Category: PPIC Higher Education Center

Guided Pathways in Community College

In California and across the country, community colleges are working hard on reforms aimed at increasing college completion, particularly among students historically underrepresented in higher education. Yet many promising innovations have not moved the needle. One reason is that many of these reforms, while innovative, focus on only a small proportion of the student body, or improve only one part of the students’ college experience. As a result, colleges have begun to adopt a more comprehensive institutional reform known as “guided pathways.”

Guided pathways are based on a set of scalable design principles, outlined in the 2015 book Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success. These principles include

  • Helping students choose and enter a program pathway
  • Mapping pathways to students’ end goals
  • Keeping students on path
  • Ensuring that students are learning

Implementation may occur in a variety of ways, but colleges have found it essential to focus on the following areas:

  • Guided exploration for undecided students. This includes clustering hundreds of programs into a handful of broad focus areas. In addition, some colleges offer foundational courses to help students select a major. In some cases, all students enroll in a foundational course within their broad field of interest. Mentored by faculty, students may research different careers, interview or shadow individuals in a particular field, and get a taste of the different competencies within each major while honing their research skills.
  • Clearly delineated program requirements. Cross disciplinary teams of instructional and counseling faculty, staff, and administrators create “program maps” to show the path necessary for labor market success and further education. Students may take elective courses that are not on the program map, but they will also know which courses each program requires.
  • Proactive and integrated academic and non-academic support. When support services are optional, students may fail to identify the services they need or lack the confidence to ask for help. Services can take many forms, from embedding academic support in the classroom to providing specialized counselors. At Guttman Community College in New York City, an entering group of students is split into “houses,” and a team of instructional faculty, counseling faculty, and peer mentors is responsible for each house. Faculty and peer mentors meet regularly to discuss individual student progress, coordinating their actions and communications with each other and the students.
  • Developmental education transformation. Developmental education—also known as remedial education or basic skills—has traditionally focused on courses such as college algebra and English composition. Reforms would create accelerated pathways aligned with a small set of broad programs (e.g., liberal arts, STEM, business, and health). Our recent research has found that the reform efforts happening across the state—for example, as part of the California Acceleration Project—are well positioned to create developmental education pathways that are better aligned to programs of study. PPIC’s ongoing research aims to shed light on the most promising developmental education reforms.

Opportunities for California Community Colleges
The last six months have seen tremendous momentum and support for guided pathways in California. This support has emerged at all levels, including the governor, legislature, the Chancellor’s Office, national foundations, and college faculty and administrators. Last month, with the support of the College Futures Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Teagle Foundation, the Chancellor’s Office awarded grants to twenty colleges as part of The California Guided Pathways Project. Last year, three community colleges in California were awarded the American Association of Community Colleges Pathways grant to assist them with planning and implementing a pathways framework. In addition, the Governor’s Budget proposal for 2017‒18 includes $150 million one-time Proposition 98 funds to support new guided pathways programs in community colleges. Finally, Senate Bill 539, introduced during the 2017 legislative cycle, proposes to use an incentive grant to help establish guided pathways that would boost completion and transfer. Given this wide-ranging support, much can be learned from the experiences in other states and systems. It will also be critical for colleges to conduct deep examinations of how existing college initiatives, such as those involved with the Basic Skills Student Outcomes and Transformation program, can be integrated into guided pathways. In an upcoming blog post, we will explore how developmental education reform intersects with the guided pathways framework..

Students Choose College with Future Jobs in Mind

Throughout California and the nation, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors are currently making decisions about where to attend college. An increasingly important part of that decision is based on career opportunities. PPIC’s statewide survey on higher education finds that the vast majority of Californians (77%) believe the state’s higher education system is very important to the economic vitality of the state.

Students’ career goals play an important role in the decision to go to college at all. According to an annual nationwide survey of freshmen conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, the vast majority of students agree that a very important reason to go to college is “to be able to get a better job” (85%) and “to get training for a specific career” (76%). A record-high 60% of students say that a very important consideration in choosing a college is the ability of its graduates to obtain good jobs.

