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  • How Cal State’s first Black woman trustee influenced the university system

    How Cal State’s first Black woman trustee influenced the university system


    Donna J. Nicol, author of a book about Claudia Hampton, the first Black woman to serve on the Cal State board of trustees.

    Credit: Courtesy of Donna J. Nicol

    It was the photo of a Black woman dressed in university regalia that caught Donna J. Nicol’s eye. 

    “Trustee Claudia Hampton,” the caption read, “appointed by Reagan.”

    Nicol, an associate dean at Cal State Long Beach who studies the history of racism and sexism in higher education, was stunned. Ronald Reagan, as governor, opposed mandatory busing as a tool of school desegregation and, as president, attempted to undo affirmative action policies in the workplace. How could it be, Nicol wondered, that he appointed the first Black woman to sit on the California State University board of trustees? And what did Hampton do once she got there?

    “Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action”, Nicol’s recent book, answers those questions and others about Hampton’s two-decade stint on the board of trustees that governs the 23-campus public university system. Prior to her appointment at CSU, Hampton worked to enforce desegregation orders in the Los Angeles Unified School District and earned a doctoral degree from the University of Southern California. She rose to the CSU board when an opportunity to meet then-Gov. Reagan’s education secretary turned into an informal vetting process for a board seat. (She met Reagan only once, as far as Nicol can tell, an encounter Hampton described as pleasant.) 

    The book tracks Hampton’s emergence as a master tactician and a skillful diplomat on the Cal State board of trustees. Initially excluded from the informal telephone calls and meetings in which fellow board members discussed CSU business outside of regular meeting times, Nicol writes, Hampton traded votes with trustees to earn influence. Eventually, she began hosting board members for dinner to ensure she had a voice in important decisions, a practice she continued as board chair. Hampton also withstood subtle (and not so subtle) racism to win support for policies benefiting low-income students of color. 

    Though at first skeptical of Hampton’s approach to board politics, Nicol came to understand her as a pragmatist who worked within the period’s racial and gender norms to wield power on a board dominated by white, wealthy and conservative men. 

    “I realized how genius she was,” Nicol said. “When she became board chair, she had a strategy of letting her supporters talk first, and then her opponents had to play defense later. Everything was strategic.”

    Nicol also details Hampton’s work to implement, monitor and ensure funding for affirmative action programs. Soon after Hampton’s death, California voters passed Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot measure that bans state entities from using race, ethnicity or sex as criteria in such areas as public education and employment.  

    But Hampton’s legacy is still felt in CSU and beyond, Nicol writes. CSU created the State University Grant program after Hampton argued that increases to student fees should be offset by more need-based aid. A student scholarship named in her honor is aimed at underserved Los Angeles-area students. The California Academy of Mathematics and Sciences, a prestigious public high school that was her brainchild, continues to operate on the campus of Cal State Dominguez Hills.

    Nicol counts herself among the many students to have benefited from Claudia Hampton’s advocacy. She attended an enrichment program for African American high school students at Cal State Dominguez Hills and received a State University Grant to pursue her master’s degree at Cal State Long Beach. Today, Nicol is the associate dean of personnel and curriculum at Long Beach’s College of Liberal Arts. She spoke to EdSource about the book and Hampton’s legacy.

    This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.   

    You write about a couple of incidents in which Hampton used some savvy diplomatic skills while on the Cal State board of trustees. Would you mind walking us through an example or two of those strategies?

    She was silent (at board meetings) for her first year. She didn’t talk, because she used that time to assess who were the power players, who were the people who had the capital. And so when she identified them, she said, “I have to trade votes with them.”

    One of her first appointments was to be on the Organization and Rules Committee. People treated it as a throwaway committee, but she was the chair, and so she decided, “I’m going to learn all of the board policies inside and out.”

    Before she passed away in (1994), she asked for a very specific rule, which is to hold presidents accountable for the implementation of affirmative action. What she wanted to ensure was that someone besides the middle manager, who would be the affirmative action officer, would be held accountable to make sure that they didn’t fall short on their affirmative action goals. 

    Claudia Hampton faced both subtle and overt racism that challenged the legitimacy of her role on the board. What are some examples of the discrimination that she experienced and how she was able to overcome that opposition?

    She was kind of presumed incompetent, because she was a Black woman coming into the board — even though she actually had a doctorate degree coming in.

