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President Todd said the graduate and professional enrollment goals were 7,500. The university is at 7,252. Some of that impact is because of 9-11 and the decreased number of incoming international students.
The university's undergraduate enrollment goal is 18,707. It is now at 18, 500. It has been necessary to watch the size of the freshman class because of budget constraints and the inability to add faculty. The administration did not feel that it could continue to grow the freshman class any faster; therefore, the numbers have been held back. There was, however, an increase this year.
The recent CPE meeting released information showing that the overall population for Kentucky increased only 1.5 percent this past year, which is not enough to get toward the 2020 goal. A lot of that increase was in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS), and UK probably had the largest increase for undergraduates in the state of Kentucky this last year.
President Todd said that the university wants to increase the retention rate for undergraduate students. The goal was to increase the first- to second-year retention rate to 83 percent. While it appears that the university will not make that goal, there was a slight increase this year over last year. He pointed out that this goal has not been accomplished, and there is still work to do.
President Todd reported that the six-year graduation rate goal was exceeded two years ago, but it was not exceeded in the fall of 2004. Therefore, this goal has not been met. Other state four-year institutions are at 30 percent and 40 percent in this measure. Being up in the area of 60 percent is somewhat pleasing for the administration. The goal is to be at 70 percent, and that is where UK's benchmarks are. The Top 20 Business Plan information that will be provided to the Board will show that this is the target that UK really needs to achieve by 2020.
President Todd talked about faculty salaries. While there have been increases, UK's benchmarks are increasing salaries to higher levels than UK. He said that he is going to put the highest premium for next year's budgeting process on faculty salaries. There have to be some increases in faculty and staff salaries in order to get where the university needs to go. In the Top 20 Business Plan, salaries will be put in as part of the budgeting process in order to try to catch up with this statistic. President Todd said that he is very pleased with the faculty that the university has been able to retain during this period of time and also with the faculty that have been recruited. The university has had some faculty leave because of salary conditions.
In the federal research dollars area, the latest number is for 2004. The university was at $130 million. With the performance this past year, UK should be above the goal of $140 million. President Todd said that he has asked the staff to look at the Top 20 universities that are above UK and plot their federal research dollars over time starting back in the 1940's and 1950's when the federal government started investing in research at universities to determine where those universities experienced their break point. If such research was done for the state of Kentucky, clearly when HB 1 passed in 1997 would have shown up as a transition time because that is when those numbers started growing for UK. President Todd said that he is very pleased