HB 307: Kentucky Just Changed the Rules on Admissions. Is Your Team Ready?

My hometown view of Kentucky - Cumberland Falls, Corbin, Ky.

On April 7, Gov. Andy Beshear signed House Bill 307, officially titled the My Kentucky Future Act, into law. And if you lead enrollment or marketing at a Kentucky institution, this one lands squarely on your desk.

This isn’t aspirational policy. It’s a mandate with a hard deadline: July 1, 2027.

But the real work isn’t in reading the bill. It’s in answering the questions the bill creates — questions most enrollment teams haven’t gotten to yet. Here’s what the law actually does, and what your team needs to start working through right now.

What the HB 307 law actually does

HB 307 establishes a statewide proactive admissions program managed by the Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE).

In practical terms:

• Every fall, the Kentucky Department of Education will compile a list of every student who just completed junior year — including GPA, test scores, and academic information — and share it with the CPE.

• The Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority will share each student’s KEES scholarship amount as part of that data set.

• The CPE will send personalized letters to eligible students telling them they’ve been prospectively admitted — and what financial aid they may qualify for.

• By July 1, 2027, every public postsecondary institution must establish minimum academic qualifications for prospective admission and implement a CPE-approved common online application.

The letters are not binding admission offers. Institutions retain the right to conduct full application reviews. But the signal to students is clear: you belong here, and we’re telling you before you even thought to ask.

That’s a meaningful shift. And it puts Kentucky among a growing number of states, including Oregon, Montana, and Colorado, moving toward proactive admissions as an access and enrollment strategy.

The questions your team needs to answer

Here’s the thing about proactive admissions: the outreach doesn’t end with the CPE letter. It begins there. And the institutions that get this right won’t be the ones that benefited from the law, they’ll be the ones that responded to it fastest and most personally.

That means working through some questions you may not have asked before.

• What about students already in your pipeline?

If your institution has been purchasing names and working sophomores or juniors in your CRM, some of those students will receive a CPE proactive admissions letter in the fall of their senior year. That means two parallel tracks, your existing funnel and the state’s proactive outreach, converging on the same person.

If those tracks aren’t talking to each other, the student gets a disjointed or contradictory experience.

• Should every student be in the proactive admissions track?

Not necessarily, and this is a conversation most institutions aren’t having yet. The CPE sets minimum qualifications, but each institution sets its own threshold. That means there will be students who receive a CPE letter who may not ultimately be admissible at your institution, or who fall into a gray zone requiring additional review.

Your institution needs to define its internal admissions threshold relative to the CPE minimum and communicate that clearly and early. A student who receives a proactive admissions letter and then gets denied is a worse outcome than a student who never got the letter. That’s a trust and access problem that lands on enrollment.

A note for test-optional institutions: HB 307 requires institutions to set minimum criteria based on GPA or a combination of GPA and test scores. If your institution is test-optional, you have a real policy tension to resolve and a decision to make deliberately. Going GPA-only for your proactive criteria is permitted under the law and is likely your cleanest path. But whatever you set becomes a public-facing standard. Get ahead of it.

• How should these students be tagged in your CRM?

This matters more than it sounds. Proactive admits are a new top-of-funnel population: students who haven’t visited your website, attended a fair, or filled out an inquiry form. If you fold them into your existing pipeline without distinguishing them, you lose the ability to report on them accurately, communicate with them appropriately, or measure the program’s actual impact on your enrollment.

The approach that works: a two-part tagging system. Keep the source code that captures how a student originally entered your pipeline — that data matters for yield modeling and ROI. Add a secondary tag or field that flags proactive admissions status once the CPE letter goes out. Build the proactive admissions cohort as a distinct population that can overlap with existing pipeline populations, not replace them.

• Should you still purchase Kentucky names at all?

Yes, but the purpose and timing shift. The CPE letter goes to rising seniors based on junior-year data. That means there’s still a sophomore and early junior window where name purchases serve a relationship-building purpose the state program doesn’t cover.

Institutions that stop buying names entirely may find themselves with a senior-year proactive admit who has had zero prior relationship with them, and that’s a much harder yield challenge than a student who’s been hearing from you for two years.

What to do with a population you’ve never recruited before

The students arriving through proactive admissions are different from students who raised their hand. They didn’t visit your website. They didn’t request information. They got a letter from the state. Your communication strategy has to account for that.

One of the most effective ways to quickly understand and serve this population: ask them. Not with a formal survey, but with a short, warm, two-minute “tell us about yourself” moment, framed as help rather than data collection.

“We want to make sure we’re sending you the right information — not a pile of stuff that doesn’t apply to you. Take two minutes to tell us a little about yourself and we’ll do the rest.”

That’s a fundamentally different ask than “Please complete this survey.” And for first-gen students especially, the framing is everything.

