Education
From K–12 to post-doctoral programs, the Kansas City region is teeming with educational assets that underpin the local economy.
Two highly regarded state university systems. Three community college systems highly responsive to work-force needs. Dozens of high-performing private colleges and public school districts. Stellar private K–12 education.
All in one metropolitan area. That math works to the advantage of students, parents and businesses in the Kansas City region, who are blessed with a panoply of educational options at virtually every step of what educators call the K-20 continuum—kindergarten through post-doctoral work.
Flagship universities lead the way, both with the ranges of academic offerings and the numbers of students enrolled. The University of Missouri–Kansas City bears the standard for the state’s four-campus university system. UMKC’s Bloch School of Management and its Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation have been globally recognized as leaders in business education, and the campus near the Country Club Plaza also plays key roles in allied health and performing-arts instruction.
The Bloch School just this semester opened its new $32 million home, courtesy of a donation from namesake Henry Bloch, co-founder of H&R Block. And the Conservatory of Music and Dance has just undertaken a drive to raise $70 million for a Downtown campus to leverage the benefits of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Julia Irene Kauffman’s $20 million challenge grant primed the pump for that effort earlier this year.
If successful, that campaign would greatly enhance the university’s links to Downtown; UMKC also aligns with Truman Medical Center as a teaching hospital for its four combined medical programs on Hospital Hill. There, the next cohorts of physicians, nurses, pharmacists and dentists are trained each year.
On the Kansas side, the state’s two leading public universities have strong presences. The University of Kansas has long been an anchor for the area just east of Midtown, with its campus housing the School of Medicine. That’s part of a complex that includes the University of Kansas Hospital, a public health authority separate from the university, but serves as a training ground for the medical school’s doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other allied-health professionals.
More recently, the advent of a life-sciences research sector has drawn Kansas State University into the metropolitan area in a big way. Its Olathe Innovation Campus opened in 2011, with a mission of fostering research to produce the kinds of spin-off companies considered vital to the changing business infrastructure of this region, particularly those focused on animal health.
The five-campus Metropolitan Community College system complements and collaborates with its Kansas counterparts, Johnson County Community College and Kansas City Kansas Community College. The campuses have already reach accord on an in-state tuition structure for students from either state, and have agreements to send students to each other for certain academic programs, to avoid duplication of services.
Private colleges abound, including those that call the metro area home—Park University in Parkville and a pair of Kansas City Catholic universities, Rockhurst and Avila, and MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe. But Kansas City also has proven fertile recruiting ground for regional private schools seeking a foothold in this market by opening branches here, including Baker University, Ottawa University and Columbia College. Even Washington University from St. Louis, and its prestigious Olin School of Business, have found it worthwhile to set up operations in this region. Not far from Kansas City is Benedictine College in Atchison, another Catholic institution.
On the K–12 front, Kansas City, like many large cities, faces challenges with its urban public school systems. But the area is ringed by K–12 systems that produce students who score well above state averages on the American College Test, the standard qualifying entrance exam for students in this part of the nation.
The gold standard for K–12 academic excellence is the Blue Valley School District in central Johnson County, on the Kansas side. High school students in that district for years have been atop the ACT rankings in the metropolitan area, and their composite average score of 24.9 in 2012 was better than all but seven private high schools in the region.
Other high performers include Blue Valley’s two neighbors, the Shawnee Mission (24.0) and Olathe (23.7) districts, and the Park Hill and Liberty districts in Missouri, which tied for top honors on their side of the state line in 2012 with composite scores of 23.3.
Private education also offers some outstanding options. The average ACT score in Kansas for 2012 was 21.9; in Missouri, it was 21.6, but the region boasts 20 private, parochial and faith-based high school programs that beat those numbers last year. Leading the way was the Pembroke Hill School, which produced back-to-back composite scores of 29.0 the past two years.
Right behind was Rockhurst High with average composites of 27.0 in both 2012 and 2011. Neither option, however, is cheap, but both offer scholarships. 