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  • Cal State posts uneven graduation progress as initiative finish line approaches

    Cal State posts uneven graduation progress as initiative finish line approaches


    Cal State Northridge is one of 23 CSU System institutions.

    Larry Gordon/EdSource

    As the end of a decadelong push to graduate more students nears, California State University made slight progress in 2024 on increasing the four-year graduation rate for freshmen but saw six-year freshman rates stall and four-year transfer rates drop, new statistics show.

    Those numbers show the difficulties the university system faces in its final efforts to improve its graduation rates, even after significant overall improvement toward ambitious goals over the previous nine years.

    The data were presented Tuesday at a two-day symposium on graduation goals ahead of spring 2025, when the system’s much-scrutinized Graduation Initiative 2025 effort is supposed to end. California State University (CSU) officials urged colleagues to learn more about why many students are dropping out or taking so long to finish. 

    Across the CSU system, freshman six-year graduation rates have plateaued at around 62%, the same as in 2023 and 8 percentage points below the system’s graduation goal for 2025. Freshman four-year graduation rates ticked up to 36% in 2024, a 1 point gain from the previous year. But they fell shy of the system goal to hit 40% by 2025. 

    Transfer students’ performance was a mixed bag. Cal State is just 1 percentage point from reaching its goal of a 45% two-year graduation rate for transfers, a decent increase from 41% in 2023. But among transfer students who entered CSU in 2020, four-year graduation rates dropped from 79% in 2023 to 75% this year, putting them 10 points below the Graduation Initiative 2025 target.

    CSU also tracks graduation rates for its 23 campuses, all of which have been assigned varying goals. But the university system has not published campus graduation rates for 2024 to a dashboard available online, and those were not included in the public report Tuesday. 

    Though the system’s current graduation rates compare favorably to similar public universities, Chancellor Mildred García said they are “not good enough.”

    About 25,000 first-time students who entered CSU in 2018 did not graduate in six years, Garcia noted. “That’s 25,000 students whose dreams are deferred, 25,000 students who left — and because of the cost of living in the state, are leaving with debt,” she said. “We’re not going to take responsibility for that? I think we have to, we have to talk about the elephant in the room and really examine, again: Are support services really helping? Are we listening to our students?”

    García said the university system must also do more to connect recent graduates with careers, like a Cal State graduate she encountered working in a hospitality job who said they can’t find work in their desired field. 

    “Where is our responsibility there?” she said. “There’s so many options for them. How are we teaching them about the amazing career options that are out there, so they could know which way they want to go?”

    García’s remarks followed a presentation about the system’s graduation and persistence rates by Jennifer Baszile, the associate vice chancellor for student success and inclusive excellence.

    The system is yet to close the gap between students without Pell Grants (more affluent students) and lower-income students receiving such assistance. Among the CSU cohort that started in fall 2017, roughly 68% of more affluent students without Pell Grants graduated in six years. Among Pell Grant recipients, that figure was just 56%.

    Officials have previously attributed at least part of their trouble closing equity gaps to the coronavirus pandemic, which added pressure on students who have to work or care for family members.

    Cal State also touted some good news. Since the effort began, the system has nearly doubled its four-year graduation rate, Baszile said. A Cal State analysis comparing CSU to state systems like the City University of New York and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education — after making adjustments to leave out top-tier research institutions — found that CSU’s six-year graduation rates for freshmen was near the top of the pack.

    Higher graduation rates are also a good deal for students. Baszile noted that getting their degrees faster means money in the pockets of Cal State graduates, since they can join the workforce sooner and save on the additional fees and tuition they would have paid if it took longer to finish their programs. 

    A closer look at how some students fared

    The past 10 years have seen notable demographic changes at Cal State. The university saw its incoming freshman classes grow 31% between 2009 and 2019. During the same period, the population of first-generation, Pell Grant and/or historically underserved students increased by 50%, according to Baszile’s presentation.

    Baszile then turned to persistence rates, which measure the percentage of students who return to a campus after each year of education. 

