College Commitment Day, May 1st, has passed. Every senior in America had to put a deposit down by midnight. Meanwhile, my interest was piqued and I started digging through data online; specifically, the Common Data Set (CDS) for each of Kentucky’s public universities, the standardized form every U.S. college submits each year. Section C7 of the CDS asks each school to declare — on the record — what factors it considers in admission and how important each one is. Those factors: Very Important, Important, Considered, Not Considered. The CDS is the closest thing higher education has to a sworn statement.
Read Kentucky’s data side by side and the picture you get is of six universities not really competing for the same students anymore.
What Each University Says it Values
Acceptance rate, middle-50% test scores, average GPA, and what each school’s own CDS lists as Very Important in admissions. Most recent published cycle:
- University of Kentucky — Acceptance rate 93%. Middle 50% SAT 1070–1270, ACT 21–28. Average unweighted GPA 3.58. Lists rigor of curriculum, GPA, class rank, and standardized test scores all as Very Important. The flagship.
- University of Louisville — Acceptance rate 81%. Middle 50% SAT 1010–1220, ACT 19–27. Average unweighted GPA 3.64. The other research university.
- Murray State University — Acceptance rate 77%. Middle 50% SAT 1020–1230, ACT 21–27. Average GPA 3.57. The most academically selective regional comprehensive in the state, despite the smallest applicant pool.
- Eastern Kentucky University — Acceptance rate 78%. Middle 50% SAT 930–1190, ACT 17–24. Average GPA 3.35. Public framing: “School of Opportunity.”
- Northern Kentucky University — Acceptance rate ~91%. Middle 50% ACT 19–25. Cincinnati commuter pull.
- Western Kentucky University Acceptance rate 97%. Middle 50% SAT 920–1140, ACT 18–25. Average admitted-student GPA 3.42. Per WKU’s own published admission policy: any Kentucky student with a 2.0 unweighted GPA can be admitted via the Composite Admission Index. Anyone with a 2.5 or above is admitted automatically, no test score required.
I’m not pointing this out to dunk on any school. Open access is a real public-mission commitment and a 2.0 floor is how a public university reaches first-generation college students and rural Kentucky kids whose schools never offered AP Chemistry. There’s a real argument for the floor.
The problem is what happens at the ceiling. WKU has the highest acceptance rate of any public university in Kentucky, the lowest published academic floor, and — by published merit-aid figures — the smallest scholarship offer in the state for the kids the Commonwealth has spent 43 years certifying as the best of the best. A school can pursue open access and academic prestige. A school cannot, with the budget Kentucky’s legislature has given it, do both at the same time. WKU has chosen — both financially and demonstrably — to be aggressive at the bottom of its admission pool and indifferent at the top.
The receipts are on every Kentucky kid’s kitchen table this week in the financial aid letters they had to choose between by midnight last night.
The Poachers are Reading the Same Documents
Here is what nobody in Frankfort wants to admit out loud: The schools competing hardest for Kentucky’s top students are not actually in Kentucky.
Look at the official Kentucky Performing Arts list of Governor’s School for the Arts scholarships. The GSA is the state-funded summer program for the most talented teenage performers and visual artists in Kentucky — the kids who can sing, paint, dance, act. The list is what every Kentucky-funded GSA alumna and alumni sees when she or he’s deciding where to spend the next four years. Out-of-state schools are on it.
- Savannah College of Art and Design (Georgia) — Minimum $1,500 a year, plus portfolio-based bumps.
- Art Academy of Cincinnati — $10,000 over four years plus $2,500 a year on top of entrance scholarships.
- Kansas City Art Institute — $14,000–$22,000 a year, renewable.
- Nossi College of Art (Nashville) — $1,600 a year, renewable.
- University of Indianapolis — $2,500 a year.
- University of Southern Indiana — Out-of-state tuition discounts and waivers stacked with talent scholarships of up to $2,500.
- Millikin University (Illinois) — $1,000 a year, renewable.
An out-of-state private art school in Georgia, a private college in Indiana, and an art school in Kansas City all show up on the official Kentucky GSA list. They are out there recruiting Kentucky kids by name with money. They are reading the same Common Data Sets we just read. They know which Kentucky students have which credentials and they have decided that a Kentucky kid is worth poaching.
Now look at what the schools in Kentucky offer the same student, by percentage of in-state cost of attendance, from the Kentucky Governor’s Scholars Program scholarship page:
- Murray State — 100% of tuition.
- Morehead State — 100% of tuition under the Governor’s Award+.
- Kentucky State — 100% of tuition, room, board and fees.
- University of Kentucky — 100% of tuition (Tier 1) for top GSA students; competitive limited GSP awards (not everyone from GSP gets it.)
