California State University said it would increase its graduation rates by 2025. Did it?
The California State University system has made some progress toward four-year and six-year graduation rates, yet fall short of 40% four-year graduation rate goal.
Combined across the California State’s 23 campuses, freshman four-year graduation has risen to 36% in 2024. Freshman six-year graduation rates are around 62%, which is 8 percentage points shy of the system’s goal for 2025.
During a symposium in October, Chancellor Mildred García said about 250,000 first-time students enrolled in 2018 did not graduate in six years. She added these figures were not satisfactory. The chancellor attributed this decrease to a rise in the cost of living in California, among other institutional obstacles.
“We have to talk about the elephant in the room and really examine again,” García said in October. “Are support services really helping? Are we listening to our students?”
These numbers come from the California State University’s 2025 graduation initiative, which launched in 2015. Jennifer Baszile, the associate vice chancellor of student success and inclusive excellence, said this project monitors progress outcomes for first time students and transfer students across four and six years. This initiative monitors graduation rates from 2009 to 2025.
Upon the initiative’s launch, the four-year graduation rates for the California State Universities were around 17%, according to system-wide data.
“Over the course of the initiative, we have seen rates improve significantly for all cohorts and for all groups.” Baszile said, noting that “there is work to do.”
Baszile said these numbers have also been impacted by how the CSU’s population has drastically changed in the past 15 years. The system’s freshman class has grown 31% between 2009 and 2019. And not only has the student body grown, but the composition and diversity has changed, Baszile said.
“What we don’t see, and what we don’t understand, is the way in which the work of student success has changed within the CSU,” Baszile said. “Over the lifetime of this initiative, the student population has fundamentally changed.”
As a result, the needs of these students have differed. For example, the majority of CSU students at 48% identify as Hispanic and Latino. More than half of the system’s male Latino first-generation students who began in 2018 have dropped out.
The California State University system is still trying to close in equity gaps left by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Students who are more affluent versus students who are low income are still seeing obstacles. Roughly 68% of students without Pell Grant graduated in six years, while among low income students the graduation rate was 56%, EdSource reported.
“I think that just the challenge is to really understand the composition of the populations at each university and how the dynamics are required to change in order to serve those populations,” Baszile said.