Students are right in thinking that college can give them economic advantages. Using data from the 2014 and 2015 American Community Survey, we examine some basic labor market outcomes for recent college graduates (ages 22 to 29) in California. The advantages in terms of employment and wages are clear. Young adults with a college degree are much less likely to be unemployed and, on average, earn far higher wages.

Of course, not all majors are equal when it comes to career opportunities. Among young adults with a bachelor’s degree, wages vary widely by major. Among the ten most popular majors for young adults in California, the most remunerative major is computer and information sciences; young workers with those degrees earn more than twice as much as young workers who majored in psychology. But even among those paid least, wages are still substantially higher than those of less educated workers.

Students attend college for many important reasons beyond economics. But because career opportunities are an important consideration for most, state policymakers and higher education institutions should seek ways to provide students with accurate and meaningful information about labor market outcomes by college and by major. The American Community Survey does not provide information for specific colleges nor for community college certificates, but public colleges in California can link student records with wage records from the Employment Development Department. For example, California’s community colleges have created a “Salary Surfer,” which offers useful information on wages for students contemplating different career paths and provides a good model for other colleges to follow.

Highly Educated Workers See Strong Job Gains

Recessions and recoveries have the power to reshape our economy and workforce. In California, the latest recession and recovery have had very different consequences for workers based on their educational attainment levels. During the Great Recession, most job losses occurred among less educated workers, and the subsequent recovery has seen stronger gains for highly educated workers.

After declining to a nadir in 2010 with the Great Recession, the number of employed workers in California has grown substantially, increasing by 1.6 million among adults of prime working age (20 to 64) between 2010 and 2015, according to data from the American Community Survey. During the recovery, the rate of employment growth has been highest for workers with a bachelor’s degree or graduate degree (see chart). Even though high school graduates have also fared relatively well in the recovery, they suffered the most in the recession and recent gains have still not offset the job losses they sustained from 2007 to 2010.

These employment gains reflect the changing nature of our economy. Many of the fastest-growing occupations rely on highly educated workers, such as software developers, computer scientists, and management analysts. But other fast-growing occupations depend on less educated workers, such as taxi drivers and chauffeurs (including those that work for Lyft or Uber) and food preparation workers. Overall, occupations highly dependent on college graduates—those in which a majority of workers in 2010 had at least a bachelor’s degree—experienced a much faster rate of growth (14.1%) than occupations less dependent on college graduates (9.6%).

The changing nature of the state’s economy has also created regional winners and losers. The Bay Area, with its highly educated population, led the state in employment growth, adding more than 400,000 workers overall from 2010 to 2015, with college graduates making up 75% of those job gains (see chart). In contrast, the rate of employment growth was lowest in the San Joaquin Valley, where the demand for and supply of highly educated workers is relatively weak. In the Inland Empire and the San Joaquin Valley, college graduates accounted for only 20% and 17%, respectively, of employment gains.

California’s recovery from the Great Recession highlights the importance of the state’s higher education systems in providing meaningful economic opportunities for workers. Rather than being diminished by the most recent recession and recovery, a college education has emerged as an even more important determinant of labor market success.

Learn more

Visit the PPIC Higher Education Center

Testimony: Accurately Assessing College Readiness

Olga Rodriguez, research fellow at the PPIC Higher Education Center, testified before the Senate Education Committee in Sacramento today (April 19, 2017). Here are her prepared remarks.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning. My name is Olga Rodriguez and I am a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. PPIC is a nonpartisan policy research organization and does not take positions on legislation. My comments are based on research we have conducted at PPIC on California’s community colleges.

As you heard during last month’s remediation hearing, every year, California’s community colleges identify hundreds of thousands of students as not ready for transfer-level courses in math and English. Since these courses are required to transfer to a four-year college, students deemed underprepared are placed in developmental (also known as remedial or basic-skills) courses to prepare for college work. These placement decisions have profound effects: a sizeable portion of students in remedial classes never earn a degree or certificate, or transfer to a four-year college. Our study finds that 80% of entering students take at least one developmental course in math, English, or both, and most of those students never complete a college-level math or English course.

