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is up to the UK Board, its faculty, and its staff. He stated that if we go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning and say that we are not going to pursue this, that will be it. It's really up to us. It is our responsibility to bring to the state and to the leaders of the state why it is vitally important for the state of Kentucky, not just this institution, to have a Top 20 institution and for us to strive to achieve that purpose.
At that point, he began a slide presentation, which he used throughout most of the remainder of his address.
FCR 11 is a financial document. It lays out in broad terms the numbers of faculty and students that would be involved in achieving Top 20 status and the financing modes needed in order to pursue this challenge. The Top 20 Business Plan will be followed by the Strategic Plan that will start up next semester. Preparation of the strategic plan will be different from last time. The strategic plan is what will actually put into place the needed operating principles to drive this plan to fruition.
President Todd is pleased with the progress that has been made at this institution over the past eight years, and he hopes the Board shares his pleasure in those achievements. There was no definition of exactly what Top 20 would be. There was no plan put in place when it was legislated in 1997. Had the legislators spelled out some of the things that they wanted UK to achieve, it is likely that UK would already have exceeded those goals. Enrollment has gone up 10 percent, although it has been held down somewhat in the past few years because of lack of budget. Graduation rates have performed extremely well, growing from 48 percent to 60 percent. A lot of work has gone into that, and there is still more work to do.
Research expenditures started at under $125 million and are now almost $300 million, a clear testament to the faculty and the staff of this institution. Our endowment has gone from under $200 million to its current level of around $556 million as of last month, even during a time of dot com failures, 9-11, and the Enron debacle. The way that UK's supporters have stepped up is extremely impressive. We have taken the number of endowed chairs from 22 to 95 and endowed professors from 45 to 210. To achieve this type of improvement was one of the principal reasons for passage of Bucks for Brains, to try to let us catch up with the number of endowed positions in our benchmark states like North Carolina and others, the states with institutions that are in the Top 20.
One of the points that must be made is: Why does it make a difference if Kentucky has a Top 20 institution? Kentuckians seem to know exactly "who we should play in basketball, how we should play, why we lost the [2005] North Carolina game. . . ." But people need help in the discovery of how they could benefit by having a Top 20 university in the state. President Todd remarked that he had written an op ed piece on this topic that appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal and that will be published in the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Categories really spell it out, however. Median household income, population on Medicaid, below-poverty-level population, and populations with bachelor's degrees-these statistics are key in explaining the benefits of having a great educational institution.