Column by Katie Perkowski. E-mail [email protected].

Remember the cliche statement, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”? This is precisely what UK’s Top 20 Business Plan is all about: setting the goal of reaching bars set by the best universities (the stars, if you will).

In an Oct. 27 interview with the Kernel, UK President Lee Todd said he hoped the next president would be one who worked toward the Top 20 Business Plan. Todd said a positive of the plan was that students and faculty push themselves to new heights in hopes of meeting higher standards.

The UK Budget Office website lists the goals of the Top 20 Business Plan, the positive impacts it could in the state, the obstacles it faces and the reasons it is a necessary goal.

“Only 21 percent of Kentuckians have a bachelor’s degree or higher,” the website says. “The national average is 27.2 percent. The impact is predictable: Kentucky’s median household income is $36,786. That is almost $8,000 below the national average.”

According to the executive summary of the plan Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness Connie Ray supplied, one of UK’s goals is to increase its number of graduates by increasing the student population. By 2020, UK will increase its enrollment by 7,000 students to 34,000 and its graduation rate by 12 percentage points to 72 percent, according to the summary. To do this, it also needs to increase its faculty, and the summary says it will add 625 members by 2020.

While these are good goals to have, the funding obstacles standing in the way of reaching them are not easy to overcome. In the Apr. 26 Kernel article, faculty trustee Joe Peek said the salary freezes cause the university to lose some of its best faculty and staff members to other universities paying salaries closer to market value.

“And that absolutely hurts the quality of this university and the ability of this university to become better,” he said.

How can UK increase its faculty by 625 if it cannot even afford to pay those faculty members amounts closer to what universities in the top-20-range are paying? Sure, Todd has come up with creative ways to reward UK’s faculty, like receiving a floating holiday which they can use when they want and increasing the length of their Christmas break, but keeping the faculty is necessary to become a top-20 university around is difficult without the state’s appropriate funding for the plan.

The Top 20 Plan is about a positive change in Kentucky and a move forward.

So, even though the Top 20 Plan lacks significant funding from the state to realistically achieve its goal by 2020, the fact that UK administrators and faculty continue to work towards gets UK’s students closer to landing amongst the stars — and to abandon this plan would only be counterproductive to a flagship university’s mission.