College Prep Programs in Peril

Simone Leard puts it simply: If not for the UCLA students who visited her classes at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles almost every week for four years, she wouldn’t have known how to apply to college or what it takes to get there.

The college students “told us what classes we needed to take, how to take good notes, how to study,” said Leard, the child of Jamaican immigrants. Most of all, she said, “they made us think about college, all the time.”

But Leard, a second-year UCLA undergraduate who returns frequently to Crenshaw to prod others toward college, is worried about the future of such outreach and college-preparatory efforts.

The programs, which are aimed at helping to guide poor and minority students toward four-year colleges, would be cut significantly in January and all but eliminated for the next school year under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent budget proposals.

The reductions, intended to help close a budget shortfall of at least $17 billion through mid-2005, would save about $24 million for the current year and about $85 million next year.

University of California and California State University leaders have said they will fight for the programs. And several legislators, including Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh (D-Los Angeles) are trying to preserve the outreach funding.

A state Senate subcommittee is scheduled today to discuss the first round of the proposed cuts.

But for now, the reductions remain part of the governor’s proposals, Vince Sollitto, a Schwarzenegger spokesman, said.

Given the size of the budget deficit, cuts in higher education could not be avoided, Sollitto said. He said the proposed reductions were intended to preserve the university’s core instructional programs.

“In each instance, the reductions were very, very difficult for the governor to make -- he hated to make some of these -- but felt he had no choice,” Sollitto said.

Supporters contend that the outreach efforts help create a pipeline to college for disadvantaged but academically qualified students.

They say that outreach is an essential element in helping to keep their campuses ethnically diverse in the wake of the state’s 1996 affirmative action ban.

“At any and all costs, we have to save these programs,” Cal State Chancellor Charles B. Reed said last week. He suggested that his system was willing to take an additional unallocated cut to make up for it.

Speaking at the same UCLA conference on the budget crisis, UC President Robert C. Dynes said the university could not walk away from its commitments to the state’s neediest students.

“We can’t build a fence around higher education. We have to go out and help find those diamonds in the rough,” he said.

Even the most vigorous advocates for the programs, however, concede that it is difficult to gauge their effectiveness and success, other than anecdotally.

The state’s independent legislative analyst and some others also have questioned the amount of funding for outreach, which has declined in recent years but peaked at about $185 million annually in 2001-02.

The various efforts sometimes overlap and there are no reliable data to show how well they work, said Steve Boilard, director of the higher education unit in the legislative analyst’s office.

“I wouldn’t say that we should just get rid of these programs, but perhaps this [budget crisis] is an opportunity to get rid of some overlap and duplication,” Boilard said.

Some of the outreach programs focus on direct help to high school students, including assistance on applications, campus tours, tutoring, counseling and weekend and summer courses on college campuses.

The students targeted include those who are in the first generation of their families to attend college and those at high schools with low rates of UC and Cal State enrollment.

Other parts of outreach help community college students prepare to transfer to UC or Cal State. Some give extra training to elementary school teachers and administrators and help low-performing schools with curriculum development.

Outreach expanded significantly after the passage of the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in 1996. At UC, the state and the university nearly tripled their investment in the programs, to $90 million, from 1998 through 2002.

UC Regent Ward Connerly and other conservatives have said they worry that the programs may be an end-run around the state’s ban on affirmative action, while staying within the letter of the law.

But without the programs, the university would be in danger of becoming a privileged society “bifurcated -- even more than it is -- by income level, education and race,” said Winston Doby, the UC system’s vice president for educational outreach.

UC administrators noted that 40% of the African American and Latino freshmen enrolled at the university’s eight undergraduate campuses participated in outreach programs while they were in high school.

Jeannie Oakes, a UCLA education professor who has performed extensive research on education inequality, said a UCLA study released Saturday illustrates the disparities that make outreach programs necessary.

The study by the UC All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity, which Oakes directs, shows that students whose parents have college degrees were two to three times more likely than others to attend high schools with “college-going cultures” that include such things as information and assistance with college.

Those same students were admitted to UC and Cal State campuses at rates of more than 60%, compared with fewer than 7% of those at schools without such cultures, the study showed.

Based on a survey last summer of 3,000 18-year-old California high school graduates, the analysis also found that college-educated parents were more likely than other parents to pay for after-school help for their children, including tutors, SAT preparation classes and private counselors.

Oakes said outreach programs help bridge the gaps by providing similar services to low-income and educationally disadvantaged students.

At the Cal State system, loss of the funding, among other things, would end assistance for thousands of educationally disadvantaged students admitted to the university but who need tutoring and other academic support to remain in school, said Allison Jones, assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs.

“If not for this program, many students would not have the opportunity to go to college,” Jones said. “But with it, they can succeed here.”

Some of the outreach programs’ strongest advocates are their former participants.

Octavio Estrella said he might not have gone beyond community college without an outreach program that set him up with a mentor and trained him to write research papers. He credits UC’s Puente Project with demystifying higher education for him.

Estrella eventually transferred to UC Berkeley, where he graduated with a degree in sociology and ethnic studies. He is now at UCLA, pursuing a doctorate in education.

“You can’t measure what it did for me,” Estrella, 28, said. “It gave me a chance to realize something that I had never thought was within my reach.”

Leard, for her part, said the students from UCLA’s Early Academic Outreach Program had a profound influence on her and others at Crenshaw.

The students, several of whom remain in touch with her, helped her map out the courses that she needed to get into college and then checked frequently to make sure she was on track.

Now a program mentor, she worries that the students in her charge at Crenshaw will not be able to get the same help.

“If we eliminate these programs, I just worry that the state doesn’t care anymore whether minority kids and poor kids have that link to college,” Leard said. “It seems like we’re saying that their education is really not that important.”