Resize Text: 
People frequently ask me to identify the greatest challenge I face as the leader of the country’s largest system of higher education. After nearly 10 years as California State University’s chancellor, I have come to believe that challenge is the urgent need to reach students from traditionally underserved populations—to prepare them and get them into college and then to make sure they graduate. We must find ways to reach students who might not speak English as a first language, whose parents or grandparents may never have been to a college campus, and whose teachers and counselors may not have paid attention to their needs.
These students are already in the majority in California, and their numbers are growing rapidly throughout the country. If we don’t serve them, they will suffer. People with a baccalaureate degree make about $1.2 million more than high-school graduates over their working lifetimes, and a middle-school student who drops out of school and doesn’t return is headed to the poverty line.
But the rest of us will suffer as well. Our universities will become obsolete, our workforce will be unable to compete in the global economy, and our standard of living will decline. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education estimates that the personal income of Americans will drop significantly in the next 15 years unless states do a better job of raising the educational level of all racial and ethnic groups.
We can’t wait for these students to come to us. We need to go directly into the community to reach them—to help them and their parents understand what steps they need to take to prepare for, get into, and succeed in college. We are trying many different approaches to try to meet the needs before the situation becomes a crisis.
The CSU system is a good testing ground for this challenge. We are not only the largest but also the most diverse four-year university system in the country, with approximately 450,000 students on 23 campuses spanning the 1,000-mile coastline and valleys of California (www.calstate.edu). Our students represent the new majority on college campuses around the country, in that our undergraduates’ average age is 24, about 85 percent are commuters, 44 percent are no longer dependent on their parents (nearly two in five have dependents themselves), four out of five have jobs (over a third work full time), about one in five is in the first in their family to attend college, and 40 percent come from households where English is not the main language spoken.
Currently, 55 percent of our enrollment consists of students of color. This means that compared to many universities around the country, we do a pretty good job of attracting and enrolling students from traditionally under-represented groups. But pretty good is not good enough.
According to California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, CSU was established to accept the top third of California’s high-school graduates. But during the past 20 years, large numbers of African-Americans and Latinos have not been eligible to attend because they did not take the required college-preparation courses. For example, in 2003 Latinos made up 34 percent of all California high-school graduates, but only 16 percent were eligible for admission to CSU. African-American youths make up a much smaller segment of the student population, but we have a similar problem with their preparation for college—particularly that of African-American males.
We know that we must reach these students early to expand the pool of eligible students, so we have created a number of collaborative projects with our public schools and community colleges, from which we draw the overwhelming majority of our students.
Strategies for Preparation and Participation
With support from the Boeing Corporation, we have produced a “Steps to College” poster—offered in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese—that spells out what middle-school and high-school students need to do, grade by grade, to prepare for college. It also sets out deadlines and instructions for applying for financial aid. The CSU distributes 1.3 million of these posters each year throughout the state, including at conferences of high-school counselors, all the state’s K-12 schools, the state Parent-Teacher Associations, Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs and YWCAs, other youth groups, African-American churches, and Latino parents groups. This is a simple way to reach parents, especially those who have not had the benefit of college and do not know how to counsel their children regarding the course-taking patterns that begin to separate the college-going from their peers as early as the eighth grade. (www.calstate.edu/college/poster.shtml.)
Our Early Assessment Program allows 11th graders to take a voluntary test to assess their readiness for college English and math. We augment the required state tests with our own questions that determine if a student has the needed college-level skills. With any deficiencies signaled early, students can spend their often-wasted senior year in high school filling in any academic gaps. We have established special math and English Web sites, www.csumathsuccess.org and www.csuenglishsuccess.org, to help students prepare for the voluntary tests and to explain to teachers, parents, and counselors how they can help. (Editor’s note: see Change, May/June 2006, for Virginia Smith’s interview with former CSU administrator David Spence about this program.)
Students’ participation in early assessment of their college readiness has been more than encouraging: In spring 2007 (the fourth year we administered the test), 346,035 (or 75 percent) of the 461,657 eligible students took at least one Early Assessment Program test, up from 317,056 (72 percent) of the 440,205 who were eligible in spring 2006.
