Building College Success
Despite strides in recent years to prepare more students from South LA high schools for college, gaps remain in the readiness rates between Black and African-American students and their White and Asian counterparts. Currently, only about 26% of African American graduates from the LAUSD matriculate to 4-year institutions, with just 17% achieving a degree within six years. LA Promise Fund’s Black College Success (BCS) program collaborates with select colleges and universities to forge significant pathways for college success, purposed to uplift Black students from 10 schools within South LA. Our study consists of an evaluation of BCS, with funding exceeding 1.5 million dollars from the LA Promise Fund and the US Department of Education.
Our evaluation utilizes a five-year Quasi-Experimental Design (QED) to assess BCS’s impact on outcomes crucial for educational success, including college awareness/readiness, self-awareness, self-esteem, self-efficacy, enrollment, persistence, academic achievement, and degree attainment. The program serves approximately 600 Black high school seniors within the Los Angeles, Compton, and Inglewood Unified School Districts, including Charter schools, aiming to have markedly better educational and life outcomes for this group.
Evaluation Highlights
Academic Self-Efficacy
Belonging
Mattering
Students receiving BCS services demonstrated an increase in academic behaviors (reflecting improved confidence), while students in comparison schools showed a decline in their scores.
Overall, while individual schools varied, the treatment group’s average trend suggests girls either improved or declined less severely than boys, a positive narrowing of a perennial gender gap.
Students receiving BCS services demonstrated an increase in academic behaviors (reflecting improved confidence), while students in comparison schools showed a decline in their scores.