AB 705’s Impact: Five Years of Gains in Transfer-Level Student Success
In 2017, the California legislature passed significant reforms to the process of placing students into their initial coursework at California Community Colleges. Since the law fully went into effect in 2019, the Campaign for College Opportunity has annually identified campuses that successfully supported their students to complete transfer-level math and English classes. This year’s awards use data from the 2022-23 school year, meaning that we now have half a decade’s worth of information to look back on since the implementation of AB 705—the legislation mandating that community colleges “maximize the probability” of enrolling incoming students into transfer-level coursework.
Belying concerns that these students would struggle after being placed in more advanced courses, course completion rates have skyrocketed in recent years, despite much of that time coinciding with a global pandemic that only increased the burdens facing students seeking to adjust to college-level coursework. Since Fall 2016— the last year before the passage of AB 705— English completion rates have risen by 15 percentage points from 52% to 67%. The increases are even more stark for math courses, in which completion rates more than doubled from 27% to 60% over the same period. While persistent equity gaps remain, and will require further efforts from California’s legislators, educators, and advocates to tackle, it’s worth taking the time to appreciate the remarkable successes California has achieved in equitable placement over the last few years.
The 2022-23 academic year saw continued gains across the state in both enrollment and throughput rates (the rates at which first-time students are directly enrolled in and supported to successfully complete transfer-level courses). Over 99% of students systemwide enrolled directly into transfer-level English courses, an increase from 97% the year before. Of the 115 public California community colleges, 102 have English enrollment rates of 98% or higher. Only two colleges (Imperial Valley College and Mendocino College) have rates of below 90% and no colleges have rates below 88%.
Big Gains in Math Courses
In Fall 2022, the rate of first-time students enrolling directly into a transfer-level math course jumped by fifteen percentage points from the previous year and now sits at 95.8%. For years, enrollment rates for initial transfer-level math courses have lagged well behind those of their English counterparts. During the 2021-2022 school year only four campuses enrolled 100% of their students directly into transfer-level math courses, compared to the 37 campuses who did so for English courses. Just one year later, 51 campuses successfully hit that 100% mark for math—an enormous improvement over such a short period.
Successful completion of transfer-level English rose to 68% in 2019-2020 and has remained at that level since. Transfer-level math completion rates, however, have continued to improve, jumping by five percentage points between 2021-22 and 2022-23 to 60%. As was the case with enrollment rates, completion rates for math have historically been far lower than those for English. While this latest increase was not quite enough to completely close the gap, it does mark the first time in over a decade that the difference between the two subjects has been reduced to single digits.
Statewide Equity Gaps
As enrollment rates across the state remain near 100%, racial/ethnic equity gaps have also shrunk. Black and Latinx students are just 0.1 percentage points more likely to be enrolled into remedial English classes than other students at the same institution. The gap is only slightly larger when it comes to math, as Black and Latinx students are one and two percentage points more likely to be enrolled into remedial math coursework, respectively.
There are still substantial gaps for Black and Latinx students when it comes to completion rates, however. Black and Latinx students remain substantially less likely to complete transfer-level English coursework within a year of initial enrollment than the statewide average (12 and 13 percentage points, respectively). The gaps are even larger for math courses at 14 points for Black students and 17 points for Latinx students. Despite the large gains made in recent years in completion rates for Black students, only minimal progress has been made toward the goal of Latinx and Black students being supported to complete transfer-level coursework at the same rates as their Asian American and white peers.
Regional Gaps
There is limited regional variation when it comes to enrollment rates. The notable exceptions are the Los Angeles and San Diego colleges, which enroll 93% of their students into transfer-level math coursework—a substantial improvement from previous years— but not enough to match the rest of California, which ranges from 97% and 99%. Among the Los Angeles area colleges, those with the lowest placement rates are in the Los Angeles Community College District, with 9 of the 21 community colleges with rates under 90% coming from this district. This includes three colleges with rates below 80%.
Regional gaps are much more evident when examining throughput rates. Of the state’s seven macro-regions, Los Angeles and Inland Empire colleges are the only two with completion rates below the state average in both English and math courses. Colleges in the Bay Area, Northern California, and San Diego regions each boasted above average rates in both subjects.
While the size of equity gaps for Latinx and Black students varied significantly across regional boundaries, in every region Latinx or Black students were not significantly less likely to complete transfer-level coursework than students from other racial/ethnic groups at the same institutions. Black students in particular had consistently large gaps across virtually every combination of region and subject. Other than the case of English courses in San Diego (where the gap was just two percentage points), there was no region that managed a gap of fewer than seven percentage points for either subject, with gaps as high as 19 percentage points for transfer-level math coursework in Northern California.
The regions with the largest equity gaps for both Latinx and Black students across math and English were Los Angeles and Bay Area colleges. These gaps are particularly large in math, where they all reach double digits. The single largest instance occurred among Black students in the Bay area, who completed their transfer-level math coursework at just a 52% rate, a far cry from the regionwide 68% average. Interestingly, the Bay Area and Los Angeles represent the highest and lowest total rates of all California regions, respectively, with the Bay Area ranking first among regional math completion rates and just one percentage point below first for English, and Los Angeles holding the state’s lowest math completion rates and low English rates. Despite this, Bay Area Black and Latinx students actually performed slightly worse than their counterparts in Los Angeles relative to the regionwide average.
Looking Back But Moving Forward
It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate just how far we’ve come in just seven years since the passage of AB 705. In Fall 2022, the percentage of new students who were enrolled into remedial courses was just 4% for math and under 1% for English, compared to about 80% less than a decade ago. Considering that cohort sizes range from 120,000 to 180,000 depending on the subject and year, hundreds of thousands of students have been enrolled directly into transfer-level coursework who would have otherwise been placed into remedial coursework, where research has shown they would be significantly less likely to complete those courses and progress toward graduation.
As more students are being placed directly into transfer-level coursework, we must ensure that they are equipped with all the tools necessary to succeed. To that end, in addition to protecting students’ rights to enroll in the coursework that maximizes their chance to thrive, the state and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office should continue to support faculty in the development and refinement of co-requisite courses. Prioritizing regular reviews of data related to placement, different co-requisite course models, and transfer-level course completion to understand how the changes are impacting student enrollment and success will make certain the state continues to support best practices while weeding out those with less stellar track records. Yesterday’s reforms have proven that California’s students are capable of much more than they’re given credit for. Tomorrow’s efforts should give them the chance to prove they’re still just scratching the surface.