Yesterday, Kentucky Commissioner of Education Wayne Lewis presented the State of Education briefing for Kentucky. As I wrote yesterday, the presentation was direct and revealing. And, nowhere was it more revealing than in the rather disturbing story about what happened to the Kentucky public school senior class of 2010. The table below tells this somber story.

According to the slides Dr. Lewis used in his presentation (not online yet, I had to request from the department), there were 37,217 seniors in the Class of 2010. Of that group, a total of 37,053 by my calculation were successfully tracked through 2017 by the Kentucky Center for Statistics, who Dr. Lewis says provided him this information.

As of 2017, 11,336 of these individuals had no college experience. Their annual wage of only $19,990 reflects that.

Another 16,129 did go on to postsecondary education but never completed their studies. Their salary also reflects their low level of attainment at just $20,638 per year.

Next, a small group of individuals, 1,138 of them, did get a credential of some sort. They get a bit more in annual salary, $22,671 per year, as a result.

In addition, 1,599 got a 2-year degree and now earn $27,521 as a result.

Finally, 6,851 members of the Kentucky high school class of 2010 got a four-year degree. Their higher education is rewarded with a notably higher salary of $31,703 per year.

So, on average, more education in Kentucky definitely equals a better paycheck.

However, only a disappointing proportion of the 2010 high school seniors, less than 26 percent, got some sort of postsecondary credential or degree. That’s just not nearly good enough to meet the ever-expanding number of jobs that require more advanced education than a high schooler gets.

Some other things also need to be considered. The high school class of 2010 had a lot more than 37,000 members in its earlier high school years. Thousands of students originally in this class didn’t even get a high school diploma and almost certainly had even more gruesome salary outcomes than any of those shown in the table.

There are over 57,000 students listed in the ninth grade in the department’s Growth Factor/Ethnic report for 2006-07, the year this class entered the ninth grade (sorry, this report is no longer online but can be requested from the Kentucky Department of Education). That indicates somewhere around 20,000 more very unhappy education stories need to be told about the students who should have graduated in 2010.Kentucky MUST do better than this.