Doors open, but will OUHSD students step through?

Just 1 in 3 grads earn degree or certificate



IN THE NUMBERS—Following a recently released report showing whether Oxnard High Union High School students are ready for college, Superintendent Penelope DeLeon said officials need to take note of the report’s statistics showing that only a third of OUHSD graduates continue on to earn college diplomas and career licenses.

IN THE NUMBERS—Following a recently released report showing whether Oxnard High Union High School students are ready for college, Superintendent Penelope DeLeon said officials need to take note of the report’s statistics showing that only a third of OUHSD graduates continue on to earn college diplomas and career licenses.

After graduating in 2010, about 80 percent of Oxnard Union High School District’s seniors enrolled in colleges and vocational programs, but just 1 in 3 grads went on to complete a degree and earn a career certificate, according to a new district report.

The 62-page college readiness report released Sept. 13 tracked seniors’ progress after graduation, but the document also breaks down how many seniors completed courses and tests required for college admission, how many finished career academy programs, the number who applied to college, and other key data, Superintendent Penelope DeLeon said.

“We started this process last year,” DeLeon told the Camarillo Acorn. “In the past, we had a pretty clunky and old data system. We recently updated our data systems. So although this isn’t the first year that we’ve looked at the data, it’s the first time we’ve presented so much accurate data on college readiness to the board.”

Charts and graphs in the report reveal some interesting facts. For example, the numbers show Adolfo Camarillo High had the highest percentage of seniors in the district who successfully completed the A-G subjects required for college admission—history, math, English, science, a foreign language, visual or performing arts, and a college-level elective.

However, 10th- and 11th graders at Rancho Campana High scored the highest on the PSAT. The school, which offers three career academies—engineering, health and biological sciences, and arts and entertainment— opened in 2015 and will have its first graduating class in 2018.

Although only two school years old, 44 percent of Rancho Campana’s students in 10th and 11th grades scored between 800 and 990 on the PSAT, the highest scores in the district, the numbers show.

In presenting the study to the school board last week, DeLeon said officials need to especially take note of the report’s statistics showing that only a third of OUHSD graduates continue on to earn college diplomas and career licenses.

“This is important to us as a district,” she said. “This is why we must as a district dig in to helping our students become college- and career-ready.”

College can be a grind for incoming freshmen unable to pass math and English college entrance exams and who end up having to take as many as three remedial courses before they can begin earning college credits. It’s a financial drain that takes an added toll on students’ self-confidence, DeLeon told school board members.

“Don’t forget, if you get put into a remedial course for no credit, you still have to pay for that course,” she said. “And we have a lot of students that it’s just human nature to give up at a certain point.”

OUHSD grads aren’t alone. Only 16 percent of freshmen statewide who take noncredit remedial English and math in college go on to earn an associate degree within six years, and just 24 percent of remedial students in community colleges end up transferring to a four-year university, a Public Policy Institute of California study found.

But as the California State University system pushes to bolster the four-year completion rate for first-time freshmen to 40 percent from the current 19 percent by 2025, new changes in the system could increase local students’ success at Cal State Channel Islands and other CSU campuses, DeLeon said.

Last month, CSU announced it intends to expand the use of “multiple measures” to assess the academic readiness of students, meaning admissions officials will no longer rely solely on college entrance exams. Instead, administrators will take into account students’ SAT scores, their Advanced Placement test scores and their scores on state assessment tests.

As of 2019, CSU students who must take remedial classes will earn college credits for those courses, the chancellor’s office announced Aug. 28.

For DeLeon, the admissions changes at CSU campuses mean more opportunities for local high school students and a renewed reason to focus on boosting students’ standardized tests scores.

“College admission is no longer a one-shot deal, where if a student is having a bad day, for example, and does poorly on that one college entrance exam, they’ll automatically be put into a remedial class,” she said in a phone interview. “Now there are these multiple measures that will be taken into account for college admission, including SAT test scores. So we have to do our job now and make sure our students do well on those test and exams.”