Data obscures gap in CSU grad rates for Black students

Jul. 18—At the close of the first-ever California State University Juneteenth Symposium last month, the system's top executive laid out an agenda for improving the Black student experience at the nation's largest public university system.

The first item on Interim Chancellor Jolene Koester's list? "We need to disaggregate the data," she said.

Huh?

That might sound dry, but there's a good reason why it's top of mind: Cal State's struggle to graduate its Black students often goes unmentioned in the system's public reporting about graduation rates.

Combined, the system's 23 campuses graduate just half of Black students who enter as freshmen over a six-year period — well below the overall six-year average of 63 percent, according to the latest system data from 2021.

But you wouldn't know it from looking at how Cal State reports the data.

In its marquee data tool showing the system's efforts to close achievement gaps among ethnic and racial groups, Black, Latino and Native American students are lumped into a single category of "underrepresented minorities." With Latino students comprising about 91 percent of all students in the "underrepresented minority" category — in keeping with the size of their population in the system and state — that makes the data almost entirely a reflection of the success of Latino students.

Consequently, the deeper inequities faced by Black students remain hidden.

On average, Cal State graduates 57 percent of its first-time students who are underrepresented minorities within six years, a gap of 12 percentage points compared to White, Asian and other students who don't fall into that grouping. But the graduation gap between Black students and students outside the underrepresented-minority category is 20 percentage points — and has been that way for 15 years.

Last year, across the system, Cal State graduated 770 fewer first-time and transfer Black students after six and four years, respectively, than its targets for 2025.

In other words, Cal State's default method of presenting minority data suggests the system is much closer to closing the achievement gap for Black students than it actually is.

"We've been pushing the chancellor's office for years about disaggregating and giving us the data," said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, a student advocacy organization. "We've always been critical of that."

Yet at the November 2021 Board of Trustees meeting that discussed the gaps in graduation rates, Cal State senior officials never mentioned the deeper equity gaps Black students experience or disaggregated any data by specific racial groups. Instead, both the publicly available written material and oral discussion focused solely on the underrepresented minority student gap.

No one from the Cal State's Office of the Chancellor made themselves available for an interview for this story.

Interim Chancellor Koester turned down a CalMatters request for an interview. So did Jeff Gold, interim associate vice president of student success for the system. In a written statement, Gold explained that the Cal State system adopted the underrepresented minority metric in 2009 and built it into the 2025 goals of its graduation initiative that launched in 2015.

"Despite the problematic nature of the term 'URM' and the limitations of the underlying methodology, the CSU decided not to abandon this metric and/or change the goalposts midstream," he wrote. In other words, the system won't change its approach to measuring equity gaps because of a decision it made seven years ago and won't change until 2025 at the earliest. The Cal State system "is committed" to moving away from the underrepresented minority metric for future graduation initiatives, Gold said.

Gold then noted that individual campuses "regularly disaggregate student retention and graduation rate data by race, gender, ethnicity" and other descriptors, such as household income levels.

At CSUB

Cal State Bakersfield's chief academic officer, Vernon Harper, praised Koester's comments and said understanding the data and using it to address any gaps that might exist is an issue of critical importance.

CSUB tracks all of the data referenced, and he said the university's director of institutional research was working on a new data portal, expected to be available in the fall, that would allow the public to analyze the "disaggregated data" online, adding that was "part of our responsibility as a public institution."

Harper also acknowledged that while there was still work to do, the progress CSUB has made on graduation rates since the mid-2000s is a point of pride for the university.

In comparison to the systemwide CSU graduation rate of 57 percent for underrepresented-minority students, the CSUB rate for incoming freshmen in 2015 to graduate in six years was 46.9 percent, which is the most recent from university data available. That figure was 40.2 percent four years earlier.

In 2008, the percentage of Black students who graduated in six years was 16.7 percent, or just six students, according to data supplied by Harper; that figure was 39.8 percent, or 103 students, for freshmen who enrolled in 2015.

Harper said in order to raise that figure, the university continues to work on community outreach efforts, including a CSU-wide mentorship program, which has been around for about six years.

"First of all, the Young Men of Color program, which is a systemwide program that focuses on young men of color, to give them specific support resources and opportunities on campus," Harper said, "because we know that when people feel belonging, they have a better chance of No. 1. doing ... better in their classes, but also being more successful in graduation."

There's also a mentorship program, which Harper is also involved in, which involves not only helping Black students with challenges they might face on their path to graduation, but also providing them with someone to talk to about any issues they might have on campus.

There are also student-recruitment efforts, such as Super Sunday, where officials, including Harper, visit local churches and high schools to make an appeal to Black families.

"One of the things that I do when I'm standing on stage talking to their congregation, I give them all my phone so that if they have a question about getting into college, they can reach out directly to me ...," Harper said. "We, as an institution, want to ensure that we are doing absolutely everything that we can structurally to serve everyone in our community. That is our mission. And that's what we're committed to doing."

Mikhail Zinshteyn reports for CalMatters, and Perry Smith is with The Californian.