Despite the critical role of assessment and placement, there is little clarity about how colleges across the state assess and place students into math, English, and English as a Second Language (ESL) sequences. Prior studies conducted in California relied on a small sample of community colleges and examined policies in place before 2010. To help fill this information gap, in spring 2016 we surveyed all 113 community colleges in the state; 82 of the colleges participated in the survey. They reported on the assessment and placement policies used to place students into transfer-level math and English as well as the highest level of ESL during the 2014–15 academic year. The broad goal of the survey is to provide policymakers and practitioners with a descriptive landscape that will improve understanding of the policies used across the state to assess and place students into math, English, and ESL courses, prior to the implementation of reforms associated with the Common Assessment Initiative. I describe our findings below.

  • First, colleges vary in how they identify college-ready students. We find that the use of assessment tests is widespread; 100% of colleges reported using assessment tests for math, English, and ESL placement. However, there is variation in the types of tests used and how they are used. Over half of colleges used the Accuplacer for placement into math and English courses; the Compass, which was taken off of the market last November due to poor predictive validity, was the most commonly used assessment test for ESL (33%), and was used by over 20% of colleges for math and English. It is very important to note that even when colleges use the same test, they apply different rules for the minimum scores that qualify as college ready. For example, while more than half of colleges reported using the Accuplacer test to assess college readiness in math, cut scores ranged from 25 to 96 out of 120. A student with a score of 58 (the median score used by colleges) would be deemed college ready at half of these colleges, but not at the other half. The lack of consistency means that access to college courses—credit-bearing courses that students need in order to transfer to four-year colleges—is determined not only by students’ performance on the test, but also by the policies at the college where they enroll. This wide variation may be especially challenging for the 40% of students who eventually enroll in more than one community college campus, as they could be deemed college ready at one college but referred to remediation in another. These policies end up undermining opportunities to transfer between campuses and provide mixed signals about what it means to be ready for college-level courses. Furthermore, assessment and placement practices have implications for equity. Students of color are more likely to attend colleges that set higher math cutoff scores, which means these students have less access to the math classes they need to advance.
  • Second, the use of multiple measures continues to be sparse and unsystematic. In California, the use of other measures in addition to placement exams (known as multiple measures) is mandated by law—in fact, research shows that measures such as high school achievement data do a comparable or better job at predicting college success. But while assessment tests were standard practice, there was substantial variation in the types of other measures used across colleges and across subjects. We find that the majority of colleges used additional criteria to determine placement into math (94%) and English (90%), but just over half did so for ESL (52%). Colleges used, on average, three measures to assess and place students in English and math courses, and two measures to assess and place students into ESL courses. Additional measures included high school GPA, grades in prior English and math coursework, results from the Early Assessment Program (EAP), and counselor or instructor recommendations, among others. Overall, the use of high school records was more common for math and English, but much less so for ESL. In addition, while some colleges used multiple measures in a systematic way for all students, up to 30% of colleges only used multiple measures if students requested it or challenged their placement. Uneven implementation of multiple measures may aggravate inequities if students with cultural and social capital are more likely to take advantage of these policies.
  • Third, assessment and placement in ESL needs more attention. Each year, about 30,000 students (6% of incoming community college students) enroll in ESL, and these students may be especially disadvantaged by current policies. Compared to English and math, in ESL, fewer colleges offered exemption opportunities (28% offered none at all in ESL vs. 4–5% in English and math) and test preparation activities (40% offered practice tests in ESL vs. 70–74% for English and math). Additionally, our findings suggest that a lower proportion of colleges used high school achievement data for ESL placement, indicating that English Learners may not be benefitting from one of the most promising methods of improving placement accuracy.
  • Finally, ongoing reforms aim to promote more consistent and accurate placement policies. With the support of the governor, the legislature, and the system office, a significant amount of resources have been devoted to improving assessment and placement at community colleges. The Common Assessment Initiative, for example, will establish a shared assessment system. Our survey finds that over 80% of colleges reported having discussions about the Common Assessment Initiative for English and math; just under 80% of colleges did so for ESL. Still, colleges will have the autonomy to set their own rules for placement, and that’s a cause for concern if the inconsistencies described above continue. The Multiple Measures Assessment Project (MMAP) is a collaborative effort led by Cal-PASS Plus and the RP Group to support colleges in implementing multiple measures in a more consistent and effective way. About half of colleges reported having discussions about multiple measures, and those that did frequently did so as part of their participation in the MMAP. Collaborative efforts such as this one can help ensure consistent placement policies across the state’s community colleges.