    You had a trustee by the name of Wendell Witter. This is a few years in. They’re discussing affirmative action. And he yells out, “Oh my God, there’s a n— in the woodpile.” So she is taken aback by all of this, and all the men on the board, she says, are upset, too. And Wendell Witter is looking around like, “Well, what did I do? It’s just an expression.” 

    Hampton had a lot of experience in administration in (Los Angeles Unified), and she worked explicitly on race relations within the K-12 setting. When she got to the board, instead of yelling at Witter for what he had said, she told the board chair at the time, “I’ll talk to him individually. You keep going with that meeting.” And so the men on the board started to rally around her, because they viewed her as a political moderate, because she had every right at that moment to tell him off for the statements.

    Help me to understand the victories that Hampton ultimately won with regard to affirmative action and related policies.

    California Gov. Jerry Brown was actually kind of an opponent of affirmative action. He would say he supported it, but then when it came to funding, he would support (Educational Opportunity Programs, or EOPs, which help low-income and other underrepresented students attending a CSU campus), but he would not (fund) student affirmative action (in admissions) or faculty and staff affirmative action (in hiring). Hampton put a lot of pressure on Jerry Brown. She would call him out in meetings and say, “What about your commitment to these principles?’” (Hampton ultimately used her board position to ensure funding for student affirmative action pilot programs during a period of budget cuts in the late 1970s.)

    There was an update in the admission standards for students (in the 1980s). And she told people, ‘Yes, we’re going to increase the admission standards, but what we’re going to do is make sure that there’s enough EOP money that would prepare students in low-income areas in order to make sure they could meet those standards.’ She was particularly focused on the fact that L.A. Unified and San Francisco Unified had these large numbers of students of color and low-income students, but they weren’t getting access to things beyond reading, writing and arithmetic. They didn’t have access to a drama club or all those sorts of things. So she made sure that the CSU put funding aside to help support (that programming).

    Hampton and other affirmative action advocates’ success was short-lived because of the passage of Proposition 209, which prohibited state and local governments from considering race and other factors in public education. What were the forces that brought about Proposition 209?

    You have the recession that happened in the 1990s. Wherever there’s a recession and an economic downturn, you see an uptick in either racial violence or racial animus. So that’s one big part of it. The other part is the L.A. riots of 1992 because folks are like, ‘Well, they don’t deserve affirmative action, because look at how they’re behaving in the streets.’ That’s the idea. And then you also have, in 1994, Proposition 187, which has to deal with undocumented students.

    So you take all of those things – the recession, the LA riots, Proposition 187. Then, on top of that, you have (University of California regent member Ward Connerly, who championed Proposition 209) as this Black man who becomes a public face of the anti-affirmative action movement. (Connerly has said he has Native American, Black and white ancestry.) He’s kind of supercharging the debate over whether affirmative action is a good thing or not. So that’s really what led to its falling apart.

    We find ourselves now in a moment when a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has effectively ended the practice of race-conscious college admissions. Are there lessons from Hampton’s life that you feel are even more relevant today in that context?

    I think that having diversity in our boards is really important because diversity leads to better policy. Too often we think of diversity as a feel-good thing — to make people feel included and inclusive. We talk about representation, but representation is more than just having two or three people from this group here; It’s really about having different perspectives so that you can write better policy.

    If you look at the CSU board, it is more diverse than it was, but is it reflective of what’s happening on the ground with students? I’m at CSU Long Beach, and we have a much larger Latinx population than what is represented on the board.

    I always say that the American project has been built on racism, and we don’t reconcile that. And Hampton just approaches the problem in a different way than others. I was raised in the Black radical tradition. So I had to come to terms with this pragmatic side — that we need the pragmatic and we need the radical at the same time. You need the radical to raise the consciousness of people, but you need the pragmatic in order to turn it into policy and something that has a legacy. 

    I also think that Hampton — her story, her life, what she did for the board— really demonstrates, in a lot of ways, people’s ignorance about how the trustees work. They’re super powerful, but they are super unnoticed. They are appointed by governors, and they are not held to account by the public.





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  • Cal State system braces for possible cuts in classes, sports due to budget problems and enrollment decline

    Cal State system braces for possible cuts in classes, sports due to budget problems and enrollment decline


    At Sonoma State University, lower enrollment is worsening financial cutbacks.

