re: Ranking the SEC by Enrollment (Full-time Students)

quote:

---

quote: 8. Kentucky--28,094 9. Tennessee--27,523 These two kind of surprised me. Figured they would both be larger.

---

UK used to be much larger. The UK system once included 13 campuses around the state; Lexington was the main campus and 12 additional locations functioned as a feeder system of community colleges for the Commonwealth's 7 large regional universities.

The Lexington Community College, located in the heart of UK, served as a "dummy campus" for the university. If you graduated from a high school in Kentucky, you could attend LCC automatically. The idea was to remediate (a.k.a., weed out) students whose potential was lagging behind their age group and to make them ready for higher level education. Approximately 11,000 students attended LCC. UK's enrollment, including LCC once topped 34,000.

All that ended in 1997 when the Legislature decided to create the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS). UK lost all of the community college campuses, including LCC. It was physically moved across town to a brand new campus and renamed Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

KCTCS was expanded to 16 locations and now serves approximately 120,000 students as a stand-alone entity. UK is bouncing back in enrollment, reaching nearly 29,000 this Fall.

A campus-wide building project, including many new dorms, should push enrollment to approximately 37,000 within the next 5 years. I doubt Lexington could handle more than this.