Inland Empire confronts obstacles to sending students to college

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The Inland Empire is a young, diverse and fast-growing region in California — and it’s also the California region with the lowest incomes.

It is a region of 4.6 million people that local and state leaders are targeting for economic growth. It’s also young enough that leaders believe that college education can play a dramatic role in shaping the region’s — as well as the state’s — future.

“This is a region of consequence,” said Ashish Vaidya, president and chief executive of Growing Inland Achievement. He heads the regional K-16 collaborative working to link the TK-12 system with higher education.

That’s why the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) recently released a report and hosted a panel that examined the big barriers to Inland Empire students attending and ultimately completing college, and highlighted potential solutions in the works.

The region has its work cut out for it. In California, 64% of students who completed high school in the 2021-22 academic year attended college. That number was 54% in Riverside County and 56% in San Bernardino County, which comprise the Inland Empire.

When students in the Inland Empire do attend a community college, they’re less likely to transfer to a four-year university than other Californians. Only 31% of students who do attend community college end up transferring to a university — the lowest rate in a state struggling with this issue.

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Geography can pose a problem for transfer students. The vast region east of Kern, Los Angeles and Orange counties is home to major cities that host UC Riverside, CSU San Bernardino and other private universities. And yet, many of its community colleges — Barstow, Copper Mountain, Desert, Mt. San Jacinto, Palo Verde and Victor Valley — qualify as public university deserts, meaning these colleges are 25 miles from the nearest university.

The region is vast, diverse and many of the educational institutions are disconnected, but that’s changing. The PPIC report heralds the work of Growing Inland Achievement as exactly what is needed in the Inland Empire.

For instance, CSU San Bernardino is engaged in a pilot program that allows direct admissions to high school students who meet certain conditions. This means that they don’t even need to jump through the hoops of applying, which can serve as barriers.

Dual enrollment programs, which enable high school students to take college courses, have shown great potential in ensuring that students attend college after graduating from high school.

The PPIC report recommends that the courses required for Californians to attend a public university — known as A-G courses — be aligned with high school requirements. This would ensure more students are not only eligible but also prepared for college. In some districts, this might be a relatively low lift. The report noted that in one school district, graduation courses are almost completely aligned with university requirements, except for the foreign language requirement.

The report noted that there is pessimism about the value of a bachelor’s degree in the Inland Empire.

Catalina Cifuentes, executive director of college and career readiness for the Riverside County Office of Education, said the tenor of conversations about college has changed in recent years.

She has become accustomed to parents doubting whether their students are ready for college or whether they can afford it. But now she hears parents say things that are much more charged, such as “You just want to get my child into loan debt” or “You want them to be a socialist.”

The region has a relatively low cost of living, which has for decades made it attractive for workers commuting into costlier Southern California cities like Los Angeles. Many workers have been drawn to jobs in transportation, warehousing or construction. Some of these jobs pay more than the minimum wage, and the cost of living is lower than in other parts of the state.

All of this leads to the perception that a college degree isn’t as valuable.

There’s a big debate about what kind of job growth the Inland Empire actually needs, according to Vaidya. He describes it as a chicken-and-egg problem: Companies that need highly educated workers can’t open in the Inland Empire unless the region invests in education.

The PPIC report notes that Inland Empire residents who do get a college degree get a 39% bump in wages. That’s not as high as the bump in other parts of the state — 55% — but locals with degrees do have one big advantage: They are more likely to own a home than college graduates in other parts of the state.

The region’s dominant industries tend to bring in workers without a college degree. One in 4 adults has a bachelor’s degree, compared to nearly 6 out of 10 in the Bay Area.

That means students rely heavily on schools — rather than their family or broader community — to learn about how college works, according to Cifuentes.

She said schools need to educate students about the classes they should take in high school, how to apply to college and figure out how to pay for it.

“If they don’t get this information from us, they most likely will not get it,” Cifuentes said.

Because most of this information is coming from schools, the report says it is important to have conversations about college beginning in middle school. Increasingly, PPIC notes that districts are taking that work on.

Making sure that everyone in a school system understands the data about who is and isn’t going to college is important, Cifuentes said. For example, she said some Advanced Placement teachers didn’t understand why their students needed to be pulled out of class for college readiness programs. Sharing data from the National Student Clearinghouse showing how many AP students are not going to college was an eye-opening experience for these teachers, Cifuentes said.

PPIC takes the position that keeping students’ options open after high school — whether that’s trade school, a job, the military or college — is also important.

“We are not saying each high school graduate must attend college,” said Kevin Cook, a research associate at PPIC. “Our point is simply that each graduate should have the information they need and a full range of options for what they choose to do with their postsecondary life.”