Need for a Comprehensive K-16 Framework
The state of California needs to mount a massive effort to build the capacity of the K-16 education system to provide an opportunity to learn to all students.  The University needs to define its system-wide role within that plan, and each of the universities campuses needs to play a part. 

The University has several roles in an overall K-16 plan.  First, the University must be an active,  contributing partner with the other segments of higher education and K-12, committed to the notion of equal opportunity to high quality education.  Secondly, the University has a role as the most selective institution of higher education, committed to the notion of quality and diversity among its students.  Third, the University has a role as a system of distinguished campuses, each with its own unique set of circumstances and characteristics to which it needs to respond.  Each of these roles is vital to the University none can be neglected or overlooked.  Each role suggests a different set of objectives.

1. The University as Partner - California is best served educationally by an education system in which every part is working well from pre-school programs through graduate and professional schools.  The University has maintained and will continue to play a central role in contributing to the overall health of the states entire education system.  This role was most recently exemplified in the California Education Round tables initiatives to improve educational opportunities for all of California's citizens.  The need is so great that only a comprehensive K-16 effort which enhances the overall quality of schooling in the state can address it.

2. The University as a Selective Public Higher Education Institution - The Regents and the universities Outreach Task Force have made it clear that the University remains committed to quality and student diversity.  Both goals are important and should be pursued.  The first goal points to a recruiting or selecting approach where the University aggressively recruits students who may be already on the road to becoming eligible for a university education, even without a special intervention. The purpose of these efforts is to ensure that these students select a University of California campus.  A second approach is to aggressively support programs which take the next tier of university-preparedness and focus energies on groups of students showing high potential for University work, but who may need some selective intervention to propel them from non-college attending status to University-ready students.

3. The University as System - The third role for the University comes in its capacity as the center piece of a collection of distinguished campuses, each with its own outreach priorities, determined largely by its current and emerging admission standards and by unique features of its region.  For these individual campuses, it makes sense to provide them the flexibility to design outreach programs which best suit their needs.  Just as for the system as a whole, individual campus approaches call for a combination of strategies, the appropriate balance of which is best determined locally.  Whatever the local configuration, it must fit within a framework established by the system, working closely with the campuses.  The elements of such a framework are described in the next section.

A Framework for Program Coordination and Service Delivery
The current outreach efforts of the University are inadequately coordinated, unsatisfactorily documented, and poorly evaluated.  What is currently lacking is a framework for coordinating and delivering all of the outreach programs and related services.  Establishing such a framework will not be easy, but is essential.

The Office of the President must play a leadership role in building this framework, working closely with the campuses.  First, the Office of the President needs to be explicit about the ultimate long-term outcomes it seeks.  Is it to focus on university admissions, or university completion?  Are there other long-term major objectives?  Secondly, the Office of the President, working closely with outreach administrators, needs to convert the long-term goals into shorter-term outcomes which are then converted into performance indicators which are both measurable and program-linked.

For purposes of this discussion we have focused on the goal of increasing the numbers of disadvantaged, underrepresented students who not only enter the University but who persist to an undergraduate degree.  Thus the level of preparation of students must be high enough not only to get them to meet eligibility criteria, but to enable them to be successful.  Setting the goal as college graduation makes the challenge for outreach even more difficult.  It also means that the University must track students during their undergraduate education and monitor their success.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Program Administration
As in any multiversity, appropriate systemwide and campus roles are at issue. 
there is a need to clarify appropriate roles for the Office of the President and the campuses in programs administration.  For wide-reaching programs, decisions regarding administrative authority are crucial, both systemwide and for the campuses.

Our best judgment is that the systemwide office should primarily be responsible for establishing the accountability benchmarks and process and identifying key components of successful programs.  The responsibility for determining the best approaches within that framework in order to achieve the prescribed outcomes lies with local program administrators.  Once goals are clarified, performance indicators determined, and comparable data collected, local program administrators are best situated to ascertain the most appropriate strategies to apply.  It is the systemwide office, however, that is responsible for the next step, which is to hold campus programs accountable for the results.  As we have discussed, existing evaluations have little helpful information about which programs deserve to see their budgets increase or decline.  Given the growing level of student need and the shrinking level of resources, it would be irresponsible to not build both positive and negative performance incentives into these progress.

Eligibility and Competitiveness
An issue which is directly related to the appropriate role of the university in all this is the issue of eligibility versus competitiveness.  It has proven difficult to expand the eligibility pool of underrepresented minority and low- income pupils.  The problem is exacerbated for selective institutions, where the competition for seats is much greater the bar for admission is significantly higher.  Put differently, the gap between the levels of performance for most low-income and underrepresented minority students is much greater. 

Unfortunately, the outreach evaluations we reviewed shed little light on this issue.  What the evidence does suggest, however, is that for selective institutions, the strategies for addressing the admissions pool problem are likely to be much different than for less-selective institutions.  Whatever programs the selective institutions adopt, whatever components they emphasize, will have to be done with greater intensity, over a longer duration, and with more resources per pupil.

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