Expanding Opportunity in Higher Education: Leveraging Promise

2. California Opportunity Indicators: Informing and Monitoring California’s Progress Toward Equitable College Access

BACKGROUND We begin with a reminder of what is well known. There are stark statewide disparities among California’s racial and ethnic groups in high school completion and college participation—a finding that is not unique to this region but exists across the nation. Figure 2.1 documents these disparities for a cohort of students who graduated from California public high schools in spring 2002. It shows the proportion that each racial and ethnic group makes up of the state’s 9th-grade enrollment compared to the proportion they comprise of high school graduates and first-time college freshmen four years later. Notice as Latinos and African Americans move through the educational system , their share of the enrollment declines dramatically as a proportion of the freshman class at the California Community Colleges (CCC), the California 19 JEANNIE OAKES JULIE A. MENDOZA DAVID SILVER Chapter Two California Opportunity Indicators: Informing and Monitoring California’s Progress Toward Equitable College Access State University (CSU), and the University of California. Particularly striking is the extreme under-representation of both groups in the selective University of California (UC). For example, in 1998, Latinos represented 40 percent of the state’s 9th-grade enrollment. Four years later, they comprised 32 percent of the state’s high school graduates, 28 percent of freshmen enrolled in California community college, 22 percent of CSU freshmen, and only 13 percent of UC freshmen. Figure 2.1 not only documents dramatic disparities in high school completion and college participation among California’s diverse student population, it underscores the need for the state to carefully monitor barriers known to impact college participation.1 As bad as they are, the 2002 disparities represent a substantial recovery from the significant drop in the rates of admissions of African American and Latino students to the University of California following the Regents’ 1995 resolution ending affirmative action at the university and the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, a ballot initiative prohibiting the consideration of race, ethnicity , and gender in admissions and hiring in California. The ban on affirmative action prompted the University of California and California State University systems to become far more aggressive in their efforts to use “outreach” programs to create a more diverse pool of high school graduates who are eligible and competitive for the university in a race-neutral admissions environment. In 1997, a blue ribbon UC Outreach Task Force proposed a four-pronged approach for reaching students at these schools: (a) student-centered academic 20 Jeannie Oakes, Julie A. Mendoza, and David Silver FIGURE 2.1 California Student Diversity: 1998–1999 Ninth Graders Compared to 2001–2002 High School Graduates and to Fall 2002 First-time Freshmen *Includes Pacific Islanders and Filipinos (chart created by Celina Torres, MPP, Tomás Rivera Policy Institute) 40% 32% 28% 22% 13% 9% 7% 6% 6% 3% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1% 39% 43% 42% 38% 37% 12% 15% 15% 19% 38% Latino African American American Indian White Asian*  Ninth-grade Enrollment, 1998–1999  High School Grad  CCC  CSU  UC development; (b) school-centered systemic reform; (c) recruitment and yield activities; and (d) research and evaluation. In 1998, the Task Force plan was funded rather generously by the legislature, with the proviso that within five years the university double the number of African American, Latino, and American Indian students that were graduating from high school eligible for admission to the university and increase by 50 percent the number that were “competitively eligible”—for admission to the system’s two most selective campuses—Los Angeles and Berkeley. Unfortunately, the expanded Outreach programs and their partner educators in K-12 schools had little information to guide them as they devised policies and programs that would make college access more equitable. Existing data about K-12 schooling—test scores, API (Academic Performance Index) rankings—and rates of CSU and UC eligibility conveyed information about educational outcomes, including inequities in college preparation. However, they provided almost no clues about inequalities in learning resources and opportunities within schools or about the types of interventions that would be most effective in removing barriers known to contribute to differences in student achievement and college-going. Neither did they provide answers to other important policy-relevant questions: Are the college -going disparities a statewide phenomenon? Are they worse in particular regions or in particular types of schools? Where along students’ schooling trajectories do the disparities appear? What policy-alterable conditions underlie...