Alexis Atsilvsgi Zaragoza is a model student by any measure.
She was a superstar at Modesto Junior College, where she earned twin associate degrees in political science and geography and became an effective student advocate for access to financial aid. She now is a respected campus leader at Berkeley, where she transferred in 2019, and was last year’s student representative on the University of California Board of Regents.
Yet, in common with hundreds of thousands of lower-income students across the state, Zaragoza has had to wage endless fights against a complex and baffling bureaucracy that has frequently threatened to derail her college career completely.
She faced rejection right out of the gate, even before she finished high school in Patterson, a small farm community outside Modesto in the Central Valley. Humboldt State University rescinded an offer it had previously made because one of her senior year math grades fell short of its standards. Nobody had informed her, or her high school, what those standards were.
Every year since, she has struggled to complete her financial aid forms because her father, a carpenter, is on state disability, and the higher education system requires her to produce an avalanche of extra paperwork to prove it. “I am picked every year for verification,” she says.
When it came time to transfer to a four-year institution, Zaragoza was on her guard. As a student activist, she knew about “the danger zones” – the thicket of requirements to get her course credits recognized and to meet the thresholds demanded by different four-year institutions. She knew that her efforts would stand or fall on having a first-rate counselor, and she was forthright enough to reject the first two she was given before finding one who earned her confidence.
Even then, she almost lost one of her essential credits, an online course she took from San Bernardino Valley College while she worked a summer job in Sacramento. An administrator from San Bernardino informed her she’d have to come in for a meeting or the course would not end up on her transcript. But San Bernardino was six hours away and she didn’t have the time or the money to go.
“It turned out the meeting was to confirm my name and birth date,” she says. “Something ridiculously simple, but they couldn’t take it over the phone.”
As it happened, her summer job was with the California Community Colleges, so she took the problem to her bosses who not only solved it but got the entire procedure changed. Still, the lesson was clear.
“This kind of process can take regular students on so many different routes,” Zaragoza says. “Maybe they’ll go see their counselor, who will send them to the financial aid office, who will then send them somewhere else. Maybe they’ll end up owing money to the system that they never needed to pay. This is why so many students drop out or give up on transferring.”
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The numbers, unfortunately, only confirm Zaragoza’s analysis.
The Public Policy Institute of California recently studied the freshman community college class of 2013 and found that, of those who said they wanted to go to a four-year school, only 28 percent managed to transfer within six years. Theoretically, it should take just two years to earn the credits needed to transfer, but in recent years fewer than 3 percent of community college students have managed to move on that fast.
The reason? Without expert guidance – and, ideally, a pre-established relationship between a community college and a four-year school (as Berkeley City College has with Berkeley, and Santa Monica College has with UCLA) – students end up taking far more than the minimum 60 credits required for transfer, because target schools are forever demanding one more thing, and the criteria keep shifting. Typically, students will rack up 85 or 90 credits before a four-year college finally takes them.
Every setback has a cost in terms of time and money, putting undue pressure on lower-income students for reasons unconnected to academic merit. Students who have no family history of higher education often come to question whether they truly belong in college and lose the will to keep pushing.
The racial implications are particularly ugly, because Black and Latino students are left swirling in the community college system in vastly disproportionate numbers. Latinos make up 40 percent of California’s population, but as of a few years ago only 15 percent of Latino adults reported having a bachelor’s degree (compared with 47 percent of white Californians). Black Californians, meanwhile, have the highest dropout rate of any racial group: one-third of them go to college but never finish, according to U.S. Census data.
“We’re breaking the promise of opportunity to so many students,” says Michele Siqueiros, who as president of the Los Angeles-based Campaign for College Opportunity has been one of the state’s strongest advocates for equity in higher education. “Our high school graduates are more prepared for college than ever, but there’s a huge gap between those students and the access they have to the system.”
A decade ago, in response to lobbying by Siqueiros’ group, the California legislature introduced something called the Associate Degree for Transfer, which should have smoothed a lot of this bureaucratic friction. Close to 80 of California’s 115 community colleges have taken significant steps to embrace the concept, according to data collected by CCO. But its effectiveness has been blunted because it is not necessarily available to all students, is not uniformly recognized across the Cal State system and is barely recognized at all in the elite University of California system. Other reforms – including proposals to allow community colleges to offer four-year degrees and thus circumvent the transfer obstacle altogether – have made similarly modest progress.
In a report published in June, the Campaign for College Opportunity likened the transfer system to a game of Chutes and Ladders, in which even the most talented and driven student is one bad roll of the dice from potential disaster.
“Transfer rates are low because navigating the process remains a cumbersome, confusing and time-consuming experience,” the report says. The main culprits? “Duplicative, ever-changing coursework requirements and a lack of unified, system-wide, transferable course agreements.”