- University of Louisville — Up to about 30% of in-state cost.
- Eastern Kentucky — Roughly 31% of in-state cost for GSP at the 3.8 GPA/28 ACT threshold, and not awarded to all who qualify; about 19% for GSA, audition-based.
- Northern Kentucky — About 17%.
- Western Kentucky University — $1,500 a year. That’s just 5.4% of WKU’s published in-state cost of attendance at $27,718. The lowest in the state. 5.4%!
The university an hour from Nashville, sitting in a city that has been investing in gifted education for forty-five years, offers Kentucky’s certified best students the smallest merit-aid percentage on the list — beaten by Murray, Morehead, UK and UofL, beaten by every regional comprehensive in the state, and matched on the GSA list by Savannah College of Art and Design. An out-of-state private art school in Georgia is paying the same percentage to poach a Kentucky kid that Kentucky’s own regional university is paying to keep them.
This is the part where you stop caring about institutional strategy and start caring about the kids.
The Kids You Actually Know
Take a step away from the spreadsheet for a moment. Picture the senior at South Warren High School with a 3.7 GPA and 26 ACT score who wants to be a pediatrician — the kind of kid whose pre-med pipeline runs through WKU’s biology department. The kid who’d come back to Bowling Green and open a practice off Cave Mill or near the Med Center. She’s looking at four financial aid offers. Two are from out-of-state. One is from Murray, the other from WKU. Murray will provide free tuition. WKU offers a $1,500 supplemental scholarship and an $8,000 academic award she could have gotten with no GSP credential at all. The out-of-state schools have flown her up for accepted-student weekends and given her a poster with her name on the dorm room door. She’s 18-years-old. What does she do?
Picture the senior at Greenwood with a 3.9 and a 29 ACT who’s going to be a state legislator someday — the kid whose name will be on a sign in Bowling Green or Frankfort by the time she’s 40, the one who’ll vote on the higher education budget that funds the program she was in during WKU’s Gifted and Talented Super Saturdays. She completed Governor’s Scholars at Centre last summer. She has been raised here and knows exactly what WKU has and exactly what its tuition costs. She needs 100% tuition or at least a competitive offer that beats private in-state schools like Centre that offer $140,000 total ($35,000 annually for four years). But they are getting a 5.4% offer from WKU. What does she do?
Now picture the senior at Bowling Green High School with a 4.0 and a 32 ACT who wants to teach high school English — the kid who’d come back to Warren County in five years and teach your grandkids. She got into Vanderbilt with a Peabody scholarship that covers about 40% of total cost. She got into WKU with $1,500. Vanderbilt is, on average, a better English program. WKU is home. The math, every year, points at the better program with the bigger offer. What does she do?
I know what they all do. We all do. They leave.
What That Costs Kentucky Over Time
It’s been costing Kentucky for fifteen years, and the data has been there the whole time.
Per the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, only 23.4% of Kentucky adults age 25-64 hold a bachelor’s degree. The U.S. average is 35%. Kentucky ranks fourth-from-the-bottom nationally for bachelor’s-degree attainment. The state’s own goal — 60% postsecondary attainment of any kind by 2030, is at risk. CPE’s own analysts predict that 63% of all Kentucky jobs by 2031 will require some education or training after high school. The state isn’t currently producing graduates fast enough to fill that gap. More than 600,000 Kentucky adults have started college and never finished.
The kids who do graduate aren’t all staying. Research from the W.E. Upjohn Institute, using LinkedIn migration data, found that rural states are net exporters of college graduates and the labor markets that import graduates are the metros — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Nashville. The same study found that “regional public universities tend to produce the greatest number of 4-year college graduates who remain and work in-state per dollar of state funding” — meaning WKU, EKU, NKU, and Murray are statistically the institutions doing the most for in-state retention, and yet are the institutions whose state appropriations have been cut hardest in real dollars since 2008.
The state pays for the degree. Other states get the worker. Researchers studying Eastern Kentucky’s college-graduate out-migration call it “a public subsidy of a private good.”
And Here is What the Legislature Did About it Last Month
On April 17, the Kentucky General Assembly overrode Governor Andy Beshear’s veto of HB 490, which lets Kentucky’s public universities terminate faculty — including tenured faculty — with thirty days’ notice for “bona fide financial reasons.” The standard includes “low enrollment in academic offerings” or “a mismatch between costs and revenues in a department, program, or major.” The Republican supermajority moved the bill through Senate committee in fifteen minutes after sitting on it for six weeks, then rolled the Governor’s veto a week later.