In sum, assessment and placement policies should help students reach their academic goals—not stand in the way of those goals. As colleges work to enhance the efficacy of developmental education, implementing evidence-based practices that accurately assess students’ college readiness will be critical. A more equitable and efficient system for assessment and placement is a vital step in helping all students achieve their academic goals.

The Growth of College Promise Programs

A majority of Californians believe that college affordability is a big problem for the state, according to the PPIC Statewide Survey. Low family incomes and the high cost of living have made it difficult for many students to pay the full price of college. This is true even though California’s public colleges and universities have some of the lowest tuition levels in the country and the majority of community college, UC, and CSU students receive grants to cover the cost of tuition. Policymakers have taken notice of the public’s concerns.

Many local governments, school districts, colleges, and business communities have been addressing the issue of access and affordability through “promise programs.” The “promise” label has been adopted to represent a wide range of programs that share at least two specific characteristics: they are limited to individuals in a particular geographic area, such as a city or school district, and they provide some level of financial support for postsecondary education. Nearly 80 promise programs have been launched nationwide since 2001. In California, according to WestEd, 23 of these programs have been created since 2008—13 of them in the past two years.

The most well-known California-based promise program is the Long Beach Promise, which offers all public school students in the district a tuition-free first semester at Long Beach Community College. It also guarantees admission to Long Beach State University for students who complete required college preparatory courses with the necessary grades.

College promise programs often couple financial incentives with extensive outreach to middle-school students and improved student services like tutoring and counseling. In California, the vast majority of these programs are focused on getting students to enroll in community colleges—most offer one semester of free community college tuition and do not provide enrollment guarantees to a four-year college.

While it’s important to ensure that students who might not otherwise consider college be given incentives to attend, the state’s biggest challenge is ensuring that college students stay in school and earn a degree or certificate. Only about half of California community college students receive an associate degree or certificate, transfer to four-year schools, or complete 60 transferable units within six years of enrolling. There is some anecdotal evidence that promise programs improve college-going rates, but they do not seem to boost college completion. In order to improve completion rates, programs may need to provide support services for participants who have entered college.

More generally, the wide range of program designs makes it difficult to assess their effectiveness—even within California, promise programs have different residency requirements, eligibility criteria, grades of entry (middle school vs. freshman year of high school), financial awards, support services, and levels of financial sustainability. Defining the basic elements of promise programs and developing effective standards for program design and implementation will help ensure their future success.

Learn more

Read the PPIC Statewide Survey: Californians and Higher Education
Visit the PPIC Higher Education Center

More Students Completing College Prep Courses

Over the past few years more school districts have made college preparatory courses mandatory for high school graduation. These districts have aligned their graduation requirements to the CSU and UC a-g sequence in an effort to make more students college ready. Some of these districts include Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, Sonoma Valley, and Vallejo City Unified; the East Side Union High School District in San Jose; and the San Diego Unified, Carlsbad Unified, and Sweetwater Union High School District in San Diego County. Most of these requirements are too new to evaluate, but as more districts make this change, it is important to understand the potential impact. A PPIC report on San Diego Unified found that about 10 percent more students would become eligible to apply to UC and CSU because of the requirement.

The a-g sequence is a set of high school courses required for admission to UC and CSU. The content is rigorous and broad, designed to provide students with a solid foundation of general knowledge. It covers seven different subject areas: (a) history/social science, (b) English, (c) mathematics, (d) laboratory science, (e) foreign language, (f) visual and performing arts, and (g) college-preparatory electives; it includes a total of 15 year-long courses or 30 semesters. These courses are viewed as more rigorous than standard high school courses, as they must meet the criteria developed by the UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (It is possible that a non-a-g course is equally rigorous but has simply not undergone a-g approval).

