To begin, the Bluegrass Institute has always been a fan of the AdvanceKentucky program to get more Kentucky kids into and successful with Advanced Placement courses. Over the past half-decade the total number of successful AP students earning college creditable scores of 3 to 5 on the AP exams has risen notably in Kentucky. Most of the increase is due to the AdvanceKentucky program.

Still, when I looked through a briefing on the 2016 status of the AdvanceKentucky program, I was very concerned by the two slides shown below.

The first slide shows the percent of students eligible for the federal free and reduced cost school lunch program who went on to college in Kentucky. AdvanceKentucky shows there has been a decline in the percentage of our state’s lunch eligible students who went to college regardless of whether or not the students took part in the AdvanceKentucky program. This clearly is not a good trend.

The second slide shows the same thing happened to the state’s racial minority children.

These are very serious developments and add still more impetus to the Bluegrass Institute’s contention that Kentucky’s current public education system is not really serving disadvantaged children well.

Sharp readers will note that the data only cover graduates up to 2012. I am not sure why this AdvanceKentucky information is somewhat dated, but I am looking at more recent data on college going that was just released by the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics, so stay tuned.