Beshear’s veto called the standard “ambiguous and vague” and warned the bill could be “misused to target people, programs and research based purely on subject, politics, or many other unconstitutional grounds, under the guise of economic necessity.” The legislature overrode the veto anyway. Same session: House Bill 4, banning DEI offices, hiring practices, and curricula at every Kentucky public university. Same session: a near-receivership oversight regime over Kentucky State, the state’s HBCU.
This is the legislative environment Kentucky’s public universities are operating in right now: shrinking real-dollar appropriations, expanded faculty termination authority, banned DEI infrastructure, an HBCU under financial control, and a 13% drop in the high school graduate pipeline. Then we ask the same universities to compete with Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, Vanderbilt, Centre, and Transylvania for the same Kentucky kids — using institutional aid budgets the legislature has been cutting for fifteen years.
Of course the kids are leaving. The legislature has been forcing them to.
What This Looks Like in WABBLES
Bachelor’s degree or higher, age 25+, by county, most recent Census data:
- Warren County — 27.5%. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
- Bowling Green — 31%.
- Simpson County (Franklin) — 18.8%. U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts.
- Allen County (Scottsville) — 18.4%.
- Barren County (Glasgow) — 18.3%.
- Logan County (Russellville)v 16.1%.
- Edmonson County (Brownsville) — 9.3%.
- Butler County (Morgantown) — 7.5%.
Population-weighted, the seven WABBLES counties average about 22% bachelor’s-or-higher. Kentucky statewide is 23.4%. The U.S. is 35%. Edmonson and Butler sit at less than a quarter of the national rate. Warren County is a college-educated island. Bowling Green city is an island within the island. Step five miles outside the city limits and the rate halves.
That is the workforce we’re asking to staff the GM Corvette plant’s quality engineering team, the Med Center’s research wing, the Toyotetsu and Magna corridors, the WKU College of Health and Human Services pipeline. The kids we’re losing are the kids we needed.
So What?
The Common Data Set tells you which Kentucky public universities are recruiting which kind of student. The brain-drain data tells you what happens to the graduates. The legislature tells you what kind of fight the universities are walking into. And the scholarship offers — published, on official state websites, on every Kentucky kid’s kitchen table — show you exactly which institutions are willing to put their money where their public mission is supposed to be.
Bowling Green’s economic future depends on a college-educated workforce. The math says we’re already short on those workers in six of the seven WABBLES counties. The math says the public university we built our region around offers the kids the Commonwealth has certified as our best less merit aid, by percentage of cost, than every other public in the state and most of the privates. The math says the legislature has been cutting the budgets that fund those scholarships for fifteen years while writing speeches about retention.
And the math says we are losing, every May, the next pediatrician at the Med Center, the next state representative from Warren County, the next high school English teacher at BG High, the next industrial engineer at the Corvette plant. The kids who would have come back. The kids the city is going to need in twenty years and won’t have. We are losing them to Indiana, Tennessee, Centre, Transylvania, Murray, Morehead, and an out-of-state art school in Savannah, Georgia, that is paying the same percentage of cost to poach a Kentucky kid that WKU is paying to keep her.
That is what brain drain looks like before anyone uses the word. It looks like a 43-year-old promise from the legislature that the state never funded. It looks like a CDS that tells you who’s selling what to whom. It looks like a 5.4% scholarship offer to the smartest senior at South Warren High School next May. It looks like every accepted-student weekend at every out-of-state school in the South where a Kentucky kid spends a Saturday and decides this is where I’d actually be wanted.
The kids are doing the math the legislature won’t.
The least we can do is read it with them.
Sources: University of Kentucky Common Data Set summary; University of Louisville Common Data Set summary; WKU 2025-26 Undergraduate Catalog admission policy; WKU Office of Institutional Research, Common Data Set archive; Kentucky Governor’s Scholars Program scholarship page; Kentucky Performing Arts, Governor’s School for the Arts scholarship opportunities; Kentucky Education and Labor Cabinet, GSP mission statement; WKU News, “Gatton Graduates Offered Millions of Dollars in College Scholarships”; Carol Martin Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science (Wikipedia); WKU Herald, “EKU surpasses WKU as Kentucky’s third-largest public university”; WKU News, “WKU reports record retention, rising graduation rates and strong financial performance”; Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education attainment update; ReUp Education / WKU SACRAO 2026 case study; W.E. Upjohn Institute, “Brain Drain or Brain Gain?”; Marshall Digital Scholar, “Water Runs Downhill: The Realities of Brain Drain in Eastern Kentucky”; Lexington Herald-Leader on HB 490 veto override; Inside Higher Ed on Kentucky HB 4; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Bowling Green, Ky.: Cars, College and Caves”.