In February, NCAN released “The Data That Matter and the Plans That Work: New Districtwide Approaches to Student Success Beyond High School,” a collection of case studies about five school districts and partner organizations participating in the To & Through Advising Challenge. These organizations’ “big ideas” center on changing postsecondary advising by incorporating fit and match in college selection, improving FAFSA completion, reducing summer melt, and using postsecondary outcomes data to inform practice. This post focuses on the Sacramento City (California) Unified School District whose big idea is employing letters to inform students and families about their best fit postsecondary options.
Read the full report, additional case studies, and other resources derived from the project here. NCAN would like to thank all of the To & Through Advising Challenge participants and coaches who contributed their insight and time to making this publication possible. NCAN is grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their support of the To & Through Advising Challenge.
The Big Idea
Employ letters to inform students and families about their best fit postsecondary options.
Background
Sacramento City USD is the 10th largest public K-12 school district in California and serves about 43,000 students across 76 campuses. In the 2016-17 academic year, about 40% of students were Hispanic/Latino, while 19% were Asian, 18% were White, and 14% were Black or African American. About 70% of students are classified as socioeconomically disadvantaged, and 20% are English language learners. The district is led by Superintendent Jorge Aguilar, who arrived in July 2017 from Fresno USD. Aguilar has a longstanding focus on postsecondary education and his work “is rooted in a philosophy that all students should graduate the K-12 system with the greatest number of postsecondary choices from the widest array of options.”
“The premise was, ‘If we simply make students aware of their college options, would they apply at a higher rate just by giving them more information?’” explains Christina Espinosa, director of guidance and counseling for Sacramento City USD. “With regards to the college eligibility letters, we took this on in Fresno and tried to replicate what we did there in Sacramento with the understanding that conditions are very different. We’ve very much taken a learning stance here.”
To create the college eligibility letters, the district ran profiles based on high schools’ alumni. The letters stated simply (paraphrased), “These are the Universities of California and California State Universities that fit your academic profile. Students just like you applied there. Consider applying.” The district mailed these letters to students’ homes along with an accompanying mailing to parents telling them to expect the college eligibility letter.
California benefits from a well-defined set of “A-G requirements” for acceptance into the University of California and California State University systems. These requirements help SCUSD with some, but not all, of students’ eligibility letters. Every student receives an information packet based on their academic profile. In the first year of implementation, students who did not meet the A-G requirements received information on local community colleges. In follow-up focus groups, students indicated they wanted more information on a broader range of institutions, including historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), minority-serving institutions (MSIs), and private colleges. During the 2019-20 academic year, eligibility letters are covering all of the institutional segments and include information on financial aid and scholarships. Although SCUSD does not yet include these institutions’ completion rates in the eligibility letters, it is a decision they are navigating as they aim to help students find the institutions most likely to help them succeed.
The same focus groups in which students requested information on a broader range of institutions yielded other helpful feedback. Students had aesthetic concerns (“it wasn’t student-friendly,” “it looked like a government document,” “there’s a table of contents here”). Parents also had feedback. “We put in bold the tiers of the schools that students should apply to,” says Espinosa. “We heard from some empowered parents that these letters could be discouraging. “If UCLA wasn’t in bold are you saying that my student isn’t eligible to go to UCLA?’” she remembers hearing.
But the biggest issue was distribution, says Espinosa. Too many of the addresses on file were wrong, which meant students and families were not receiving their letters. “One of the biggest changes we instituted was to deliver these through our counselors and classrooms,” says Espinosa. This academic year, the district preceded distribution with more information much earlier to counselors so that they would be better equipped to share information with students in the fall. “This first year [with the eligibility letters], we didn’t hear a lot of noise, and we didn’t have a lot of time to train counselors, so we just mailed them out,” Espinosa remembers. This year, counselors received training through a partnership with California State University, Sacramento, which offered information both on postsecondary fit and match and a more general “why and how” around the packets.
Espinosa offers some advice to other districts considering a similar approach around eligibility letters: “When we put together these academic profiles for students, we have to take into consideration courses students are taking as seniors. The timeline is really tight. Our students start school at the end of August. You typically have two weeks when students enroll and then shift their schedules. Their schedules aren’t set until the middle of September. Our college application cycle opens Oct. 1. The timeline is tight. We have to print everything the second week of September, and it only gives us two weeks to put everything together, package it, and send it out to students.” That tight timeline can lead to quality control issues (e.g., listed credits are wrong, GPA or on-track indicators may not be updated). “There’s always going to be a small margin of error,” concedes Espinosa.
An upcoming step is to try to better understand the effect sending the college eligibility letters is having. A survey of seniors from the class of 2019 got an 80% response rate, and 15% of respondents said that the letters did affect where they applied. The district will continue to employ this strategy to try to make students aware of their options and provide information through counselors and curriculum that better equips them with college knowledge and financial aid information to take their next step after graduation.
Explore the full report to learn more about how other school districts and partner organizations are using big ideas and National Student Clearinghouse data to improve their students' postsecondary outcomes.
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