A handful of simple questions, about college-going feelings, support systems, biggest concerns, and communication preferences, gives you enough to segment this new population into meaningful groups and route them to the right communication plan in your CRM. Students who don’t respond become their own segment: a named person reaches out, once, with a short text.

Low ask. Door left open.

The goal of that first 30 days isn’t the application. It’s the relationship. The application follows.

A word about first-generation students

One of the explicit goals of HB 307 is to reach students who might not have considered college a real possibility. That means a significant portion of your proactive admissions population will be first-generation students, students whose parents did not earn a four-year degree, who are more likely to be from lower-income households, more likely to be balancing work or caregiving, and more likely to ghost when they’re confused.

And boy do I have a love for first-gen students. (I was one, myself.)

If there's anything I've learned, it's that generic yield content will not move these students. What moves them is communication that feels human, explains the ‘why’ before the ask, and makes the financial picture clear without forcing them to decode it.

If you’re not sure where to start, I wrote a free playbook on exactly this: The First-Gen Marketing Playbook. Download it at squareoneky.com/first-gen-marketing-playbook.

A note for private institutions

HB 307 applies to public institutions, but if you lead enrollment or marketing at a private college or university in Kentucky or the region, this law is still of importanceto you. Your prospective students are Kentucky students. And the state just made the first move on them.

Private institutions don’t have access to the CPE data pipeline. But you can purchase many of the same students’ names through College Board and ACT, and the junior-year window, before the CPE letter lands in senior year, is now your most valuable Kentucky investment. Get there first. Be the institution they already know when the state makes its move.

The other conversation private institutions need to have: cost. A $45,000 sticker price against a $12,000 public tuition looks like a loss before the conversation starts, but in many cases, a private institution’s actual net price after institutional aid competes directly. You have to say that explicitly, early, and in plain language. Don’t make the student do the math.

One thing most private institutions aren’t saying — and should be: 

KEES — the Kentucky Educational Excellence Scholarship — is portable. Students can use it at private Kentucky colleges and universities, not just public ones. If a student qualifies for KEES, that award applies to your institution too. Lead with it. It’s a genuine, underused talking point that can meaningfully shift the cost conversation in your favor.

I'm free to talk to private institution leaders too, and honestly, I'd recommend it even more. If you’re thinking through your Kentucky strategy in light of this law, I’d love to talk.

What you should be doing right now

July 2027 sounds like a long way off, butI assure you it isn’t. Especially if your team is already stretched, or if you’re managing this transition alongside a leadership search, a rebrand, or a CRM implementation that’s still in flight.

Here’s where to start:

• Decide your admissions threshold. What are your minimum qualifications for prospective admission? If you’re test-optional, have you worked through what that means for your criteria? This decision needs to be made deliberately — it becomes a public-facing standard.
  

• Audit your existing pipeline for Kentucky students. Who’s already in your CRM as a sophomore or junior? What does your deduplication strategy look like when the CPE letter arrives for students you’ve already been nurturing?
  

• Build your proactive admissions population in Slate. What source code will you use? What fields or tags will store mindset and first-gen data? What communication plan will route students based on what they tell you? These are configuration decisions that need to happen before the first letter goes out.
  

• Talk to your financial aid office now. Students will arrive already knowing their KEES amount. Your messaging needs to be ready to contextualize it, explain next steps, and make the total cost picture clear and human. (If your financial aid communication needs a rethink, start with Speaking First-Gen, Part 2: Decoding the Financial Aid Maze.)
  

• Brief your VP and cabinet. This isn’t just an admissions office issue. It touches marketing, financial aid, IT, and academic affairs. Someone needs to own the cross-functional implementation — and the sooner that’s decided, the better.

You don’t have to figure this out alone

I’ve spent my career helping enrollment and marketing teams build the systems, strategies, and communications that make these moments work, not in theory, but in practice. The kind of work that actually moves students from awareness to application to deposit.

Because I’m a Kentucky-based consultant and I want to help Kentucky institutions get this right, I’m offering free 30-minute consultations to enrollment and marketing leaders at Kentucky public colleges and universities. No pitch, no agenda, just a real conversation about where you are, what’s coming, and where to start.

If you’re staring at this mandate and wondering what to do with it, I’d love to talk.

Email me at laura@squareoneky.com or grab a time at

Want to go deeper on first-gen communication?

I wrote a three-part series on exactly this — built for enrollment and marketing teams navigating the first-gen journey from first contact to enrollment.

Part 1: Speaking First-Gen — Rethinking How Colleges Communicate  squareoneky.com/post/rethinking-how-colleges-communicate-to-first-gen-families

Part 2: Decoding the Financial Aid Maze  squareoneky.com/post/speaking-first-gen-part-2

Part 3: The TRUST Framework — How to Communicate with Empathy and Clarity Across the Student Journey  squareoneky.com/post/speaking-first-gen-part-3-the-trust-framework