High-school juniors who have taken Algebra I and the Algebra II or Summative High School Mathematics California Standards Test are eligible to take our mathematics test. In 2007, 141,648 students (70 percent of eligible high-school juniors) took that test (compared to 137,067—or 74 percent of those eligible—in 2006), with 55 percent scoring as proficient enough for college-level mathematics.
To be eligible to take the Early Assessment Program English test, high-school juniors must have taken the 11th Grade California Standards Test in English Language Arts. In 2007, 342,345 students (77 percent of those eligible) took our test, up from 312,167 (75 percent of those eligible) in 2006. Unfortunately, only one in six of those who took our English test scored as proficient—about the same proportion as in 2006. To help deal with this long-standing problem, CSU and K-12 leaders developed the college-preparatory Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC), which increasingly is being adopted by high schools throughout California. Since the introduction of ERWC in 2004, more than 2,200 teachers have participated in CSU professional-training workshops and then pilot-tested the modules in their classrooms.
An independent evaluation in 2005-06 found that the proportion of students proficient in English increased by 11 percent between 2003 and 2005 in schools in which five or more English teachers participated in ERWC workshops. A similar evaluation in 2006-07 found an almost identical pattern in a different sample of schools over a three-year period.
Although our Early Assessment Program tests are voluntary, we would prefer that they be mandatory, so that all high-school juniors would know how prepared they were for college when there was still time to correct deficiencies. In this and in our curriculum-reform efforts, we have garnered some public support. A March 2007 editorial in the San Jose Mercury News offered the following praise and suggestions:
To the credit of the (CSU) chancellor’s office, it has developed a program no other public
university system has tried. ... CSU’s outreach is only a few years old, and university officials
are optimistic that the extensive efforts will pay off. School districts could help out by requiring
that all juniors take CSU’s test and by adding the expository English course to their curricula.
In another effort, our Community Outreach Forums help us learn from community members about what we can do to reach out more effectively to them and their children. We have held meetings across the state with leaders from Latino, Native-American, Vietnamese, and other communities. Since research has shown that churches are key components of the black community, we have also held a very successful series of “Super Sunday” events promoting college awareness at African-American churches in the San Francisco/East Bay and the greater Los Angeles areas. On two Sundays in February 2007, CSU presidents, trustees, and other higher-education leaders took the pulpit to say that college is possible and can make a significant difference in a young person’s life. We reached 40,000 African-Americans through these events and gave our “How to Get to College” poster to all participants. California Assembly Member Mervyn Dymally, who chairs California’s Legislative Black Caucus, called the first Super Sunday, held in February 2006, “an act of political genius. ... That was a coup. I’ve never known a white college administrator to get into a black church” (CrossTalk, Summer 2006).
Families are particularly strong in the Latino community, so one of our key strategies aimed at Latino students is to reach out to their parents. My office has given each campus a $25,000 matching grant for the past two years to create partnerships with the Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE), to help strengthen parental involvement in their children’s education in the elementary and middle-school years. During the nine-week PIQE training program, parents learn how to improve their child’s performance in the classroom and the steps they need to take to help their child attend a college or university. At the end of the program, parents are presented with a “graduation certificate,” and their children are given an identification card that guarantees them admission to a CSU campus if they meet the entrance requirements. Research shows that the vast majority of parents who graduate from a PIQE program (more 7,000 last year) send their children to college.
College campuses often intimidate first-generation students, so to help them feel like they belong there, we have created a partnership with the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, funded by a grant from the Sallie Mae Foundation, that helps us take the Kids to College program to sixth graders in underserved communities near CSU campuses. In this program, children spend time on a college campus, meeting counselors, college students, and others to learn about planning for college and careers. They receive workbooks, T-shirts, and other materials to begin to familiarize them with college life.
The process of applying for college also can seem like an insurmountable barrier to students and families who aren’t savvy about the procedures. We know that we’re more apt to reach young people of all colors and economic levels if we do so electronically, so we have moved heavily in that direction.
Our online application service, CSU Mentor (www.csumentor.edu), allows students to do “one-stop shopping”: plan their high-school coursework, apply for admission, and apply for financial aid. In 2006, we received a record 465,742 online applications for fall 2007 admission during CSU’s priority application period, which extends from October 1 to November 30. That was a six-percent increase from the previous year and marked the ninth straight year of growth for online applications. Within the under-served communities, Latino applications grew by 15 percent (from 104,404 to 120,065) and African-American and Native-American applications by 12 percent (the former from 27,782 to 31,116 and the latter from 2,187 to 2,449).
