This article first appeared in EdSource.

California State University is marking the end of a decade-long effort to improve graduation rates with mixed results. While CSU has had long-term success in buoying the share of students who earn bachelor’s degrees, some metrics this year stayed flat, and equity goals remained stubbornly out of reach.

Systemwide, CSU has exceeded only one of the ambitious goals it set in 2016. That’s the two-year graduation rate for transfer students, which beat CSU’s 45% goal over the 10-year graduation initiative by less than a percentage point.

Other similar metrics missed their targets despite overall movement in the right direction. And while CSU had hoped to bring low-income and other historically underserved students up to the graduation rates of their peers, equity gaps instead widened over the decade.

With a wide variety of results across the system, some campuses showed four-year rates over 60% while others notched rates half as high. But CSU officials were mainly in an upbeat mood at an event unveiling the preliminary 2025 graduation figures. They celebrated standout campuses like San Diego State and Cal State Monterey Bay, where four-year graduation rates over the decade climbed by double-digit percentage points.

“This is not a sad story,” Dilcie Perez, the chief student affairs officer of the CSU, said at an event charting the university system’s transition as its graduation initiative comes to an end. “If we had not set those goals, we would have never made it to where we’re at in the CSU. We are making a difference. We are making changes for the citizens of California.”

Still, Perez said the CSU “hit stiff headwinds” in its progress, especially as a pandemic-driven shift to online classes disrupted students’ social connections on campus and worsened mental health five years ago. Those challenges hindered low-income students most of all, she added.

With the 10-year graduation targets in their rearview mirrors, CSU officials now have a new target: putting CSU graduates on a path to the first jobs of their careers or to graduate school. The new effort, which CSU calls its Student Success Framework, also focuses on themes like affordability, career and academic advising, and experiential learning, among others.

CSU launched its graduation initiative in 2016 as some campuses confronted abysmally low completion rates. For example, less than 9% of first-time freshmen at Sacramento State were graduating in four years at the start of the effort. (That was up to 30% last year.) 

Campuses and the system took various steps in pursuit of the targets, like removing non-credit remedial courses, improving student advising, streamlining some majors, reexamining approaches to financial aid and seeking to entice students to reenroll if they dropped out of school.

Over the course of the decade, the network of 22 campuses saw the largest graduation increases among first-time freshmen finishing in four years and transfer students completing their degrees in two years. In 2025, 37% of first-time freshmen graduated in four years, up from 19% in 2015 and about a percentage point higher than in 2024. The two-year graduation rate for transfer students rose more than 1 percentage point in 2025 to 45.6%, continuing a rebound after COVID-era dips and from a 2015 starting point of 31%.

Progress among students who took longer to graduate was more incremental. The six-year graduation rate for first-time freshmen leveled off at 62% in 2025, about the same as the year before and up almost 5 percentage points from 2015. Similarly, the four-year rate for transfer students was just shy of 77% in 2025, up slightly from 2024 and nearly 4 percentage points since 2015. The system finished the decade more than 8 percentage points below its goals for both rates.

And while CSU had hoped to erase the gap between students who do and do not receive federal Pell Grants, the six-year graduation rate disparity among first-time freshmen instead grew from almost 9% in 2015 to more than 12% in 2025. 

For the same metric, the gap between historically underserved students — a term CSU uses to refer to American Indian, Black and Hispanic students as a group — and students of all other races and ethnicities increased 2 percentage points over the decade, from nearly 12% in 2015 to almost 14% in 2025.

CSU also tracks graduation rates for its campuses, all of which have been assigned varying goals. The university system publishes campus-level data on a dashboard available online. 

While all showed improvement over the decade, wide differences persist among the campuses. For example, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo showed a top-flying 63% four-year completion rate, with San Diego State just behind at 62%. In contrast, Cal State Dominguez Hills reached 16%, and Cal State East Bay hit 22% in that category, though each had six-year graduation rates more than twice as high. 

The review of the CSU’s progress on those goals comes as the Trump administration cuts some federal grant funding and pressures higher education to overhaul wide-ranging campus programs on diversity and other issues to align with its political agenda. CSU confirmed in late September that it is the subject of federal probes into alleged antisemitism and racial discrimination. Among other disruptions, the U.S. Department of Education has moved to end a grant program for Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a designation held by 21 California State University campuses. 

“On the federal front, we’re facing real and potential disinvestment in higher education, targeted legal action and a dizzying number of threats to our most fundamental core values,” CSU Chancellor Mildred García said in opening remarks at Wednesday’s event. “Believe me, we will continue to stand strong against these threats.”

Perez said CSU faces questions every day about “what are we going to do in response to our national climate.” Her answer: Help students graduate and start their careers. 

“There is no greater effort, no greater response than us banding together and graduating more students, and closing the equity gaps, and changing the social mobility and economic mobility of our students,” Perez said.

EdSource is California’s largest independent newsroom focused on Education.

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