CSU campuses show vastly different results on graduation after 10 years and $3 billion

Freshmen starting at California State University campuses like Sacramento State University and Cal State LA once had worryingly long odds if they wanted to graduate in four years. Fewer than 10% of first-year students who started at each of those campuses in 2011 completed their degrees by 2015. Across the entire CSU system, four-year rates averaged just 19%.

But Cal State leaders vowed to change that in 2015. Then-Chancellor Timothy White announced an ambitious plan — later backed by almost $3 billion in cumulative funding and a laundry list of attempted fixes inside and outside the classroom — to revive wilting rates and urge more students to finish faster.  

Now, the final report card from that decade-long effort has arrived. And while four-year rates at Sacramento State, Cal State LA and most other campuses have rocketed upward since 2015, the grades are not all positive. Some scores are worse than a decade ago and great variation persists around the 22-campus system, tracking contrasts in students’ high school grades along with enrollment and admissions trends.

The final tallies show that every CSU campus missed at least one of four campus-specific graduation rate goals set by the system, and almost all also failed to eliminate equity gaps. Eight campuses experienced backsliding from their 2015 starting point in at least one category. And many CSUs ended the decade with more socioeconomic or racial inequity in completion rates than when they started. 

Those shortcomings are despite general progress increasing the share of students who finish their degrees in two years for transfers or four years for freshmen at most campuses. Many exceeded or came tantalizingly close to hitting ambitious graduation goals, targets specific to each campus that took into account their starting points. But the significant variation in how much campuses changed reflected challenges like brutal wildfires and mixed success in bouncing back from the pandemic.

San Jose State topped the system with the biggest percentage-point increase in the share of entering freshmen who finished their degrees within six years, rising from 57% to 68%. In contrast, following a period of fiscal and enrollment turbulence at Sonoma State, the school’s six-year graduation rate settled at 55% in 2025, down from 59% in 2015. 

Campus leaders have credited gains to a wide-ranging set of strategies that include reducing the number of units students take before graduation, redesigning courses with high failure rates, ensuring that small outstanding bills don’t prevent students from registering for classes, and eliminating noncredit remedial courses blamed for derailing students’ dreams of a college degree. Because campuses tried so many experiments at once, it’s not always clear what moved the needle — and what didn’t.

“It’s hard to isolate the variable that did or didn’t work,” said Kate McCarthy, a former vice provost at Chico State, where six-year graduation rates fell below their 2015 levels in 2025 despite improvements on four-year rates. “We haven’t backtracked on anything because it was shown to be harmful or not effective.”

Wide-ranging rates reflected persistent patterns

Varied graduation rates across the CSU appear to be linked to the distinct students they serve, according to an EdSource analysis.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s class of 2025 boasted the highest six-year graduation rate for freshmen in the CSU, at 87%, though the campus had aimed to reach 92% by the initiative’s end. The same cohort of students also had the CSU’s highest average high school GPA and smallest share of Pell Grant students, a population whose family incomes are typically less than $60,000 and who tend to graduate at lower rates from four-year institutions than their peers.

California State University, Dominguez Hills sits toward the other end of the CSU spectrum. The university ended the decade with a 42% six-year graduation rate for freshmen, far below its 55% target. But 75% of those freshmen were Pell recipients, compared with just 15% at San Luis Obispo, campus statistics show. And where the Dominguez Hills students entered with an average high school GPA of 3.2, peers at San Luis Obispo hovered around 4.0.

The much-discussed initiative launched in 2015 amid mounting pressure from Gov. Jerry Brown to hold public universities accountable. Contemporaries pinned dismal four-year rates on hurdles like rising tuition, high credit-hour requirements for certain degrees and recession-era cuts to faculty and course sections. 

But Brown’s plan to link some state funding to four-year graduation rates met with objections. Skeptics argued that a four-year yardstick might not fit the lives of Cal State students with work and family commitments. 

In the end, there were no financial rewards or penalties related to CSU’s graduation goals, Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said. The system ultimately spent almost $3 billion on the graduation initiative over the years, according to CSU, the majority from state appropriations. Less than a quarter of that sum — about $715 million — was funded with tuition.