    Credit: Ally Valiente / EdSource

    When Kaitlin Anderson committed to play golf for Sonoma State University, she posed proudly in a Seawolves sweatshirt. But last week, school officials announced that they plan to end all NCAA sports next year, part of a bid to balance the school’s budget amid sliding enrollment and anticipated cuts to state funding. Anderson, a business marketing major from Peoria, Arizona, now is thinking that she might leave the campus.

    “I will not be coming back here” if the golf program is eliminated, said Anderson, a first-year student. “I think this school will not do well after doing all this because half the reason we have so many people is because of athletics.”

    Sonoma State, one of the 23 campuses in the California State University (CSU) system, is perhaps the most extreme example of how public universities in the state are tightening their belts in the wake of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s January budget proposal and troubling enrollment drops at some campuses. The governor’s plan calls for a nearly 8% reduction in state funding in 2025-26 for both CSU and the University of California (UC), while also deferring previously promised budget increases of 5% until 2027-28.

    The governor’s proposal is not final, and later revisions could paint a rosier financial picture for higher education. But CSU leaders have warned that the plan, if implemented, could result in fewer course sections and larger class sizes, along with some cuts in student services.

    Sonoma State has been taking in less money from tuition and fees as its student body has shrunk 39% over the past decade due to changes in local demographics and some continuing fallout from wildfires in the region. In addition to the sports closures, it is also planning to close six academic departments and eliminate two dozen majors in an effort to plug a nearly $24 million budget deficit. 

    Several other CSU campuses are warning about possible impacts of the governor’s proposal. Stanislaus State, which serves more than 9,000 students in the San Joaquin Valley, could face a $20 million deficit after accounting for the January budget proposal, a Jan. 22 email from the president’s office said. Sacramento State, with a student body of more than 30,000, anticipates making a $45 million one-time cut. CSU Channel Islands officials have outlined plans to permanently reduce the Ventura County campus’s budget by $17 million in recurring expenses in 2025-26, saying that expenses per-student exceed the state average by thousands of dollars.

    Reduced state support could be missed most at schools like Sonoma State, one of 11 CSU campuses where enrollment has dropped over the last decade, reducing revenue from tuition and fees. Enrollment this fall was also a mixed bag, rising year-over-year at 15 CSU campuses and falling at eight. 

    At the Sonoma State campus in Rohnert Park, students responded to the news about the end to NCAA Division II intercollegiate sports and academic cuts with a mixture of anger and disbelief. A video published by the Press Democrat newspaper in nearby Santa Rosa shows an emotionally charged town hall meeting among student-athletes, coaches and university leaders. “So you think that we’re easily replaceable?” one attendee asked interim President Emily Cutrer. (“No, that’s not what I was saying,” she replied.) As tensions escalated, students erupted into bitter laughter and shouted interjections. “Do we get our money back for the semester?” one student asked, prompting applause.

    A group called Save Seawolves Athletics has filed a federal civil rights complaint arguing that Sonoma State’s plan to end the school’s NCAA Division II athletics program will impact minority students disproportionately, spokesperson and assistant men’s soccer coach Benjamin Ziemer said. The group is also considering filing a lawsuit.

    Signs of belt-tightening were also common this fall at San Francisco State, where enrollment is down 26% over the decade. Students and faculty members in December protested academic job cuts by staging a mock funeral march. Earlier in the fall, the university’s J. Paul Leonard Library announced that it expects to trim its budget 30% over the next two years, reducing its spending on resources like books and journals. The university offered 443 fewer course sections in fall 2024 than in fall 2023, a decline of nearly 11%, according to university data. President Lynn Mahoney said in a December message to the campus that the school is planning for “significant reductions in the 2025-26 budget” totaling about $25 million.

    Leaders at California State University, Dominguez Hills — where enrollment has fallen a slighter 3% since 2015, but 20% from its peak in fall 2020 — have already whittled $19 million from the school’s base budget since the 2023-24 school year. If state funding is slashed in 2025-26, campus officials have outlined plans to shave another $12 million, and have contemplated reducing the number of course sections, among other things.

    “I don’t want to cut out Psych 101, but if we have a thousand less students here, then maybe I don’t need 20 sections of Psych 101; maybe I only need 12,” President Thomas A. Parham said at a Nov. 7 budget town hall. “What we are trying to do is reduce the number of sections and, in some cases, fill those higher, so that instead of 15 students there might be 25 in them. But we are still trying to keep the academic integrity intact, even as we work smarter around the limited resources we have.”

