In an effort to meet legislators’ demands for accountability, the University of California released a report that its administrators say documents the progress its outreach programs have made in getting disadvantaged students to college.
University officials are pushing for the state Legislature to restore funding for the academic preparation efforts, which would be eliminated next year under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget. These include programs like TRIO that reach out to underprivileged students.
Lawmakers have long demanded that the university provide hard evidence that its programs actually work and deserve funding; it’s unclear if the report will satisfy them.
In April 2005, a committee representing the university, the state Legislature and the state Department of Finance recommended that the UC system adopt a new and more rigorous accountability framework for the programs.
This new report, according to UC spokesman Brad Hayward, provides firm evidence that outreach programs not only help diversity efforts, but help underprivileged children succeed.
“The report allows state policy makers to look at performance on a program-by-program basis and use that performance data to inform funding decisions for next year,” he stated in an e-mail. “Taken as a whole, we believe the report shows a very substantial contribution these programs are making to improved educational attainment for disadvantaged youth in California.”
The programs, aimed mostly at high school students, largely provide college preparatory curriculum, as well as training for the gauntlet of standardized tests required for college admission.
However, though an improvement on previous data collected by the university, the new report still leaves unanswered questions. In 2003, a panel of experts prepared an internal evaluation for UC President Robert C. Dynes, looking a the university’s outreach programs.
“UC’s evaluation of its outreach activities has produced outcomes for all major programs, but does not establish unequivocal cause-and-effect relationships,” the experts stated in the 2003 evaluation, pointing out that the university had no way of knowing if the programs helped underrepresented students actually perform better or simply attracted the most motivated, highest-performing and unrepresentative participants.
In some ways, the new report, which showed higher achievement rates for program participants on multiple standardized tests, reflected the previous criticisms.
While 61 percent of students at low-performing schools enrolled in at least one UC outreach program took the SAT I or ACT standardized admissions tests, only 29 percent of students at those schools who did not participate in the programs took the same tests.
In addition, more students in UC outreach programs passed the California High School Exit Exam than the average for their demographic groups. Tenth graders in the “Puente” program, for example, passed the exit exam at rates of 96 percent for the English section and 92 percent for the math section, compared to 63 percent and 61 percent, respectively, for all economically disadvantaged students statewide.
To try to rule out other potential variables that might have been responsible for the increases, independent of student participation in outreach programs, the university statistically controlled for things like income and ethnicity. However, like previous data, the new report does not establish a clear causal relationship; it’s unclear whether other variables, like work ethic and personal drive to achieve, could have caused certain students to both participate in UC-run programs, and also do well on tests. Currently, the university provides $12 million in its own funding to the programs. The programs also receive an additional $40 million in support from the federal government and private sources, according to the report.
While the Schwarzenegger administration has not yet commented on the report, state budget spokesman H.D. Palmer previously said that outreach has a long way to go in proving its programs are a viable option in outreach.
“Currently, there seems to be no conceivable way that we can concretely show that these programs work,” Palmer said when Schwarzenegger’s original budget was released.
Legislators will rule on the funding later this summer.
“We are providing state policy makers with what they requested of us, so we hope they will find it useful and compelling,” Hayward said. “We believe that having more data, on more measures of performance, using a methodology that has been developed in conjunction with state policy makers, will certainly be helpful.”
