Pathways to Higher Education: the Narrowing Pipeline

The magnitude of the access problem becomes clearer when we trace a students progress through the 12 years of schooling it takes to graduate from high school.  Students who have engaged in pre-school activities do better in primary grades than their counterparts.  Unfortunately, access to preschool programs is correlated with family income, and low-income, minority students participate in these programs at much lower rates than their cohorts.  Subsidized care, designed to serve the lowest-income students, serves only a small percentage of children eligible for these services.  As a consequence, from the very beginning, students from these groups start the trek to college at a substantial disadvantage.

At the next step of progress through the school system, the primary grades, a disproportionately small number of students from low-income and minority homes are able to perform at grade level.  Test scores from the last administration of the statewide testing programs present dramatic evidence that these groups of students, by the end of grade three, already trail their white and Asian cohorts.  Students poorly prepared by the end of grade three have limited prospects of success later up the pipeline.  The picture is similar for later checkpoints in grades six and eight.

As these students reach high school, the performance gap between Black and Latino students and their white and Asian counterparts continues to widen and their chances for admission to four-year institutions continues to narrow.  First, a larger percentage of these students fail to finish high school.  According to the California Department of Education, using a four-year derived rate method, Blacks are almost three times and Latinos over two times as likely to drop out as whites.  Asians are slightly less likely than whites to drop out during their four years of high school.²  Among Latino and Black students who do stay in school, few take the rigorous courses necessary to enter the university and among this group, fewer get high enough grades, take the required SAT or ACT examinations, or score high enough on the examinations to be eligible for admission to the University, let alone admission to one of its more selective campuses.

Saul Geiser, from the Office of the President of the University, in an earlier presentation to this Task Force, succinctly summarized the scope of the problem.  He pointed out that for every 100 Blacks and every 100 Latinos enrolled in the 10th grade, 17 Blacks and 12 Latinos complete the a-f requirements, but only 5 Blacks and 4 Latinos become eligible for the University, and only 1 from each group will actually enroll in one of the campuses of the University of California.⁵  Given that California Department of Finance projects that by 2005, over 50 percent of the K-12 population will be Latino, the current eligibility rates for these students become increasingly unacceptable.

In sum then, in spite of the many excellent efforts underway, and in spite of the hard-won progress that has been made in the last decade, the scope of the problem far exceeds the capacity of the current solutions.

In the next section we examine the kinds of strategies that have been pursued by higher education institutions as they have implemented their outreach policies and practices.

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