The Engaged University: Northern Kentucky University

From 7,500 to 15,000 students in 10 years, with a goal of 26,000 by 2020, Northern Kentucky is moving at high speed, with a focus on its relationship with its surrounding community. Learn more in this National CrossTalk feature:

What has put this once-provincial campus on the higher education map is its seemingly single-minded push to improve the lot of its surrounding region. It’s not some vague pledge. (Nor is it purely altruistic; if the public university helps the community, this perfectly reasonable strategy goes, the community will stand behind it.) A lynchpin of a regional development plan Votruba and others at the school coauthored, NKU has promised to help create some 50,000 new, high-paying jobs by 2015 and also help to double the number of Kentuckians with bachelor’s degrees to 800,000, as a means of supplanting the state’s traditional economic mainstays of coal-mining, horse-breeding, bourbon and tobacco, with advanced manufacturing, finance, healthcare, business services, and technology. That’s the reason for the push to boost enrollment—and the attraction, it seems, for rising numbers of arriving students.