    Some faculty and students at Dominguez Hills are worried. Elenna Hernandez, a double major in sociology and Chicano studies entering the last semester of her senior year, said the tighter finances have been evident at La Casita, a Latino cultural center where she works on campus. She said La Casita, which receives campus funding, isn’t staying open as late as it has in the past and received less funding for its Day of the Dead celebration. The center is important to her because it runs workshops where students can learn about Latino history and culture.  

    “A lot of students don’t have access to this education,” she said, noting that more than 60% of the student body is Latino. “The classroom doesn’t teach it, necessarily, unless you’re in an ethnic studies class.” 

    Stanislaus State University President Britt Rios-Ellis said last week in an email to the campus that the university is considering several ways to balance its budget, including reducing the number of courses and looking to save money on utility costs.

    Miranda Gonzalez, a fourth-year business administration major at Stanislaus State and president of the school’s Associated Students student government organization, said she initially was surprised that CSU would need to trim its budget at all in light of a decision to increase tuition 6% each year starting this past fall and ending in the 2028-29 school year. Full-time undergraduate students currently pay $6,084 for the academic year, plus an additional $420 per semester if they are from out of state.

    “It was kind of a shock that the CSU was going to be cutting their budget when they just raised tuition as well,” she said, adding that lawmakers and campus leaders should remember that any reduction “ultimately impacts the lives of our students, faculty and staff.”

    State funding is not the only source of revenue for the CSU and UC systems, which also get money from student tuition and fees, the federal government and other sources like housing, parking and philanthropies.

    The revenue picture is not gloomy at every Cal State campus.

    Cal State Fullerton, which has the largest student body in the system, saw enrollment grow 4% to roughly 43,000 students between 2023 and 2024. The steady growth provides the campus with a revenue cushion that has potentially saved jobs, campus President Ronald S. Rochon said. 

    “We are at a record enrollment, and because of the enrollment, we continue to have the kind of revenue to keep our lights on, people employed and our campus moving forward,” Rochon said in a Nov. 7 presentation to the university’s Academic Senate. “This is something that we all should be taking very, very seriously. We should not rest on our laurels with regard to where we are with enrollment.”

    The California Faculty Association, which represents CSU employees including tenure-track faculty, lecturers and librarians, argued last spring that the university system should tap its financial reserves to balance shortfalls. CSU officials, however, say that reserves leave them only enough money to cover 34 days of operations systemwide.  

    UC’s fiscal outlook is less dire. Enrollment is stable across its 10 campuses and is even increasing at several. Some campuses, like UC Berkeley, may not have to make cuts at all to department budgets. A Berkeley spokesperson cited increased revenues from investments and noted that Berkeley will benefit from a systemwide 10% tuition hike for out-of-state students that kicks in this year. Berkeley enrolls about 3,300 undergraduates from other states and another 3,200 international students.

    Other campuses, however, likely would have to make cuts under Newsom’s proposed budget, including to core academic services. The system as a whole faces a potential $504 million budget hole, due to the possible drop in state funding paired with rising costs. “I think this budget challenge does require us to focus more on some campus budgets than we have perhaps traditionally,” Michael Cohen, who chairs the finance committee of UC’s board of regents, said at a meeting last week. 

    UC Riverside has already saved some money on salaries because of retirements and other employee turnover, said Gerry Bomotti, vice chancellor for budget and planning at the campus. Still, the campus could face a deficit next year because of increasing compensation costs on top of possible cuts in state funding. Bomotti said the campus will try to minimize any harm to academic units if reductions are needed.

    “Our priority obviously is serving students and supporting our faculty and our enrollment. We tend to always give that priority,” he said.

    California’s 116 community colleges, which enrolled more than 1.4 million students as of fall 2023, could face a more favorable 2025-26 budget year than the state’s two university systems. The colleges would get about $230 million in new general funding through Proposition 98, the formula used to allocate money from California’s general fund to K-12 schools and community colleges.

    By some measures, the past decade has seen more state and local dollars flowing into California’s public colleges and universities. State and local spending on higher education in California has been at a historic high in recent years on a per-student basis, hitting $14,622 per full-time equivalent student in 2023, up from $10,026 in 2014, according to an analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, which takes into account funding for both two-year and four-year institutions. Looking at four-year schools alone, the association calculated that California spent $3,500 more per student than the U.S. average in 2023. Living costs and salaries, however, are often higher in California than in many other states.

    Marc Duran, a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps, contributed to this story.

    This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Kaitlin Anderson’s last name and to clarify her plans if the golf program is eliminated.