According to the Department of Defense, only 50 percent of those leaving the military services are using their GI Bill benefits. So CSU is taking a leading role in California’s Troops to College program, created by the governor, to help the 60,000 Californians leaving military service each year enroll in college. Veterans learn about college at job fairs, through public-service announcements, and at meetings at military bases. And at many CSU campuses, specially designated counselors help the veterans with the transition process. A disproportionate share of these veterans are from racial and ethnic minority groups.
Facilitating Graduation
Preparation and participation aren’t enough, of course—students’ graduation is the goal for all of our outreach efforts. In 2003, CSU’s Board of Trustees adopted a major graduation initiative that aimed at strengthening the transfer process from community colleges and helping students enrolled at CSU campuses to improve their graduation rates.
Transcript-review studies completed a few years ago showed that many community-college students were transferring to a CSU campus with many more units than they needed, which meant that they had spent time and money needlessly. So the transfer challenge is being addressed by our Lower Division Transfer Patterns project (LDTP), which we undertook with the cooperation of the California Community Colleges.
This project presents potential transfer students with a set of “road maps” to follow to ensure appropriate academic preparation for study at CSU; the road maps also will shorten the time it takes students to graduate once they enter the four-year system. The road map for each discipline has both statewide and campus-specific components. The statewide portion applies to any CSU campus and consists of general-education coursework and some courses within a number of majors. The campus-specific component identifies further coursework required for the majors at the various CSU campuses. Together, these components total at least 60 units, the number needed to transfer to CSU as an upper-division student.
In addition, we have undertaken three major accountability initiatives to track our success in getting students to graduation. First, my office asks each campus to submit biannual written reports on their progress in facilitating graduation. My office and the campus presidents then report those results to the CSU Board of Trustees. Also, this year teams of senior CSU faculty members made accreditation-style visits to campuses, during which campus policies and outcomes pertaining to graduation were reviewed. From those visits, we have developed a set of best practices for facilitating students’ graduation. During academic 2007-08 we plan to work with the CSU’s Statewide Academic Senate on the next steps in this important accountability effort.
Beyond what we are doing within our own institutions or systems, there is far more that all of us need to do nationally:
• We must continue to urge increased support for federal outreach programs such as Upward Bound, GEAR-UP, TRIO, and the like. Middle-school students especially need our attention because many of them, especially those from underserved minority groups, decide to drop out during middle school, never even reaching high school, let alone college.
• We need to address curricular problems at the middle- school and high-school levels. CSU was a very strong supporter of a successful effort to adopt a college-preparatory curriculum for all students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. But the inadequate reading and math skills of many students coming out of high school suggest that we must also work with teachers to improve courses that now do little, if anything, to prepare students for college-level work.
• We need to recruit more students from under-represented populations to teach in public schools, so that more students have teachers who look like they do. This means building a pipeline to a teaching career for talented individuals and building partnerships with the schools that hire them.
• We need to recruit more minority-group faculty and staff members at our university campuses. Since most universities will experience waves of retiring “baby-boomers,” now is the time to recruit faculty of color to our campuses.
• We need to show leaders in business and industry that if we are to provide the workforce vital to their businesses, they must be our partners in getting students through high school, into college, and then into careers that are critical to our states’ economies. For example, we need more businesses to provide scholarships to students in math and science fields so that they, in turn, become teachers and “turn on” more students to work in the state’s research labs and engineering firms.
• Finally, we need to advocate changes in immigration laws, such as allowing undocumented students who have attended high school for three years, graduated, enrolled in college and applied for legal status, to qualify for financial aid, which they cannot do now. This would help, rather than hinder, people in getting an education so that they can become productive members of our workforce and economy.
We must reach our underserved populations in all the creative ways we can because they are the future face of our country, just as those waves of European immigrants were in the past. If we wait too long it will be too late, not just for these students but for higher education and for our country. Our communities and our economy are depending on us, and we must meet the challenge.
Charles B. Reed is chancellor of the California State University System. He previously served as chancellor of the State University System of Florida and as chief of staff to former Governor Bob Graham of Florida.