The positive spin higher ed administrators sometimes put on this mess is that a student who successfully navigates her way through the system is ready for anything that life could possibly throw at her. In other words, the process is the education.
Such an argument, though, ignores the vast cost to those the system crushes underfoot – not so much Chutes and Ladders as “The Hunger Games.” It ignores the growing demands for social and racial justice in the age of Black Lives Matter. And it ignores the fact that the California economy can no longer tolerate such dizzying inefficiencies, because it needs all the skilled graduate workers it can get.
In a world in which roughly two-thirds of all jobs now require some form of post-secondary qualification – a huge change from a generation ago – economists estimate that California will need to mint hundreds of thousands more bachelor’s degrees by 2030 than it is currently on track to produce.
While the state has started closing the gap, thanks to increased enrollment and higher graduation rates in the UC and CSU systems, a lot more remains to be done.
The Campaign for College Opportunity does not expect the Latino graduation rate to rise much above 30 percent by 2030, when it needs to be closer to 60 percent. The only way to reach that goal, Siqueiros and others argue, is to break the logjam at community colleges, because that is where most Latinos – and the majority of higher education students overall – currently are.
Timothy Renick, who runs the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University and consults regularly with California administrators and government officials, agrees that transferring more students is key to any long-term solution.
“In a system where the majority of students are transfer students and are expected to finish at a different institution from the one where they were first enrolled,” he says, “there’s no way you can tackle equity gaps unless you begin to address the coherence of academic requirements from one sector to the next.”
It’s rare to hear such sentiments from California’s system administrators or from faculty leaders, who tend to disregard what happens outside their own bailiwicks and assert that all is for the best in the best of all possible public university systems. That hasn’t been true, though, of California’s last two political administrations, which have not only recognized the deep structural flaws in the system but also expressed a growing urgency to correct them.
Gov. Gavin Newsom made higher education reform one of his signature issues, and said earlier this year he wanted to see 70 percent – not just 60 percent – of California adults obtain at least an associate’s degree. (The attainment rate is currently below 50 percent.) In July, he signed a budget trailer bill to pump $47 billion into a variety of programs, many of them intended to improve outcomes for lower-income students. And another bill from the legislature may soon be crossing the governor’s desk, focusing specifically on transfer.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only heightened the sense of urgency. But it also presents an opportunity to enact what Gov. Newsom’s senior policy adviser on higher education, Lande Ajose, has called “recovery with equity.”
The pandemic has forced everyone to rethink how to deliver higher education and how to interact with students, which provides a basis for more permanent structural change. It’s time, Dr. Ajose told me, to stop talking about the institutional interests of the California system and put the focus instead on student need and how to meet it.
It is, to put it mildly, a daunting task.
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A dozen years ago, almost nobody in California was talking about equity in higher education. When The Campaign for College Opportunity proposed a report on racial achievement gaps in 2010, several people sought to talk them out of it. If minority students see how grim their prospects are, Siqueiros was told, they will only become more discouraged.
“All people cared about then was access,” she says. “It didn’t matter if students failed.”
What people did care about was the Holy Grail of higher education in California, the 1960 Master Plan, which established the state’s three-tier system and the dividing lines that persist to this day: the University of California system, reserved for the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates; the Cal State system, for the rest of the top third; and community college for everyone else.
The beauty of the plan was that it made college affordable and accessible, a vital ingredient in California’s postwar prosperity. In those days, though, most college students were white, male and solidly middle-class – and plenty of good-paying jobs did not require a college education at all.
In the decades since, the demographics and the economy of the state have changed dramatically, and the grand promise of social mobility enshrined in the Master Plan has slowly ossified into a sort of caste system in which families of college graduates are able to perpetuate their wealth and success with relative ease, but those seeking to break into the middle class for the first time face constant roadblocks and frustration.
Serving this new generation of college aspirants did not become any sort of priority until the 2008 recession, when economic pressures made the inefficiencies of public higher education suddenly intolerable – across the country and across the political spectrum. At a time of steep budget cuts, state legislatures resented having to fund systems that, like California’s, provided a lousy return on investment. Civil rights leaders deplored the number of young Black and brown Americans who left college mired in debt but with no degree. And business leaders wanted to know where they were going to find the skilled labor they needed once the economy recovered.
Arizona State University’s idiosyncratic president, Michael Crow, started talking about a new sort of American university, defined by who it included, not who it excluded. At Georgia State, Timothy Renick and his colleagues in Atlanta managed to bury the conventional wisdom that students from disadvantaged backgrounds were doomed to fail in large numbers, because they developed a series of cutting-edge support programs that eliminated all achievement gaps and dramatically improved retention and graduation rates, even as the university doubled its population of lower-income students.