The new a-g graduation requirements have raised concern that many students would be unable to meet them—the reform designed to prepare more students for college might result in lower high school graduation rates. Given this concern, most a-g aligned districts require that students earn a D or higher, which is lower than the UC and CSU requirement of a grade of C or higher.

As it turns out, more students are meeting the a-g requirements with a C or higher. Over the last 10 years there has been an increase of 48% in those meeting the requirements—or 60,000 more high school graduates—with 43% of the class of 2015 doing so.

As more students complete the a-g sequence, the UC and CSU systems receive more applications and admit more students. Between 2011 and 2016, 23% (or 54,383) more Californians applied to UC and CSU, and the systems admitted 20% (or 33,557) more California applicants. However, both systems still limit or deny access to some qualified students. In the 2014‒15 school year, UC redirected 10,688 eligible California students to UC Merced―they had been denied admission to other campuses―but only 195 actually enrolled. The following year, the CSU denied over 17,000 eligible California students, which amounts to almost 55% of denied applicants.

Improvements in college preparation among California’s high school graduates is great news. The challenge is to ensure that our colleges and universities are able to accommodate the increase in demand that comes with it.

Learn more

Read the report College Readiness in California: A Look at Rigorous High School Course-Taking
Visit the PPIC Higher Education Center

Can Mandatory College Entrance Exams Boost College Access?


This post is part of an occasional series examining how California can learn from policies in other states.

California ranks 47th out of the 50 states in the proportion of recent high school graduates that attend a four-year college. There are big recognizable barriers to attending a four-year college, such as cost. However, there are also smaller barriers—like taking a college entrance exam such as the SAT or ACT—that can keep students from even being eligible for entry to a four-year college.

Policy: Mandatory College Entrance Testing in High School

Several states have recently instituted statewide college entrance exams for high school students through allowances in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which mandates that states test their students for accountability purposes. The ESSA allows states to use college entrance tests as their high school tests. Students in states that use college entrance exams have one less hurdle to college eligibility, as well as experience taking the test and a signal of their level of college readiness. These benefits could help students make their way to a four-year college. Does the policy work?

Policy Impact

Because many states are only recently requiring a college entrance exam, there has not been enough time to analyze long-term trends. However, a 2015 study by Daniel Klasik evaluates the college-going behavior of students in three states (Illinois, Colorado, and Maine) that have long required all students to take national college entrance exams in high school. The study shows that statewide college enrollment may not necessarily increase, but students may have enrolled in different types of institutions than they otherwise would have. In Illinois and Maine the entrance exam policy was associated with a shift in enrollment away from public two-year colleges, which generally don’t require entrance exams; Illinois saw increases in four-year college attendance. Students in Maine and Colorado were more likely to enroll in institutions that required entrance exams for admission. All three states saw a positive impact on attendance at private four-year colleges.

Lessons for California

California currently uses the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) tests, which students take in grades 3-8 and 11. Of the fifteen states in SBAC, six use a college exam for federal accountability for their high schools and another three states require (and pay for) all students to take a college exam in addition to their normal state test.

The trend is catching on in California. Right now only 60% of students take the SAT, but several California districts are offering the test free to all students. In fact, Long Beach Unified School District recently asked the state if it could replace the SBAC test with the SAT, citing similar schoolwide accountability scores and the additional college-going benefits. The state declined, citing concerns about alignment with the Common Core State Standards, the ability of the SAT to accurately assess lower-performing students, and accommodations for students with limited English proficiency or learning disabilities.

But mandatory college entrance exams could remove a barrier to college entry for California students. As we have examined in prior research, the SBAC tests already link high school testing to college readiness at the California State University (CSU) and some community colleges through the Early Assessment Program. However, the University of California and many private schools still require a college entrance exam score. And while CSU does not require an entrance exam for all students, it does require an ACT or SAT score for students with GPA that is below 3.0 and for those applying to some impacted campuses or majors.

