California’s Impending College Graduate Crisis and What Needs to Be Done About It

In 2005-06 almost half of the pupils in California’s public schools were Latinos, but Latinos only received about 15 percent of the BA degrees awarded by public and private colleges in the state. Texas has a comparable Latino population, but does significantly better than California in getting Latino students through college. The implication of this disparity is that California stands to produce too few graduates to fuel its cutting-edge high tech and high-end service economy. In this policy brief, Martin Carnoy explores the reasons why California’s education system falls short in ensuring post-secondary access and success for Latino students, and identifies six steps that the state could take to increase the number of four-year college graduates.