The California State University System has set an ambitious  goal of raising student graduation rate 8 percentage points, including 10 percentage points for low-income and minority students, over the next six years. Currently, only 46 percent of students overall and 40 percent of  minorities – Hispanics and African Americans primarily — attain a degree after six years. By 2016, CSU wants grad rates to rise to 54 percent overall and 50 percent for underserved minorities.

That average combines separate goals for each of the 23 CSU campuses.  Schools like Cal State-Monterey Bay (overall 14 percentage point increase), San Jose State (12 percentage points for minority students) and Cal State-Chico (14 percentage points for minorities) face an even more daunting goal. (See  CSU graduation initiative for each campus’s target graduation rate.)

The  challenge comes at a time when many students are getting closed out of classes they need for their majors because of budget cutbacks – a primary reason student’s can’t graduate in four years anymore – and there is less money for counseling and tutoring vital to working with underprepared students, many of them working their way through college.

There are inexpensive steps that colleges could take, like requiring students to declare majors sooner. And CSU must keep pushing its much acclaimed Early Assessment Program, a series of questions that high school juniors take, in conjunction with state standardized tests, that lets them know whether they are prepared for freshman year. They then have their senior year to  take courses and tutoring to catch up. The CSU had hoped that the early assessments would substantially reduce the number of students who need remediation courses as freshman. But more than half of freshmen continue to need to take preparatory classes in math, English or both.

CSU is partly to blame for continuing to make transferring from community colleges confusing and frustrating. There is still no common numbering system that would let community college students know where they stand in terms of credits for their majors. In a report last week, the Legislative Analyst’s Office sharply criticized the lack of coordination among community colleges, the CSU and the University of California, and cited other states – Virginia and Illinois – that do this well.

Raising the graduation rate to 54 percent in six years is a worthy goal that would put the CSU on par with top national averages of similar state institutions. The CSU campuses must resist the temptation to achieve it simply by raising admissions standards or by pressuring tough-grading professors to relax their standards.

By John Fensterwald on January 30th, 2010