A statewide entrance exam program may not solve all of California’s enrollment issues—in part because California’s master plan limits entry to public universities and many campuses are not currently able to accept all qualified applicants. California could still benefit if the policy increases enrollment at four-year private schools, as students starting at four-year institutions are generally more likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree than those who start at a community college. In a state that is facing a 1.1 million degree gap by 2030, removing barriers to college entry is an important step toward producing more college graduates.

Video: Top Goals of Higher Education Leaders

California’s higher education system is not keeping up with the economy’s changing needs, PPIC research has shown. Falling behind in creating a skilled workforce could curtail economic growth, limit economic mobility, and increase inequality in the state. The leaders of the California Community Colleges (CCC), California State University (CSU), and University of California (UC) are essential in the effort to increase the number of educated workers, because the vast majority of the state’s college students attend public colleges and universities.

Hans Johnson, director of the PPIC Higher Education Center, summarized this research, and the three leaders of the higher education system sat down last week with Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO, to talk about their goals before a large Sacramento audience.

The first question: What are your top goals in the next decade?

Eloy Ortiz Oakley, CCC chancellor, said it is a critical time for the 113-campus system. “We connect with so many Californians at a time when the economy is changing before our eyes, and the default to get into the workforce is no longer a high school diploma. Some sort of post-secondary credential is essential. That is our focus.”

He said he is working with the other higher education branches and the K–12 system to integrate them into “one public system of education, not four separate systems.”

Timothy White, CSU chancellor, had a similar focus on results. “Our number -one priority in the years ahead is to improve the success rates of our students,” he said, adding that just 20 percent of CSU students earn their degrees in four years. He said he wants to make sure CSU students have access to courses when they need to take them, as well as sufficient faculty and academic support.

Janet Napolitano, UC president, said, “My vision is that the University of California remain the top public university in the world.” Citing the recent growth in enrollment of in-state students, she said that sustaining academic excellence, increasing diversity, and producing students who will be the next generation of California’s leaders are all key parts of this vision.

Learn more

Visit the PPIC Higher Education Center

Testimony: Ensuring That More Students Succeed in College

Hans Johnson, director of the PPIC Higher Education Center and PPIC senior fellow, testified before the Assembly Budget Subcommittee Number 2 on Education Finance in Sacramento today (March 9, 2017). Here are his prepared remarks.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning. My name is Hans Johnson and I am the director of the Higher Education Center at the Public Policy Institute of California. PPIC is a nonpartisan policy research organization and does not take positions on legislation. My comments are based on research we have conducted at PPIC on California’s higher education system.

Providing affordable higher education opportunities for all Californians, especially those with limited resources, is essential if we are to realize the benefits of higher education for our state and its residents. Higher education is not only the single best predictor of an individual’s wages and income, but also the strongest determinant of a society’s economic well-being. PPIC has estimated that California’s colleges and universities are not producing enough bachelor’s degrees and will fall 1.1 million degrees short of economic demand by 2030 unless we improve access to and completion in our higher education systems. While economic gains are strongest for workers with at least a bachelor’s degree, recent PPIC research has also shown strong gains for many—but not all—students who complete vocational programs in the state’s community colleges.

One of the central challenges facing higher education today is ensuring that college serves as a ladder for economic and social mobility. This challenge is especially acute in California, where 60% of high school students are identified by the California Department of Education as socioeconomically disadvantaged (meaning they are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch or come from a family in which neither parent has graduated high school). To close the workforce skills gap, California needs to find ways to improve college completion among students from underrepresented groups, including Latino, African American, low-income, and first-generation students.

The good news is that, compared to other states, California’s public colleges and universities enroll a diverse population. Recent research by the Equality of Opportunity Project shows that California’s public universities enroll more low-income students than comparable colleges in the rest of the country. For example, among elite colleges, UCLA ranks first in the nation in the share of students from low- and middle-income backgrounds. Among all large public universities, Cal State Los Angeles ranks 2nd (after City College of New York) in economic mobility, propelling students from lower-income families into middle- and upper-income groups.

