By Rachel Aretakis

Proposed legislation would require UK and the University of Lousville to play each other in men’s basketball and football each year, but it is more about graduation rates than sports.

“This bill is not about UofL and UK playing basketball and football,” said state Sen. Tim Shaughnessy about Senate Bill 45.

“The fact of the matter is (graduation rates) aren’t increasing at the levels they need to,” he said. “The purpose of the legislation is to bring this up as an issue, to set this up as a priority and to engage the universities.”

While the bill has caught the attention of Kentucky sports fans, it would affect Kentucky’s public universities and their governing boards.

The proposal calls for the universities’ Board of Trustees and Board of Regents to adopt a strategic plan “to increase the number of students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree in a minimum amount of time and course hours accrued,” according to the bill.

Each university’s governing board will create the plan with goals, strategies, incentives, programs and timelines to do this.

Shaughnessy said the plan would be unique to each university and its student body.

“Too few students are graduating from college,” he said. “At the University of Kentucky, less than a third of … attending students graduate in four years.”

Shaughnessy said at the University of Louisville, 19 percent of students graduate in four years.

This isn’t the first time the bill has been introduced to legislature.

“The last two years, it hasn’t done very well,” he said. But he said the issue needs to be talked about and people need to be held accountable for progress.

Shaughnessy said he included the part about requiring UK and UofL to play each year in men’s basketball and football in order to draw attention to the legislation.

“At a time when every other state in the nation is putting an emphasis on increasing bachelor degree attainment, Kentucky needs to get with the program,” he said.

He said universities need the same standard of success that they require of sports programs.

“Athletics shouldn’t be the only aspect of higher education in Kentucky where there is accountability at the top,” he said.

Shaughnessy is encouraged by President Eli Capilouto and his recent plans to renovate UK’s campus, and is supportive of those efforts. But graduating students on time, he said, should be the core mission of an institution.

UK Spokesman Jay Blanton said university officials had no comment about the issue.

“It’s great to be a top-20 research institution,” Shaughnessy said, “but if the university cannot have a commitment to graduate students in four years, that isn’t going to be the institution that discovers a cure for cancer.”