Report: California Schools Serving Socially Disadvantaged Students Send Too Few to College

Report: California Schools Serving Socially Disadvantaged Students Send Too Few to College: The vast majority of California high schools that serve high numbers of low-income students and students of color do a poor job of sending their students on to college, a new report has found.

“The implications are pretty bad,” said Orville Jackson, senior research analyst at The Education Trust – West and lead author of the report, titled “Repairing the Pipeline: A Look at Gaps in California’s High School to College Transition.”

A major finding of the report is that college-going rates for African-American and Latino ninth-grade students lag behind the rates of White and Asian students by 20 to more than 30 percentage points. Fewer than half of such ninth-graders go to college upon graduation from high school or shortly thereafter, and the college-going rates for low-income students were just as low, the report found

“This is our population. It’s a growing population,” Jackson said of students of color in California. “We’re actually underserving the majority of our population in this state.”