-year institutions. A cultural competence workgroup was developed to formulate campus responses to what employers were seeking from graduates.

A framework was built. “This model has learning objectives and content that were agreed upon by faculty and staff across the state,” says Offutt. “We decided we would like to put in place a certification that institutions themselves — faculty members, staff members, and then ultimately students — go through a program, which should have some sense of uniformity, some base information across the state.”

Institutions submit information about their cultural competence programming to CPE. It is then verified by a third party as meeting minimum standards and certified by CPE. Each campus builds its own optional programs and gives the micro-credential to anyone who completes it.

“Maybe the most defining moment is working with the legislature and the governor’s office to get more money put back in higher ed,” says Thompson, who notes that CPE plays a crucial role in how much funding each institution receives from the state. “We had been cut for about 12 years. Coming into this role, I’ve been able to work with them to get record-breaking funding while keeping tuition at a historic low since I’ve been in this position.” 

CPE has worked with campuses has kept tuition increases to less than 2.9% annually, and over the past five years, tuition increases have been limited to just 1.6%. Campuses are investing resources into financial aid and emergency support services. Funding for low-income students in Kentucky’s performance funding model has increased.

Sustaining success

Retention rates have steadily increased. URM in the KCTCS have gone up 14 percentage points since 2012-13 and 9 percentage points in 4YP. Low-income students have seen increases of 9 percentage point and 8 percentage points. Thompson praises his team for their impact, and they praise his leadership.

“He’s able to be in rooms with individuals where there are different perspectives and even if they agree to disagree, the respect is still there because of the relationships that he has built,” Offutt says.

Ellis worked exclusively in K-12 before joining CPE in 2020, brought in by Thompson to build a strong education continuum between K-12 and higher education. She speaks about the Kentucky Advising Academy, which has worked to build capacity around K-12 advising for college and career readiness. Students are assisted in setting career goals and learning the necessary steps to achieve these goals.

“We’ve built out a framework…to provide support on implementing that awareness and exposure to what comes after high school as early as middle school,” Ellis says. “We identified barriers. It’s helped position our policy; it’s helped to push for additional funding. Those are the ways we’re going about it systematically.”

Current projects include working with an aeronautics group as well as several healthcare organizations to build more employment opportunities. The ongoing goal is to keep building pipelines for students.

Trained as a sociologist, Thompson has written extensively about diversity, cultural competence, first-year experience programs, retention and student success. His focus has not been strictly on people of color. He has also examined income variables and gender. Everyone does not come to higher education from the same background and preparedness, but the goal must be that everyone emerges successful. Data, he says, is crucial to informing his and the CPE’s position.

Dr. Dawn OffuttAmong the honors he has received are induction into Kentucky’s Civil Rights Hall of Fame, the Lucy Harth Smith-Atwood S. Wilson Award for Civil and Human Rights in Education, and the Health Care Governance Leadership Award from the Kentucky Hospital Association.

“Higher education is about deep learning,” Thompson says. “The first year of college, a student will experience more diversity than any other time in their life. So, how are we working in our curricular and co-curricular opportunities for people to learn from each other? How are we preparing students to live in a global, diverse society as well as a domestic diverse society? All of those are things what higher learning should be about.”

Thompson notes that research and evidence show that diversity has a positive impact on learning and society. The CPE also guides legislation, and in that area Thompson has been an unrelenting advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, cultural competence, and access even in the face of pushback at the state level. Even a purely capitalistic argument shows that serving underserved students has positive economic impact. Employers, he says, are making it clear that they believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“We can’t back away from this,” he says. “The legislature knows that I’m willing to work with them on accomplishing what’s good for the state. My argument has been that everything we’ve done truly lies in that space of getting more people educated to be sustainable citizens with a living wage that can add to the state and not take away — with Medicaid, prisons, etc. If we don’t educate everybody, then in fact we’re not doing what’s good for the state.

“It’s not me speaking against these [anti-DEI] bills, it’s about me laying out what I believe to be truly what’s good for the state of Kentucky,” he adds. “It’s about looking at the progress we’re making.”