    Overall, the analysis found that 84% of first-time students in the 2018 cohort came back to campus for a second year. But equity gaps emerged early. First-year persistence among students who were Latino, male and first-generation was 78%, lagging 6 points behind the system average.

    Disparities were amplified in subsequent years. The divide ultimately fed into lower graduation rates: 48% of Latino, male and first-generation students graduated in six years, again trailing the 62% graduation rate among all students in the 2018 cohort. 

    “More than 50% of the Latino, male, first-generation students who started in 2018 are no longer with us. They are gone,” Baszile said. “We might be able to help them re-enroll. There’s always a chance. But think about on your university campuses: How much energy, how much effort, how much investment is required to have students fully depart and have to identify them, re-engage them and bring them back?”

    How to stop students from ‘leaking out of the pipeline’

    Baszile and Dilcie D. Perez, Cal State’s deputy vice chancellor of academic and student affairs, urged colleagues to learn more about the specific reasons why students leave CSU — in the hopes of preventing more students from following them out the door. 

    Students, Perez said in remarks following the presentation, are “leaking out of the pipeline.” She said a Cal State initiative to welcome back students who have stopped out has been difficult to establish, hampered by bureaucracy and processes. 

    “We’ve got to find a way to go get those students and bring them back,” Perez recalled saying to Baszile in one of the many conversations the two have had about improving student persistence. “And (Baszile) was like, ‘Yes, but how about we never lose them?’”

    President Richard Yao of Cal State Channel Islands said his campus has started using exit surveys. The first challenge is getting a response; once students leave, he said, they can be hard to reach. The next is making sense of the idiosyncratic reasons students depart.

    “When we look at the exit data, why students are leaving, it is not just one thing,” Yao said. “The variability is off the charts, and it’s so individual. So for us, right now, we’re struggling.”

    One throughline in the data, he said, is that students who leave are struggling academically. But he encouraged colleagues to look beyond academic performance, too.

    “We have to identify what’s happening in that first year in our classrooms, in our residential areas, in our co-curricular — what is it that may be contributing to those poor outcomes, whether it be mental health, basic needs — and maybe taking a deeper dive into what is contributing to those poor academic outcomes as well,” he said.





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  • Districts should target funds to foster youth to improve progress, report says

    Districts should target funds to foster youth to improve progress, report says


    As California expands services needed to grow the number of foster youth enrolling in college, more work is needed to help those students graduate.

    Julie Leopo/ EdSource

    California’s foster care students have improved their high school graduation rates since 2013, but have barely improved, or even lost ground, in rates of suspension, attendance and prompt college enrollment, according to a new report.

    And, in the 10 districts with the most foster students, only a fraction of 1% of the targeted money was directly spent on that group. The report, by WestEd, a nonpartisan education research agency, attributed the discrepancy to a disconnect between the administrators who drew up the spending plans and the staff who work directly with students, the report found.

    Published this week and titled “Revisiting Californiaʼs Invisible Achievement Gap: Trends in Education Outcomes of Students in Foster Care in the Context of the Local Control Funding Formula,” the report details how state policies have affected outcomes for foster youth over the past decade, at times positively, but often in ways that limit their ability to succeed.

    The authors conclude that while those changes facilitate school stabilization and other educational supports, challenges remain, including ensuring that planned school expenditures dedicate some funds to foster students’ unique needs.

    “The report suggests that the implementation of foster care supports remains difficult and that funding for tailored interventions to the unique situations and challenges of students in foster care is not yet a common rule even for districts with large numbers of students in foster care,” said Vanessa Ximenes Barrat, WestEd senior research associate and co-author of the report.

    Tailoring support to specific student populations

    The report’s authors noted that tailoring support to each student group is critical given their varying needs.

    For instance, in the school year immediately preceding the pandemic, which erupted in March 2020, foster students’ chronic absenteeism rate was 28% versus 12% for the overall student population across California. The rates sharply rose during the pandemic and have since steadily decreased. But data from 2022-23, the most recent school year included in the report, shows that discrepancies remain: 25% of all students were chronically absent versus 39% of foster students.