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  • For former foster care students, college help exists long after exiting the system

    For former foster care students, college help exists long after exiting the system


    Deborah Vanessa Lopez, left, is a program manager that works with students formerly in the foster system at Rio Hondo College. She has worked with Faylen Bush, right, who is set to transfer out of Rio Hondo College this year.

    Credit: Faylen Bush and Deborah Vanessa Lopez

    When Faylen Bush returned to college in 2023 after being laid off from work, he planned to pursue construction management to build on the skill set he had acquired over several years in that field as a concrete carpenter and protect himself from future layoffs.

    He was married and had three young children, and he had little time to spare as he pursued a more stable future for his family. He knew that to succeed in college, he needed to remain more focused on his career goals than he was when he had been in college about a decade earlier, when he was first entering adulthood after leaving the foster system amid a cycle of housing instability and juvenile detention.

    Faylen Bush

    And so, when a program at his school, Rio Hondo College in Los Angeles County, reached out to Bush with resources for students with experience in the foster system, he paid little attention. He was unsure that the resources would apply to him at all because he was in his early thirties.

    But the program, Guardian Scholars, was persistent. They tried to reach him multiple times until he finally decided to go to their office and learn more. He learned that Guardian Scholars is a chapter-based organization across California’s college campuses that supports students who have foster care experience. It is an organization that, since its inception in 1998 at Cal State Fullerton, has sought to increase college enrollment, retention, and graduation rates among former foster youth as a pathway toward overall stability in their lives.

    “I can honestly say that stepping into the office, sitting with Deborah, and having that conversation opened up a whole world of opportunities for me,” said Bush of his first meeting with Guardian Scholars staff.

    “Deborah” is Deborah Lopez, a Guardian Scholars program manager. She and her team connect students with access to counselors who are trained to support former foster youth, grants to purchase textbooks, meal vouchers, on-campus jobs, access to conferences to further students’ professional networks, and more.

    “Our students experience a tremendous amount of trauma even if it was one day or 15 years of their life” in foster care, Lopez said. This thinking serves as the foundation for their program: They extend support to every single Rio Hondo College student with experience in the foster system, no matter when or how long their experience was.

    Bush said he is aware of the statistics he is up against given his upbringing. According to a national 2020 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, far fewer students with experience in foster care have a bachelor’s degree — nearly 5% for men and about 9% for women, than students without foster experience, about 31% for men and close to 36% for women.

    Deborah Lopez

    These rates persist despite several studies showing that the majority of current and former foster youth report an interest in attending and graduating from college.

    But Lopez knows the statistics of the students who have received support targeted to their foster care background. For example, across the California community colleges, students are more likely to enroll in credit-bearing courses and to remain enrolled in school if they are enrolled in foster-specific support programs, according to a 2021 report from John Burton Advocates for Youth, an influential nonprofit that advocates for California’s homeless and foster youth.

    “One of the things that has worked for us as a program is consistency,” said Lopez, who has worked with the program for nearly a decade.

    While many of their students have graduated and transferred from Rio Hondo, some have needed to cut back on classes or drop out altogether. “But eventually, they come back, and we’re here,” said Lopez.

    With the support he has received, Bush has not only remained on track to transfer to a four-year university later this year — he has applied to several Cal State and University of California schools, though he is particularly interested in UCLA. His career goal has also changed in the year-and-a-half since he returned to school. He is now pursuing psychology and a career in counseling, and, while the career change might seem abrupt, it’s a return to the goals he had about a decade ago.

    Foster youth also need a blueprint

    As Bush tells it, the consistent instability throughout his childhood played a critical role in how his life unfolded as he entered adulthood.

    “The system is trying to help … and it’s providing homes, but I still feel like a necessary component is to provide that blueprint for success after you age out,” said Bush of the foster system.

    He went on to describe the blueprint that a teenager without foster experience might have: If their parents went to college, they might also attend college; if their parents were part of the workforce, they might decide to pursue a similar path after high school.

    “Someone who has experienced the foster system, they don’t have that blueprint and, sadly, the statistics show there’s a small percentage of success stories,” he added.

    He was around 10 years old when both of his parents died, leaving him and his sister in the foster system. Their maternal grandmother was near them in Lancaster, a city in northern Los Angeles County, but she was caring for her own young children plus some of her grandchildren and couldn’t take them in.

    They remained in foster placement for two years until an aunt in Louisiana reached out and requested they be placed with her.

