Kentucky State expects 20% drop in undergrads due to program cuts, strict enrollment rules

LEXINGTON, Ky. — The number of undergraduate students at Kentucky’s only historically Black university is expected to shrink by 20% by spring 2027, officials said Monday.

Students will be required to meet tougher academic and financial requirements, and some academic programs will be cut by the Fall semester due to a law passed by legislators earlier this year that was said to be necessary to keep the university in sound enough financial shape to operate. These changes will lead to the anticipated drop in enrollment, according to KSU Provost Michael D. Dailey and Chief Financial Officer Heather Bigard.

“We’re projecting down again because of the impact of Senate Bill 185 with very strict enrollment requirements relative to financial ability to actually pay,” Bigard said.

SB 185 deemed the institution in a state of emergency due to “financial exigency.”

The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education approved the university’s plan to revive itself from financial distress Monday at a CPE Academic and Strategic Initiatives Committee meeting, which oversees educational changes in the state’s public universities.

The approved plan features the end of some academic programs, an online shift for many liberal arts programs which will be taught entirely by adjunct faculty, and a focus on areas of study that produce more revenue, such as STEM majors and healthcare, which are polytechnic fields.

Because of these changes, enrollment is expected to drop by 9% in the fall, and 20% in the spring of 2027, Bigard said.

Stricter academic requirements

Admission requirements will be stricter as a way to reduce the number of students it can admit, at least temporarily.

New students will be required to have a 2.5 GPA and score at least an 18 on the ACT standardized test. These requirements will impact students who did not apply for admission before SB 185 was signed by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear on April 13.

“The problem in the past is that we’ve had students that come in at 2.0 or 2.5 or 2.49 and we’ve done wraparound services,” Dailey said. “Some of those students have been very successful, others have not. So going forward, this year until we revamp, restructure our program we set it off as a 2.5.”

Students have to hit both requirements. A student with a 3.7 GPA and a 17 on the ACT will not be admitted, Dailey said. But the university is planning ways to accommodate those students, he added.

Because of this, the university already has “lost some students but there’s not been too many,” Dailey said. It was unclear how many were impacted.

Less financial wiggle room for students

Students and those paying for their tuition will likely be held more accountable for missed payments, and have fewer opportunities to cover tuition using payment plans.

“There’s always been a policy to collect (payments) of course, but it hasn’t been enforced very effectively,” Bigard said.

The university will propose more guidelines on “what constitutes a payment plan and what options are available, and then what the consequences are when a student doesn’t pay, which includes removal from courses,” Bigard said.

Those payment policies will be proposed at a KSU Board of Regents meeting Friday.

The heightened oversight of tuition payments plays into the projected decline in applications to the university, according to Bigard.

For example, payment plans can include financial aid, “but that has to be documented, and it has to reflect what the student’s actually done to complete that process, not just simply having a process in motion,” Bigard said.

The CPE approved the university’s decision to end programs that generated less revenue and had low enrollment, including political science, childhood development and some areas of music.

‘We’re not just killing programs’

CPE President Aaron Thompson said he believes the university’s plan will generate more revenue as a polytechnic university while still embracing its background as a historically Black, liberal arts-focused, land grant institution.

“Let me be clear. We’re not just killing programs,” Thompson said. “We are looking at how we are also reengineering the classic liberal arts programs to be kind of interdisciplinary to work well with our polytechnic forward-looking way of thinking about it.”

The university expects to have less tenured faculty, and to focus on retaining non-tenured full-time teaching faculty, according to Dailey. Non-tenured faculty usually have a smaller work load and are typically paid less.

“We also are currently redesigning our faculty handbook and teacher role groups… which can shift some of that load and again lower our costs,” Dailey said.

The number of full-time faculty has dropped from 117 to 77 in the past three years, Dailey said.

It was unclear if or how many faculty members would lose their jobs due to the new program cuts.

“We ranked those programs according to their fiscal impact at the university,” Dailey said. “And then we identified programs that had low enrollment and negative (financial) contribution, and we looked at those for discontinuance.”

Lawsuits against KSU

Students and alumni have sued the university to block the law from taking effect, but the lawsuits won’t prevent them from making these academic and financial changes, according to Travis Powell, general counsel for the CPE.

“The attorney general is representing us in that matter and we’ve been tracking along, and they haven’t ordered us to stop any of our work at this point,” Powell said.

One of two lawsuits, which are open and were filed in May, claims, “It is about students who enrolled at Kentucky State University for a particular education, in particular programs, with particular faculty, at Kentucky’s only public HBCU.”

Thompson told the council he believes the court will rule in their favor.

“We have statutory responsibility for programs anyway …,” he said. “We’ll see what the court says but I would assure you that what we’re doing is the correct process.”