The challenge is ensuring that even more students succeed in our higher education systems. The University of California has an excellent track record of graduating low-income and underrepresented students, and California State University has made significant progress in improving graduation rates for all groups. But graduation gaps remain at both institutions. CSU has developed a new and ambitious graduation initiative that would substantially increase graduation rates and completely close graduation gaps by 2025. However, neither institution has been able to fully enroll all qualified applicants. In recent years, thousands of qualified Californians—both freshmen and transfer applicants—have been turned away from UC and CSU due to a lack of funding.

Of the state’s three systems of public education, our community colleges best represent the diversity of young Californians. The state’s community colleges provide higher education opportunities for almost two million students, a majority of whom are from low-income families or other underrepresented groups. However, far too many students who enter community colleges do not succeed: most never transfer to a four-year college or earn a degree or certificate. Hundreds of millions of dollars have recently been invested in efforts like the Basic Skills Initiative (BSI) and the Student Success and Support Program (SSSP) to improve student outcomes at California’s community colleges. These and other efforts—such as Guided Pathways, a new initiative to help students establish clear objectives and provide support to achieve their goals—hold a great deal of promise for improving student outcomes.

Expanding access to our public universities and improving outcomes throughout our higher education system will almost certainly take more resources. But using current and new funding to improve student outcomes in the most efficacious manner possible must be a high priority. Better coordination between UC, CSU, the community colleges, and our K–12 system can be a cost-effective way of providing students with a seamless pathway from high school to a higher education degree or certificate. Improving access and programs, including financial aid and student support services, to students with the most need can also help reduce gaps in educational attainment and economic success. The role of higher education officials and state legislators is to ensure that resources are spent on programs that really work for students. PPIC is already working on a number of projects that focus on improving student success, and we look forward to continuing to contribute to such efforts.

Bridging Equity Gaps in Health Career Training

California’s community colleges are the largest providers of workforce training in the state, offering a wide variety of career technical education (CTE) programs. Career training in health is particularly promising for students, as the health industry offers many in-demand, well-paying jobs for Californians with less than a bachelor’s degree. Health programs have higher completion rates than other CTE programs and attract a large and diverse student population. But gaps in achievement across student groups are a persistent problem.

PPIC’s latest report on career technical education in health provides detailed insights into the nature of equity gaps in student achievement. African American students are nearly 12 percentage points less likely to complete a health credential than their white peers. Latino students are about 6 points less likely.

To better understand racial/ethnic achievement gaps—and identify potential solutions—we examined three possible explanations: socioeconomic factors, program choice, and course-taking patterns. Individual demographic factors like age, immigration status, and economic disadvantage do matter, but cannot explain away the achievement gap. A student’s choice of health program also matters—that is, African American and Latino students are less likely to be enrolled in the health CTE programs with the highest completion rates, such as registered nursing and dental hygiene. But even after for controlling for socioeconomic factors and program choice, the racial/ethnic achievement gap persists (7 percentage points for African American students and 3 percentage points for Latino students).

By far the most consequential factor driving the racial/ethnic achievement gap in health programs is course-taking patterns—in particular, course progression patterns that are linked to student success. African American and Latino students are less likely to enroll full-time or in consecutive terms—these two patterns are strongly related to college completion. In addition, they are less likely to complete 30 or more units before entering the health program, another factor linked to future success. Finally, compared to white students who are otherwise similar, African American and Latino students are less likely to receive financial aid. Simply put, we find that if students entered similar programs and made similar progress course by course, the racial achievement gap would disappear.

These results suggest that there are many steps community colleges can take to alleviate completion gaps. In fact, systemwide efforts to support full-time attendance to and to guide students on choosing a program of study are among the reforms implemented through the Student Success effort in recent years. Our results suggest that efforts to enable underrepresented students to devote more time to their courses of study and pick up momentum toward their educational goals will do the most to reduce completion gaps. More information about the programs with the best completion rates and earnings potential can empower students to decide which career pathways to pursue. By identifying and addressing the drivers of inequity in CTE—in health as well as other programs—colleges can help more students take the crucial first step of earning a credential and then move along well-paying career pathways.

Learn more

Read the report Career Technical Education in Health: An Overview of Student Success at California’s Community Colleges
Visit the PPIC Higher Education Center