How successful are Kentucky’s high school graduates?

The Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics (KCEWS) has been assembling an ever-increasing collection of statistics about Kentucky for several years, and some of the most recent information about the success of Kentucky high school graduates in postsecondary education is really interesting.

KCHEWS just issued this graph that shows how high school graduates from 2010 fared in each of the next six years of their lives in the college world.

2010 High School Graduates' Degree Success Rate After 6 Years

(Click here and then select the College Completion button to access)

This graphic shows that even six years after high school graduation, only 20.0 percent of those graduates had been able to earn a Bachelors’ Degree or higher.

Another 5.3 percent had earned an Associates’ Degree and 3.4 percent received some sort of certificate or diploma from a technical training program.

Thus, only 28.7 percent of the high school graduates of 2010 had any sort of success in postsecondary education. That’s somewhat shy of the Kentucky Department of Education’s claim that in the high school class of 2010 a total of 34 percent was “College and Career Ready.” This leaves 71.3 percent of the high school graduates in Kentucky in 2010 who either never tried to enter postsecondary education or were not successful after six years in the postsecondary system.

Back in 2010 Kentucky reported a high school graduation rate of 76.7 percent using the older Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate formula (AFGR) (the current Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate didn’t come into use until the Class of 2013). The AFGR rate indicates that for every 100 entering ninth grade students in the fall of 2006, only 76.7 graduated four years later in the Spring of 2010.But, the new KCEWS data indicates that of those 76.7 students who did graduate in 2010, only 28.7 percent, or 22 students out of the original 100 entering ninth graders, were able to succeed in postsecondary education.

That’s pretty low odds, if you ask me.

There is a six-year delay to learn about how our high school graduates really make out in later pursuits. So, it will be some time before we find out how well Kentucky’s High School Graduating Class of 2017 performed after they left school. However, with social promotion clearly a serious problem in Kentucky, I am not ready to accept any claims of victory at this time.