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Kentucky officials are being encouraged to expand the availability of Kentucky’s state-funded preschool program. The current program restricts eligibility to three- and four-year-old students with disabilities and four-year-old students with family incomes up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level.

The rapid rise in housing prices that occurred between 1990 and 2006 led many communities, including Lexington, Kentucky, to become concerned about whether individuals who hold “typical” jobs—such as teachers and police officers—could continue to live in the communities where they worked. Unfortunately, given the lack of recent detailed studies examining the affordability of housing in Fayette County (which contains Lexington), it is hard to know whether concerns about affordable housing are justified.

The passage of the Kentucky Educational Reform Act (KERA) in 1990 had a dramatic impact on the funding of primary and secondary education in the state. The amount of money spent on education increased significantly with the passage of KERA with districts in rural areas of the state experiencing the largest growth in spending (Hoyt, 1999). This has led to a decline in the disparity between rural and urban districts in education spending. However, despite the increase in educational spending, Kentucky still lags behind the typical state in the U.S. in spending per student (Troske, 2008).

Kentucky has consistently been one of the poorest states in the country between 1939 and the present. On top of this already low level of income, Kentucky has experienced fairly slow growth in output in recent years. Between 1997 and 2004, Kentucky had an average annual growth in real gross state product (GSP) of 1.6 percent, ranking 43 rd in terms of growth in GSP relative to the rest of the states.

The offering of tax and other location-based incentives to firms considering locating operations in a state, as well as firms with existing operations, has become a common practice of both state and local governments in the past thirty years. However, these programs are not without their critics. Some of the concerns about these programs arise from the lack of strong evidence, either supportive or critical of these programs.

This report presents the results of our nine-month effort to measure the economic value of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS), both directly to its students around the state, and indirectly to all residents of Kentucky. We find wide public support for KCTCS, and a willingness to pay for an expansion of its programs. We also find a large variation in the individual returns to community and technical college education, in terms of expected work-life earnings by gender and by region of the state.