The California State University system’s current Graduation Initiative has lasted nearly a decade. When it ends next year, Cal State could just launch another one.
But the nation’s largest four-year public institution by enrollment—about 460,000 students across 23 universities—is planning a new emphasis for its next campaign: what happens to students after they graduate.
System chancellor Mildred García told Inside Higher Ed that “we’re not shifting the focus” away from increasing graduation rates, where more progress is still needed. But she does want the system to better prepare students for starting careers or entering grad school after they earn degrees, she said.
“It is going to be definitely moving to the next level of what we think is student success—what is our responsibility as a university system to help these students live fulfilling careers and a fulfilling life?” García said. Students who make up “the new majority”—first generation, low income, students of color and/or those who are 25 and older—“come to college seeing that as social mobility,” she said.
Moreover, García, who became chancellor a year ago, said she doesn’t like the title “Graduation Initiative,” which the system has been using for 15 years, “because it’s not an initiative, it’s part of our mission.”
García said first-generation students, like herself, “saw higher ed as a way out of poverty, a way to help our families, a way to contribute to our communities.” But these and other “new majority” students don’t have the same social capital or personal connections as more advantaged students to get into the careers they desire, she said, and the system needs to look at ways to use data and partner with stakeholders to introduce students to multiple careers, create paid internships for them and provide other help.
To develop its new Student Success Framework, Cal State hired Deloitte consultants to collect input from students, employees, alumni and others as part of a Year of Engagement. Officials plan to send a draft of the new plan—which has the working title “Beyond Completion”—to the Board of Trustees in January.
“The initiative will deepen the CSU’s relationship and alignment with industry partners and benefit California’s workforce by strengthening the pipeline of career-ready graduates to fill critical positions in growing fields,” according to documents from a previous board meeting.
Among the details being worked out is how the system will define and measure whether students are placed into good jobs, García said. (The system didn’t point to any particular existing data, such as average salary after graduation, that has Cal State administrators concerned about how students fare after they leave their institutions.) The chancellor said the new initiative won’t seek to dissuade students from pursuing degrees that have less chance of landing them good-paying jobs.
Indeed, CSU’s emphasis on looking at postgraduation outcomes echoes the national focus on ensuring students’ degrees are worthy investments.
Beyond Completion
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he pushed the idea of college for all. He launched the American Graduation Initiative, which focused on community colleges, and encouraged citizens to pursue postsecondary credentials more broadly. He also sought regulation to ensure that degrees are worth what Americans pay for them.
In the first year of Obama’s presidency, Cal State launched its own six-year Graduation Initiative. That campaign exceeded its goal of increasing the graduation rate, according to the system. In 2015, the system launched a new, decade-long Graduation Initiative, which is set to wrap up next year.
How has this campaign gone? Cal State has made progress, according to data provided by a spokesperson, but it looks like it will fall short of the target. The four-year graduation rate for first-time students has risen from 19 percent to—if preliminary 2024 numbers hold—36 percent. That’s four percentage points shy of the goal. The six-year graduation rate for first-timers increased from 57 percent to 62 percent. That’s progress, but the system had set 70 percent as the goal.
For Cal State transfer students, preliminary numbers show the two-year graduation rate is only one percentage point short of the goal. However, the four-year graduation rate is 10 percentage points off. Cal State noted that its progress coincided with a significant increase in its population of first-year, first-generation, low-income and/or historically underserved students.
Su Jin Jez, chief executive officer of California Competes, a policy, research and advocacy group focused on modernizing the state’s higher education system, doesn’t have details on Cal State’s next campaign, but she thinks the shift makes sense, given the new chancellor and the end of the latest Graduation Initiative. The new emphasis on postgraduation outcomes “aligns with sort of a national movement to really be thinking about higher ed and workforce alignment,” she said.
Part of the state funding California community colleges currently receive is based on whether students earn a regional living wage within a year of graduation. Jez said a number of other states “are making this sort of transition.”
Starting in 2026, the U.S. Education Department plans to implement a new financial value transparency and gainful-employment rule for colleges and universities—though next week’s election could change that. As part of the new rule, the department plans to calculate whether graduates can afford their yearly debt payments—and whether they earn more than an adult in their state who didn’t go to college. That information will be posted online.
Jez said that, as a student, “I didn’t have someone at home who could help [me] … understand how to get ready for a professional career.” She said students continue to struggle with issues such as finding internships, mentors and sponsors and learning how to dress and answer questions during an interview.
Cal State could use this Year of Engagement to set a new national standard for how to define what a good job is, she said. And she suggested that the system start not by merely evaluating the data it already has, but by focusing on the students, communities and state it needs to serve.
She said that, for Cal State, this is “a moment to be really bold.”
(This story has been updated to fix a typo in the name of the organization California Competes.
