Lawmaker filing bill to disband council that oversees Kentucky higher education
A bill filed Tuesday would dissolve the Council on Postsecondary Education, which oversees Kentucky public universities and colleges, and move its authority to the Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority.
House Bill 257, sponsored by Rep. Steven Doan, R-Erlanger, would move CPE’s responsibilities to KHEAA, which oversees and provides state financial aid, including the Kentucky Education Excellence Scholarship program. It would also add student members to the KHEAA board.
CPE is over many parts of public universities and the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, including tuition ceilings, approving and overseeing academic programs, and the state’s performance funding model, which distributes state appropriations to schools.
In a press release, Doan said the bill was created “in an effort to reduce government size and waste.”
“Kentucky’s experiment with CPE controlling higher education has failed to produce the greatest yield for Kentucky’s students,” said Doan in a statement. “CPE’s accomplishments include a decade of record enrollment decline across the board of Kentucky’s institution, including record drops in enrollment for low-income students. Kentucky can no longer withstand another year of higher education being led by CPE.”
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CPE was created by the 1997 Kentucky Postsecondary Education Improvement Act. CPE oversees the budget requests for schools in the state, and approves tuition rates, admissions criteria and academic programs. CPE also licenses non-profit and for-profit colleges offering bachelor’s degrees in Kentucky.
The proposed bill would give authority to the executive director of KHEAA, taking the place of the president of CPE. CPE has just under 100 employees, according to its online staff directory.
A CPE spokesperson said Tuesday the council would need to review the bill before commenting.
“We cannot stand idly when the government is wastefully taking chances and experimenting with our kids’ future,” Doan said. “As state representative, my job requires me to provide government accountability and think out of the box for solutions. CPE is not the solution working for my district or Kentucky.”
While statewide college enrollment is lower now than it was 10 years ago, last week Gov. Andy Beshear announced Kentucky leads the country in college enrollment growth from last fall to this fall, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. While some universities across the state have seen declining enrollment, the University of Kentucky has reported record enrollment the last several years.
Last year, Senate Resolution 98 directed CPE to conduct a study that looked at a variety of higher education topics, including “the structure of higher education governance.” Among one of the suggestions from the study was integrating KHEAA into CPE to “strengthen alignment of statewide, strategic higher education goals and the goals of state financial aid programs.”
The report, done by consulting company Ernst and Young, included four options for strengthening higher education governance in Kentucky, two of which centered around keeping the current structure but focusing on effectiveness or adding authority to CPE.