These programs seized on emerging data technologies to identify the biggest obstacles Georgia State students faced and found ways to eliminate them. Classes were scheduled when students with jobs and other outside responsibilities needed them, not when faculty felt like teaching. Academic advisers adopted a sophisticated interactive dashboard that could quickly steer students into the right major and ensure they took classes in the right order. Students who hit a financial crunch received microgrants that dropped right into their university accounts. And the university offered a variety of platforms, including an artificial intelligence chatbot, for students to ask questions and receive timely answers without standing endlessly in line at campus offices.
California has since piggy-backed on many of these ideas, and much of the progress in graduation rates since 2015 – particularly at CSUs like Cal State Long Beach – can be ascribed to the introduction of more efficient course schedules, more robust academic advising, and a greater all-around awareness of student need and how to meet it.
But two important things cloud this seemingly rosy picture.
First, the UCs and CSUs are able to cherry-pick their students, because the entire higher education system is oversubscribed, a result of California’s robust population growth over decades. So, a campus like UC Riverside, which was designed for large numbers of minority students, can brag about narrowing achievement gaps, but it also sets its standards high and rejects one-third of its applicants. As one expert who knows Riverside well put it, “Turning down a lot of people can cover up a lot of problems.”
Second, California has been unable to build a seamless, all-encompassing data warehouse, the sort that has driven Georgia State’s success, because the different parts of the system like to hold on to information and resist any push toward uniform definitions and standards. It’s almost impossible to dig out even basic data about financial aid recipients, or figure out what proportion of California high school graduates enter the public higher education system.
What’s more, there has been no uniformity even in course numbering across community colleges, so it’s almost impossible to compare student trajectories, much less begin the arduous, years-long work of standardizing lower-level math or English courses across the three systems.
Data matters not just because policy wonks love it, but also because it is the bedrock of meaningful reform. If, say, a faculty union is skeptical about the need to hire large numbers of non-faculty academic advisers – an important part of the Georgia State model – the first question often will be, where’s the data to show it will improve student outcomes? Many institutions do not have it.
Lack of data contributed to a flare-up a few years ago when CSUs were deciding whether to make ethnic studies a mandatory part of the core curriculum. Timothy White, then the CSU chancellor, wanted to keep ethnic studies optional, because he felt that was most conducive to higher retention and graduation rates. He didn’t have the data to prove this, however, and he soon faced a furious faculty and student backlash. Ultimately, the legislature forced ethnic studies back on to the CSU syllabus.
Stories like this alarm higher education experts in several states – including Georgia, Tennessee and Florida – that have enacted effective student success reforms with little or no political interference and get nervous at the thought of legislators inserting themselves in areas where they are not expert. In California, though, many advocates for lower income students say there is no alternative to lobbying politicians, because the system is too impervious to change on its own.
“None of this requires legislation,” Siqueiros says, “but none of this will happen without legislation.”
The governor’s office, meanwhile, believes it has a vital role to play because higher education feeds into so many other state interests – everything from the economy to anti- poverty programs – and because California, unlike many other states, still believes in improving the system through public investment and smart budgeting.
“The institutions are the durable, permanent parts of the system … but students are transitory and … [it’s easy] to lose focus on them,” Ajose says. “The role government can play is to bring that student voice and experience to the forefront.”
Ajose was a noted advocate for student equity in her previous role running the nonprofit California Competes, and she and Newsom have drawn up an ambitious wish list: Everything from introducing dual enrollment, so students who start at community college already have a guaranteed place at a follow-up institution, to helping high school graduates complete the notoriously complex federal financial aid form, to building a comprehensive statewide data system, to investing in student housing and helping lower-income families establish college saving funds.
Not only should the three system tiers sit down and transform their silos into a “holistic ecosystem,” she says; they should also think creatively about moving people through the system faster.
That could mean putting some large intro courses online, where students can absorb them at their own pace instead of feeling lost in a large lecture hall. Or it could mean more classes on Fridays and weekends, or boosting summer enrollment. “It should all be on the table,” Ajose says.
When Michele Siqueiros first lobbied to ease the transfer process a decade ago, a student advocate she worked with told her: “This whole time I thought there was something wrong with me. It never occurred to me it was my college that should have been doing a better job.”
Now the governor’s office is echoing that same message – and it implicates every level in higher education, from community college to the Board of Regents.
UPDATE: On Oct. 6, Gov. Newsom signed two bills, one requiring the UC and Cal State systems to establish a more coherent and more uniform “student-centered transfer process” based in large part on the Associate’s Degree for Transfer concept, and the other establishing a common course number system across the state’s community colleges to cut down on the excess credit problem. Since this piece went to press, it has also been announced that Lande Ajose will be leaving the governor’s office in October to head a new research initiative at the Public Policy Institute of California.
Andrew Gumbel’s book recounting the student success revolution at Georgia State, “Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System,” was published by The New Press in 2020.
