An aerial photo of the University of Kansas campus in August 2015.

The top executive with the Kansas Board of Regents has a word he uses to describe the college-going rate in the state: Free-falling

The number of Kansas high school seniors who graduated and attended a public university in the state in 2011 was 54%. In 2021, the most recent year data is available, it had fallen to 43%.

So, the word “free-falling” does describe the problem. Half of the word may also describe the solution.

Free.

The Kansas Board of Regents — which oversees the state’s public higher education system — last week dove into the idea of making college courses free. But here’s the twist: The courses wouldn’t be free to your traditional college-age students. They’d be free to high school students.

As part of a three-day retreat where Regents began the process of setting goals for the next year, the group honed in on creating a more robust system that allows high school students to take courses for college credit while they are still in high school. The idea being that six or nine college credits in their pocket at high school graduation will give graduating seniors a strong nudge to actually enroll in one of the state’s universities or community colleges.

“The vision is there: All students graduate with a diploma plus,” said Regent Cynthia Lane.

The vision may be there, but thus far, the results aren’t as great as Regents have hoped. That may be because many families see the “plus” in “diploma plus” referring to the extra expenses those college courses will cost them.

Regents recognized that cost issue, and also said they can see that Kansas is falling behind what other states are doing to tackle the issue.

“Other states are experiencing the same drop,” Blake Flanders, president and CEO of the Regents said. “They are just being much more aggressive than we are.”

Look to the south to Oklahoma. Last year the state legislature provided nearly $12 million to entirely pay for the tuition costs of high school seniors — and some juniors — who want to take college courses while in high school, according to a national database from the Education Commission of the States. In addition, every public high school in Oklahoma is required to participate in the program.

The scene in Kansas looks much different. The state allows local school districts to cover the college tuition costs of their students, using existing school district funds, if the districts so choose. Kansas high schools aren’t required to offer any college courses or partner with any universities.

At their retreat, Regents showed interest in asking the Kansas Legislature next session to begin to change that. Lane said past research has estimated the Legislature would need to provide about $11 million to provide free tuition to high school students who qualify for free or reduced lunches. To provide tuition to a broader group of high school students, regardless of their income, likely would take about $20 million in state funding.

Flanders said it also would require some changes on the part of school districts and colleges. School districts need to be required to participate in the program, and universities, like KU, might have to be willing to accept less in tuition than what they normally would charge. Flanders said for the system to work fairly, there would need to be one statewide rate that all institutions charge for a college class taught in high school.

Some states have put those caps in place, while others — New Mexico is an example — require its public universities to waive tuition for high school students. Regents didn’t get into that level of detail last week, but they did start making the pitch that universities will benefit from these programs even if it doesn’t produce a lot of dollars upfront.

Regents said if universities are going to consistently grow enrollments, they have to get more aggressive with high school students because convincing someone to go to college several years after high school is laudable but not very lucrative.

“If they leave the custodial confines of the high school — and people get scattered in the wind — the recruitment becomes so much more difficult,” Flanders said. “It is hard.”

Oklahoma is far from the only example of a state that is using public money to pay for the college tuition of high school students. Of Kansas’ border states, Missouri is the only one that doesn’t have such a program, according to the national database.

Colorado has a system where state funding is provided to both school districts and higher education institutions to pay for tuition costs of high school students. Nebraska has a more limited program that focuses on providing funding to community colleges, who can then partner with local school districts to provide tuition-free classes. At least 22 states have at least one program that allows high school students to take post-secondary classes without paying tuition, according to the database.

Regents, however, were cautioned that providing a tuition-free path might not be enough to turn the tide. Heather Morgan, executive director of the Kansas Association of Community Colleges, said her group hears pushback about higher education in general.

“With the new state school board and school boards becoming more polarized across the state, we are starting to hear at our colleges anti-higher ed messages in high school coming out of those boards,” Morgan said.

She said community college presidents sometimes have difficulty convincing local school board members of the benefit of offering college courses at the high school level.

“It is one of those messages we can’t escape because our presidents are hearing it from local school boards now: ‘I just want my kid to be a kid. I don’t want them to take college classes,'” Morgan said.

Higher education’s declining reputation with a growing segment of the population often hung over the discussions of Regents at last week’s retreat. The state already is facing a “demographic cliff” that will challenge universities to grow enrollment as Kansas high schools produce fewer graduates as birth rates have declined.

Adding to the challenges, though, are those declining college-going rates. Not only are there fewer graduates, a smaller percentage of them are choosing to go to college, either due to cost concerns or they have a negative view of what higher education provides.

Regents expressed concern that the state’s economic prosperity will suffer if Kansas has fewer college graduates in the future. For towns like Lawrence, who rely on students to power their economies, a quick look at the data shows the challenges of keeping to that model for economic success.

Data from the Regents show that during its heyday, higher education in the state was growing rapidly. The 10-year period from 1965 to 1975 produced a 50% increase in the number of students enrolled in universities, colleges, and trade schools across the state. In the most recent 10 years, total enrollment in the state’s higher education system has declined by 15%

KU has not been immune from the trend, although it also hasn’t been hit as hard as some others. During the last five years, the number of students enrolled at KU has declined by more than 4.5%, with a steep drop of nearly 14% in graduate student enrollment. KU leaders have been implementing changes related to recruitment and student retention. KU leaders are quietly optimistic that it will have one of the largest freshmen classes in memory when the school year begins later this month.

Nonetheless, universities should expect to make significant changes in how they do business, according to many of the conversations at the Regents retreat. Flanders said the reality likely is that universities are “going to have to do something very different,” just to stop the free-fall in college-going rates, let alone reverse them.

The key word in that phrase, he said, is ‘do.”

“It is not going to happen organically,” he said.

•••

Regents also tentatively agreed on several other goals, which they will formally approve at a meeting in September. They include:

• An increased focus on literacy training for college students studying to become K-12 teachers, particularly elementary teachers. Both higher education and K-12 leaders have expressed concerns about literacy rates in the state. Regents said they are interested in education schools at state universities crafting curriculum that better emphasizes the “science of reading” method, which uses research on how a child’s brain learns to read.

• Development of a universal set of classes that could be taken at universities and community colleges across the state by students who are preparing for a degree in nursing. The goal of the program would be to ensure that classes taken at any of the public universities and colleges in the state would transfer to one of the state’s nursing schools.

• Continue work on reviewing the multitude of academic programs offered at the state’s universities. The Regents in the past year have approved a new system for reviewing programs to ensure they are not overly duplicative of other programs offered in the state, and that each program has sufficient demand from students.