‘Through in two’ and ‘finish in four’ proved prophetic

Among the most decisive initiative successes was Cal State Monterey Bay. The campus’s two-year graduation rate for transfer students nearly doubled from 34% to almost 67%, the largest percentage-point jump for that measure. Four-year rates for freshmen similarly soared, rising from 23% to 47%.

Andrew Lawson, Cal State Monterey Bay’s provost, ticked off reforms that might have made a difference, like easing transfers from local community colleges, encouraging undergraduate research and launching new morale-building traditions like the annual Otter Plunge, in which students jump into the Pacific on the day before classes. Then again, Lawson said, it could be something intangible. “It’s difficult for the culture of a campus to stand out in any of the metrics that you’re talking about,” he said.

“We’re throwing all the pasta on the wall to see what sticks to improve student success.”

Amy Sueyoshi, provost, San Francisco State

Not every experiment worked. Monterey Bay tried an online peer mentoring system but backtracked after finding the information technology costs outweighed the benefits. Other solutions required constant maintenance. The redesign of introductory university-level math and writing courses increased pass rates, Lawson said, but course success declined after the pandemic. “We’re having to go back and rethink those courses again,” he said. 

Some campuses struggled with backsliding

Eight Cal State schools experienced a paradox: While more transfer and freshmen students finished in a total of four years, the campus stalled or regressed in graduating more students within the next two years after that.

At Chico State, six-year graduation rates for freshmen ended the decade at 60%, 3 percentage points below the graduating class of 2015. Four-year graduation rates for freshmen, meanwhile, rose from 26% to 36% over the decade. 

“I’m very frustrated that we didn’t make progress (on six-year graduation),” former vice provost McCarthy said, “but I’m very buoyed by the fact that our four-year rate has never been higher.” 

Chico State focused on student advising, planning efficient schedules and ensuring students understood graduation requirements. To prevent students from leaving after their first year, McCarthy said, the campus created a free summer program for first-year students to retake general education courses they didn’t pass the first time. 

But the November 2018 Camp fire, a destructive blaze that forced more than 50,000 people to evacuate areas east of Chico, proved “enormously disruptive,” McCarthy added. The Covid-19 pandemic added challenges. “We just felt like we couldn’t get a break,” she said.

Covid-19 hurt San Francisco State, too. The graduating class of 2019 achieved the university’s highest six-year freshmen rate of the decade — almost 57% —  but that metric has since fallen to 50%. 

“We were doing really good, and then the pandemic hit, and it totally devastated our campus,” said Amy Sueyoshi, San Francisco State’s provost.

The university is still trying out new ideas to keep students connected and thriving — mentorship programs, serving food around monthly holidays and a “living room” stocked with puzzles and magazines. “We’re throwing all the pasta on the wall to see what sticks to improve student success,” Sueyoshi said. 

Progress on equity targets was also mixed

Beyond the targets for all students, CSU started the decade with two bold equity goals across the system. The first aimed to help students receiving Pell Grants catch up to peers who don’t receive that aid. The second looked to bring the graduation rates of American Indian or Alaska Native, Black and Latino students — which CSU together calls historically underserved students — on par with peers of other races and ethnicities, mainly white and Asian students. Both used six-year freshman graduation rates as a benchmark.

By this year, only a few campuses came close to eliminating either gap, and many saw widening disparities.

Cal State Dominguez Hills and Cal State San Bernardino were bright spots on Pell, achieving near parity between students who receive the aid and students who don’t by 2025. That was a contrast to campuses like Cal Poly Humboldt, where students receiving Pell Grants lagged peers who don’t get such aid by 15 percentage points in 2025.

Meanwhile, gaps widened at about half of the campuses between historically underserved students and peers of other races and ethnicities. Among those narrowing the gap, Cal State Dominguez Hills saw a less than 1-point difference between the two groups in 2025.

Chico State started the decade with historically underserved students trailing their peers by 9 percentage points. So they worked at it. The college started affinity centers. It gave faculty a tool to see equity gaps in their classes. Four-year graduation rates for historically underserved freshmen doubled between 2015 and 2025. But their six-year rates among freshmen slipped from 57% to 55% 

A 10-point graduation gap remains between historically underserved Chico State students and all others.

“The persistence of the equity gaps — which I know is systemwide — really, really frustrated us,” said McCarthy, Chico’s former vice provost.