Last week, the Campaign for College Opportunity (CCO) — a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that has a mission is to ensure 1 million additional college graduates in California by 2025 — released a report by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at California State University Sacramento examining four-year transfer rates for Californians who begin at one of the state’s 110 community colleges.
The longitudinal research study examines community college completion and transfer rates for over 250,000 Californians who began at public two-year schools in 2003-04, revealing significant disparities across racial and ethnic lines. Only 26 percent of Black students and 22 percent of Latino students completed a certificate, degree or transferred to a four-year school within six years, compared with 37 percent of White students.
While this may not be surprising to those who study such trends, it should sound a loud alarm to state policymakers and business leaders who will need to rely on an increasingly diverse population for future economic prosperity.
The Latino community — California’s largest underrepresented minority group — is expected to make up a full half of the state’s population by 2050. While California’s information- and health care-driven economy is expanding, the educational mobility of its new majority is not keeping pace.
According to the California Employment Development Project, the number of STEM jobs will grow 20 percent between 2006-2016, the majority requiring at least an associate of science degree. Yet, the state’s racial/ethnic minority youth and adult populations remain far behind their majority peers in educational attainment, particularly in scientific fields.
The propensity of these populations to begin higher education at the two-year level (a trend that is true in California and nationally) means that community colleges must do a better job of completing and transferring their students.
Yet none of this would be clear if the policy and advocacy community did not first ask the right questions and seek the relevant data. The Divided We Fail authors make central to their argument the need to utilize student progress data to inform completion policy and subsequent practice.
