San Francisco
California State University is setting a goal of raising its graduation rate by eight percentage points and cutting its racial achievement gap in half by 2016, university officials announced on Friday.
The plan marks the first time the nation's largest public-university system has set a comprehensive goal to raise its overall graduation rate, officials said, and lays out an ambitious long-term agenda for the 450,000-student system even as it turns away tens of thousands of students to help weather California's budget crisis.
Cal State has long sought to reduce the number of students who drop out of its universities, and it has made significant progress over the past decade. Under the plan, the system will attempt to raise its six-year graduation rate from 46 percent to 54 percent by the spring of 2016.
The plan also seeks to sharply raise graduation rates for underrepresented minority groups, such as black and Latino students. Campuses will be asked to cut in half the disparity in graduation rates between those students and other groups in the next six years.
"This is the one question that matters the most: Can we help our students graduate?" said F. King Alexander, president of Cal State's Long Beach campus.
Mr. Alexander said he believed the goal was attainable. Setting high expectations, he said, will be essential to helping the country meet President Obama's goal of having the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020.
He acknowledged, however, that the severe cuts in state support that have plagued colleges and universities in California will make reaching the goal more difficult.
"It's important to know that this initiative indeed is the most important thing that we're working on," he said. "But it certainly hurts to have 25 percent of your budget yanked out from under you, while we're trying to do all of these things."
Comments
1. adamreed - January 25, 2010 at 05:58 am
A six-year target fills me with foreboding. Many of our students at Cal State LA have work and/or family responsibilities that make taking more than one or two courses per quarter, often at night, difficult enough. They need flexibility, not a six-year deadline.
2. 11180037 - January 25, 2010 at 08:48 am
Mr. Alexander specified "Setting high expectations" but failed to mention maintaining high standards much less supporting his expectations with additional and/or reconstituted resources. This appears to be the classic management by fiat, where wishful thinking couched in the grandiloquence of those who administer from high above the tedium of daily work in the trenches. Grade inflation will be the cheapest route for declaring success without any complicating measures of actual academic attainment.
3. johntoradze - January 25, 2010 at 11:50 am
I also think this is wrong. For instance, I know an excellent student who gets good grades, who works 40 hours a week at a grocery store. He takes 6 units a quarter usually. He has been attending for 9 years, and is near to graduating with a science and history double major. He had to PELP out for one year to deal with family issues. He would have graduated this past fall, but because of cutbacks crucial classes in his science major were cancelled. Now it looks like he will graduate end of summer of 2010.
The formula needs to be reworked to take into account the number of units students take and the majors they are in. That way, a student who is taking an average of 6 units per quarter should be considered on-schedule if they graduate within 8 years.
My observation is that with the tougher economy, more students need to take half course loads. The direction we should be going in is revising graduation rate to account for reality.
4. georgialorenz - January 25, 2010 at 05:22 pm
I think that the graduation rate at the CSU system will naturally rise as students who are shut out of other opportunities like the UC system end up enrolling at the CSU. As a result of the budget crisis and students getting shut out, the academic qualifications of the applicant to the CSU will naturally be higher. And, those students will be more likely to graduate.