    Thus began Bush’s experience with kinship in which a child in foster care is placed with a family member. He was living with family once again, but his life was no more stable than before.

    “I can honestly say she tried her best, but she didn’t really have the resources to fully cater to our needs. To her it was more like, OK, you guys live with me now,’ and that’s it,” Bush said. “But there was trauma that needed to be addressed. There was, for both of us, abandonment issues that needed to be addressed.”

    By the time he was 14, Bush was regularly suspended from school, eventually missing enough days to become truant and land in juvenile detention.

    “That set a course for me, going in and out of juvenile corrections,” he said. He continued getting into trouble, eventually spending over a year inside.

    Once released at 16, he returned to his aunt’s home, but he had developed resentment toward her because she had not visited him during his time inside. He learned that she continued receiving payment as he was still officially under her care, and so began a cycle of housing instability as he began to stay at friends’ homes and hotel rooms rather than sleep at his aunt’s home.

    To route the payment to himself and pay for housing, Bush figured out how to emancipate himself at 17. It’s a process that Lopez noted few of their students go through given its difficulty.

    Bush knew he had a path forward: football. After his time in juvenile detention, his football coach continued to invest in him, sending him to university training camps. But his behavior landed him in trouble again, and he was in a fight so bad during the summer going into his senior year of high school that the coach ended the relationship.

    “I would always wind up in situations where I’m in trouble. I always used to ask myself when I was in front of the principal, when I was in front of the judge, ‘Why am I here?’ said Bush, reflecting on his youth. “And then I learned over time, it’s the decisions that I’m making.”

    “Before, there were a lot of things that were happening that were out of my control,” he continued. He slowly learned there were things he had control over, such as his path toward emancipation, but without the proper, stable guidance of an adult through his upbringing, he was often unclear on how to properly use that newfound power.

    Unable to play football after the fight, he reached out to a former foster parent in California who agreed to take him in so he could start fresh in his home state.

    With his high school requirements complete, he attended Southwest College in Los Angeles, playing football for the team and eventually landing a scholarship to continue playing the sport in Oklahoma.

    He had dreams of continuing his studies in psychology, eventually earning a doctorate in the field and becoming a school counselor.

    But the pressure of supporting his family took center stage once he and his now-wife had their first child, so he declined his university scholarship. “It was such a big transition at that time, and I felt the need to support my family,” said Bush.

    From then through the fall of 2023, Bush worked odd jobs and eventually secured stable work in the construction industry as he and his wife had two more children. His return to school was prompted by his layoff, but he was also keenly aware of the harsh reality of working in such a physically demanding field.

    “The longevity for a Black carpenter isn’t that long. I have to figure out how I’m going to maneuver within this industry so that I can make it for at least 15 years,” he said of his thinking at the time.

    It wasn’t long after landing in the Guardian Scholars office that he began thinking more deeply about his goals. What began as a return to school to secure job stability in a field he’d entered solely to provide for his family has since become a path back to the goals Bush had long before he had the level of support he has found with Lopez and her team at Guardian Scholars.

    “My daughters and my son,” he said. “I feel they are the best thing out of my whole life. I’m trying to put myself in a position where I can be the best example and the best provider for them. I know now, at 33, with all my life experiences, this is what seems clearest to me.”





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  • California launches first phase of long-anticipated Cradle-to-Career data system

    California launches first phase of long-anticipated Cradle-to-Career data system


    After years of preparation inside and outside the state Capitol (shown), California has launched a website that gathers all sorts of education and career data in a single, searchable place.

    Credit: Kirby Lee / AP

    Top Takeaways
    • The Cradle-to-Career data system links education, workforce and social service data.
    • The Student Pathways dashboard, released Tuesday, will help students decide on a college and career path.
    • California is one of the few states that make educational data easily accessible to the public.

    California introduced the first phase of its ambitious Cradle-to-Career data system Tuesday, making it one of the few states with education data accessible to everyone.

    Now, parents, students and others can go to the Cradle-to-Career (C2C) website to learn how many graduates from each school district earned a bachelor’s degree each year, how long it took to achieve that goal and how much, on average, they earned after graduation.

    Cradle-to-Career links data sets from school districts, institutions of higher education, workforce organizations and social services to help students plan their education and careers.

    The first phase, the Student Pathways dashboard, explores pathways to and through college, college enrollment, awards and diplomas, time to graduation or certificate, and earnings during and after college.

