New Data on California’s Black-Serving Institutions

Two years ago, the California Legislature passed a law creating a new designation, Black-serving institutions, to recognize colleges and universities working toward Black students’ success. To qualify, institutions have to enroll at least 10 percent Black students—or a minimum of 1,500 students—and take specific steps to support them, including submitting data on their enrollment, retention and graduation rates and drafting plans to improve their academic outcomes and close equity gaps. The designation doesn’t currently come with any funding, but institutions regard it as a badge of honor. They can renew their status every five years by submitting progress updates; the first batch of 31 BSIs will be up for renewal in 2030.

Now new data shows how they’re doing so far, as well as how they can better serve Black students—and why state funding would help, college leaders say. Researchers at the University of Southern California recently published a data dashboard to track student outcomes, which reveals a mixed bag: some heartening numbers, as well as some shortcomings.

The new dashboard uses federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, to offer a first glimpse into how these institutions are serving Black students.

Royel Johnson, associate professor of higher education and social work at USC and principal investigator of the data project, said the goal was to establish a “baseline” to track if BSIs create real progress for Black students down the line.

He hopes the dashboard, which shows Black student enrollment and graduation trends and other metrics by college and by type of institution, will be a “tool of accountability and transparency” and “a way of taking stock of where we are now” at the newly designated BSIs. Colleges can also use the peer-benchmarking tool to see how their student success metrics compare to similar institutions. The dashboard will be updated as new IPEDS data comes out.

“Just being a BSI doesn’t mean that you are succeeding in supporting Black students,” Johnson said. “It just means that you’ve made a compelling case for what you plan to do over the next five years.” Over time, the dashboard will “allow us to see whether or not that commitment translates into material gains in terms of enrollment, retention and completion.”

The Findings

The good news is that BSIs have the potential to make a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of Black students “if we do it right with these institutions,” Johnson said.

The data show almost 44,000 Black students attend the 31 designated institutions, representing 28 percent of all Black college students in California. The dashboard also highlights which colleges have made the greatest gains in Black enrollment over the last decade and which are graduating Black students at rates on par with their peers. At Cerritos College, for example, Black enrollment rose 3.6 percentage points and Black completion rates jumped 13 percentage points between 2015 and 2023, according to the dashboard. And though Black enrollment fell 5.3 percentage points at Compton College, Black students’ completion rate skyrocketed 17 percentage points over the same period.

“You can see that some institutions have been doing really well, and maybe we want to learn from [them],” Johnson said. He sees the data as an opportunity for further research into how some institutions achieved the wins they did.

But some data points revealed gloomier outcomes.

At 18 of the 31 BSIs as of 2023, Black students completed and graduated at 80 percent the rate of their peers, according to the data. Only six institutions had no completion gaps between Black students and their classmates. For Black-serving community colleges, 22 percent of Black students finished within three years on average, compared to 31 percent of other students. At four-year institutions, 59 percent of Black students completed within six years on average relative to 71 percent of their peers. Black students’ six-year graduation rates also fell behind those of their peers at all four-year BSIs as of 2024.

“Even at these BSIs that have been recognized for their commitment, there’s a lot of work to do,” Johnson said.

A Moment of Reflection

Some of the findings “may not be glamorous,” Johnson said, but he hopes they cause college leaders to reflect and enact changes.

If BSI status “only operates as a consumer information tool or as a badge that you get to put on your website … then you know we will have failed,” he said.

He noted that colleges’ applications for BSI status, which are featured on the dashboard, vary widely in terms of their plans for improving Black student success. He said many of them focus on fostering student belonging, but some lacked detailed plans for institutional policy changes to support that goal.

“Talk about belonging. That’s really important,” he said. “But don’t just tell me how you’re going to create a new student group or club that’s going to bring Black students together and have them interact and find community, because that alone is not enough to move the outcomes.”

But he expects colleges will be “up for the challenge” of reflecting on the data to develop new strategies, he added. By applying to become BSIs, they “made the commitment to changing” Black student outcomes for the better. So far, he said he’s only gotten positive responses from college leaders eager to peruse and use the new, easy-to-navigate data.

Michael Marion, interim executive director of the California State University system’s Central Office for the Advancement of Black Student Success, said the dashboard reveals some “bright points” at each of the BSI-designated CSU campuses. He pointed to Sacramento State University as a model, noting the institution introduced the country’s first Black honors college two years ago. The dashboard shows Black student completion at Sacramento State rose 12 percentage points since 2015.

At the same time, some of the “grim” data points allow “me and our office and various leaders throughout the CSU to really be able to say, ‘OK, how can I … shift energies and focus and funding to support certain initiatives that will help correct these numbers?’” he said. “We all have to look ourselves in the mirror … and say, ‘What can we do better and what are we not doing great at?’”

Money Matters

But BSIs need funding to invest, emphasized Keith Curry, president of Compton College.

With the new data at their disposal, BSIs like his are “making adjustments to their plan and looking at … how we align our budget to meet those needs,” he said.

But state lawmakers have ignored two requests to attach funding to the BSI designation over the past two years, he noted. He hopes that the data dashboard, which shows just how many Black students BSIs serve and how persistent equity gaps remain, “gives us a chance to advocate for money to support BSIs.”

He believes BSIs could serve as a national model beyond California, particularly for federally designated minority-serving institutions, such as predominantly Black institutions or Hispanic-serving institutions. The government historically based their MSI status on enrollment thresholds, but Curry believes a focus on how well minority students are supported is the next step.

“We’re talking about services, and we’re talking about how you support the students,” Curry said. “It’s not just enrollment-based.”

Johnson agreed that for BSIs to fulfill their potential, “the most urgent thing” is to fund them.

“That’s going to help them serve Black students in a way that’s going to really be transformative,” he said.