    The wide gaps indicate to school staff that foster youth might need stronger interventions than other student groups in addressing why they are missing so much instructional time.

    Similarly, suspension data shows continuing disparities, despite policy changes in recent years. Whereas suspension rates for all students have largely lingered between 3% and 4% since 2014-15 and through the pandemic, the rate for foster youth was between 13% and 15%.

    “All the things that make students in foster care have all the worst outcomes across the board — their instability, their trauma, etc. — means that they need more of the interventions than everyone else, and they need different interventions based on their unique needs,” said a child welfare and education professional who was interviewed for the report.

    Improved graduation rates, but concerns remain

    One area where foster students have slowly made strides is with graduation rates. Rates have steadily increased for high-needs students, including foster youth, since the 2016-17 school year. That year, 51% of foster students graduated from high school in four years. By 2022-23, 61% were graduating.

    A possible reason for the improvement, according to the report’s authors, is the passage in 2013 of Assembly Bill 216 which allowed some foster students to graduate after completing the state’s minimum requirements.

    School staff who were interviewed for the report said that the law prevented some students from dropping out as they were moved from one placement to another, and encouraged them to complete high school even if they had fallen behind in some courses.

    Other staff noted that the extension of foster care services to age 21 occurred during the same period in which graduation rates improved. The extension, they said, probably prevented students from leaving school because they were receiving added support to avert homelessness and other instabilities common among youth leaving foster care.

    But even with that improvement, school staff interviewed for this report saw areas of concern. Of those foster students who graduated, for example, less than one-fifth had completed the A-G coursework required to qualify for admission to one of the state’s public four-year universities.

    Other takeaways from the report include:

    • While dropout rates among foster youth remain higher than their peers’, they have lowered by 5 percentage points since 2016-17.
    • More foster youth are attending only one school each year, rather than moving between schools, which advocates say causes personal and academic instability — 66% in 2022-23, up from 62% in 2017-18.
    • More foster students are attending high-poverty schools — up from 56% in 2014-15 to 59% in 2022-23.

    As California’s general student population has dwindled, so has the state’s foster student population. State data shows that nearly 45,000 foster students were enrolled in the K-12 grades during the 2014-15 school year on census day, the first Wednesday in October. Eight years later, the state enrolled about 31,700 foster students.

    About a quarter of the state’s foster care students attend school across just 10 districts: Los Angeles Unified, Fresno Unified, Lancaster Elementary, Long Beach Unified, Antelope Valley Union High, Palmdale Elementary, San Bernardino City Unified, Moreno Valley Unified, Kern High, and Hesperia Unified.

    Local-control dollars rarely targeted solely to foster students

    The dip in enrollment of foster students in K-12 coincided with the state’s overhaul of the school finance system and the implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula, commonly referred to as LCFF. One of the changes under LCFF was that districts receive supplemental grants based on the number of high-needs students, which includes foster youth, English learners and low-income students.

    Each district must also complete a Local Control Accountability Plan, known as an LCAP, and provide details on how it intends to help students succeed, including actions and expenditures related to the three groups of high-needs students.

    Equity across the state’s student population was part of the intent of implementing LCFF.

    But the report showed that of WestEd’s review of the 10 LCAPs, only 10 of 482 anticipated actions to support overall student populations were specific to foster students. Over half of the actions referenced foster students in some way, but mostly lumped all high-needs students together.

    Foster youth, for example, have alarmingly high rates of chronic absences and increased school mobility. If a service offered by a school requires students to be present in class, foster students may not always benefit; they might instead need greater access to transportation to help them travel to school regularly.

    The question of whether to target more funds specifically to each student group, rather than combining them, persists, given changes at the federal Department of Education and how they may impact foster students.

    Ximenes Barrat said, “As a relatively small and highly vulnerable population with distinct needs, there is a real risk that their concerns could be overlooked amid broader policy shifts.”

    WestEd CEO Jannelle Kubinec is president of the EdSource Board of Directors. EdSource’s editorial team maintains sole editorial control over the content of its coverage.





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