    “With the C2C Student Pathways Dashboard now live, Californians can visualize their futures by seeing disconnected data from across sectors and previously unavailable insights, all in one place,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom in a statement released Tuesday. “The Golden State is once again leading the way in innovation, connecting our education system to the workforce to ensure everyone has the freedom to succeed.”

    How it works

    The website uses charts, guiding questions and pull-down menus to make the information accessible and easy to use. The pull-down menus allow users to compare their child’s school to other schools, the state average or legislative districts. They can also compare the pathway progress of different student populations, said Ryan Estrellado, director of data programs for C2C.

    Each chart in the dashboard has links with instructions to help users interpret it, and includes links to underlying data that can be downloaded and used by the public to create their own charts and reports.

     “What’s so exciting about what California has done is they’re putting the information out to everybody,” said Paige Kowalski, vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, a national nonprofit advocacy organization. “It’s out there for the community folks, for schools, for parents, for kids looking at colleges. And, this is their first step, right? It’s not everything. It’s not all of it, but it is the first step, and it’s a really good one.”

    Future C2C dashboards will focus on early education, primary school, college and career readiness, transfer outcomes, financial aid, employment outcomes, and teacher training and retention. 

    This year, the data team will work on launching additional dashboards and completing a secure data enclave to allow researchers to use underlying data, said Mary Ann Bates, executive director of C2C. 

    Access to centralized data about education and workforce outcomes is necessary to understand whether efforts to improve student success are working, according to a media release from C2C. The dashboards will not include information about individual students.

    A community effort

    The website follows years of community meetings, open meetings of the 21-member C2C board and feedback from residents, advocates, policymakers and researchers. The most requested feature from the public, Bates said, allows users to break down the data by both geography and student populations.

    “We hope that when the public uses this, they will see that the questions and the feedback that they had are represented here,” Estrellado said Monday. “The most exciting part for me is that we invite them to continue that conversation with us as we improve this tool. I can’t wait to get it to the public.”

    C2C data will eventually be available in three ways — through accessible data stories and charts, through aggregated data files that use query builders, and through a data request process for approved research projects.

    Launch delayed

    The initial launch was originally expected to happen late last year. 

    “We prioritize securing the data system, ensuring privacy protection and ensuring linked information is accurate and reliable before working to make our tools publicly available,” said Bates when asked about the delay.

    The data for the website is submitted each March by partners that have signed data-sharing agreements with C2C, including the California Department of Education, California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, University of California, California State University, California Community Colleges, Department of Social Services, Employment Development Department, Department of Industrial Relations, Department of Developmental Services and private universities.

    The data from all partners was linked by the end of the year, Bates said.

    “We’re really proud of being able to have moved from the linkage of the underlying data system to releasing a public tool just a few months later,” Bates said. “Few (states) have prioritized creating dashboards like this for the public. And many of those have done so after more than a decade of working on building their data systems.”

    Six years in the making

    In 2019, the Legislature passed the Cradle-to-Career Data System Act, which called for creating a data system to support teachers, parents and students; enable agencies to optimize educational, workplace and health and human services programs; streamline financial aid administration, and advance research.

    The state legislation included public engagement in the planning process and mandated that the data system also require an annual survey of students and their families to ensure their voices and experiences guide the work, according to C2C. By the end of 2023, the program had received its first batch of data.

    The price tag for the project, which includes direct costs like contracts, as well as relevant staff time, is $24.2 million, Bates said, and current spending is still below that.

    There is also an ongoing line item in the state budget to fund the operation of the office and to pay the salaries of its staff, including $15 million this fiscal year.

    Federal cuts to education data collection are not expected to impact the Cradle-to-Career IT project, which is entirely funded by California. It is not clear if data collection from any of the state’s data partners will be negatively impacted by federal cuts.

    “Regardless of what happens in the federal context, we remain committed to ensuring that we’re building a data system that answers the needs of Californians and remains true to California’s values,” Bates said.

    Kowalski is hopeful that the work California has done can be replicated in other states.

    It took a great deal of political will, resources and expertise to make the California data system a reality, Kowalski said.

    “Data tells us what kind of job we’re doing, how we fared as a political leader, as an agency head, as a system leader,” Kowalski said. 

    “And when you put that data out there, whether you’re sharing it with another agency, or you’re putting it out in the public, or you’re handing it over to a researcher, you are giving them the power to look at that data and judge you.”





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