Intermediate-Term Strategies
A second level of the strategy to increase the University participation of disadvantaged, underrepresented students emphasizes activities that would improve results in the intermediate term perhaps over a two-to-five-year period.  A major focus should be on enhancing the effectiveness of current student-centered programs especially EAOP and MESA, which are the Universities largest programs, but also some of the other promising comprehensive programs, such as AVID and High School Puente.  These latter programs deserve consideration for expanded participation by the University and are also good examples of the type of professional development that can lead to higher quality implementation of other outreach programs.

MESA and EAOP describe a comprehensive set of student-centered services, but we understand that, particularly for EAOP, there is wide variation among campuses in the extent of implementation of program components and in the extent of follow-up with individual students.  The University should institute professional development activities focusing on effective implementation of key components of student-centered programs. 

As we noted in Chapter IV, our review of the components of student-centered programs suggests that some of these activities are especially important to include in strategically-timed, comprehensive interventions.  We would emphasize the following four activities as the scaffolding for student-centered programs: 1) early information to students and families about preparing for the University;  2) academic counseling to ensure that students enroll in the required (i.e., a-f) high school courses; 3) tutoring and mentoring to ensure that students are successful in college preparatory courses; and 4) admissions and placement test preparation activities.  If the University moves toward a performance-based admissions policy, it will be essential to provide extensive information about the tests to students, parents and faculty.

Long-Term Strategies
Our best synthesis of the available evidence is that what works best in preparing more students for college is whatever helps students overcome the barriers.  While this conclusion seems tautological, it is inescapable.  The student services components of many of the programs included in this review clearly help many students overcome the barriers.  However, student-centered activities cannot compensate for poor curriculum and poor teaching.  In the longer term, the University can only meet its goals of serving the diverse population of this State if it joins with its higher education and K-12 partners in improving the effectiveness of K-12 schools.

A strong case can be made for the University to invest resources in collaborating with K-12 in efforts to make fundamental improvements in  low-performing schools.  All of the research on effective schools, as well as the evaluations of the systemic initiatives and school-centered programs, tells us that a part of the solution has to focus on assistance to low-performing schools in a long-term improvement strategy. 

We know from broad-scale professional development programs (e.g., The Subject Matter Projects) that such efforts can make a difference in the quality of teaching.  We also know from small-scale school improvement efforts such as ACCESS that it is possible to raise the overall quality of curriculum and teaching in low-performing schools and that doing so can help increase the numbers of college-prepared graduates.

What is needed varies with the quality of the school and the extent to which an individual student is on track to college academically and motivationally.  Several current programs such as ACCESS, AVID, High School Puente, and CAPP are examples of current programs which combine student-centered and school change-based strategies.  The experiences and successes of these programs can help point the way toward expanded efforts to assist low-performing schools.

One of the intriguing suggestions in the most recent CPEC evaluation report is that we must make schools more like the student-centered programs.  In other words, we need to find a way to get schools to institutionalize the practices that seem most effective in the student-centered programs.  While this is a daunting task, there are lessons to be learned from high schools which may already be on the way to this goal.

Some high schools are much more successful than others in graduating students who are well-prepared for university-level work. Several years ago, the California Department of Education convened a three-day symposium to examine factors in high schools associated with successful college preparation of underrepresented students.  Invited to the symposium were representatives of 21 California high schools that were relatively successful, when compared to high schools with similar student populations, in sending Black and Latino students to California's four-year public universities.  Symposium participants were asked to give their best professional judgment as to the reasons for the relatively high college-going rates of their graduates.  The proceedings were synthesized and formulated as recommendations to other high schools for improving the college preparation of underrepresented students.

The important lesson from this symposium is that the practitioners viewed college preparation as an integrated set of activities, sustained over time, within a school culture that supports academic success.  The existence of an academic school culture and the commitment of school leaders and faculty to preparing underrepresented students for college were of overarching importance.

There was clear endorsement of the components that comprise outreach programs academic preparation, college information, student support services, etc.but it was not the components as separate activities that seemed to make the difference, but the manner in which these activities interacted in a school-wide effort.  These practitioners strongly advised institutions of higher education to work collaboratively with K-12 schools to improve college preparation and to avoid fragmented efforts which operate at the margins of the school.  This leads us into our next section in which we lay out the essential elements of a comprehensive framework.

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