College Opportunity Ratio (COR) is a new statistical indicator that reports the effectiveness of the state’s high schools in producing college-ready graduates.  COR can be used by policymakers and the public to monitor how well California high schools enable students to move through one of their most critical schooling transitions—from being college-hopeful 9th graders to being college-ready high school graduates.    The map displays the COR for students from racial/ethnic groups that are underrepresented at the University of California for each high school in the Legislative district. The map also shows the relationship between a high school’s COR and the wealth of its surrounding community.  Generally, schools in higher wealth communities prepare more 9th graders for college, but the COR for underrepresented students of color at such schools is much lower than the COR for white and Asian American students.   COR is calculated by creating a three-numbered ratio.  The first number represents 100 students who are enrolled as 9th graders (including those previously retained).¹ The second number shows how many students graduated four years later for each 100 of the 1996 ninth graders.² And the third number represents how many of the graduates that year passed the courses required for admission to CSU and UC. So, for example, if the COR for XYZ High School is 100:80:40, a reader would know that for every 100 9th graders, the school graduated 80 students 4 years later, and 40 of those graduates passed the courses required for admission to CSU and UC.    COR can be calculated and reported for the state as a whole, for districts, and for individual high schools.  It can be calculated for all students, or for sub-groups.   Although COR is not a graduation rate, it offers more useful information than any other publicly reported figure now available.  In addition, it helps us see the need for the state to report its graduation rates as a percentage or ratio of all those students that the state expects to graduate.  For example, if we expect all students in the K-12 system to graduate, the graduation rate might reasonably be based on the number of students entering the 9th grade.³

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¹ For high schools enrolling only grades 10-12, the COR is based on the number of 10th graders enrolled in fall 1997.
² In a few cases, the graduating class was slightly larger than the 9th grade class.  In those cases, we report that for every 100 9th graders there were 100 graduates.
³ The data on the GIS map and in the table come from the California Basic Educational Data System. Since the state does not collect data in a way that allows us to follow individual students over time, some portion of the drop in the numbers between Fall 1996 and Spring 2000 may reflect 9th graders who move, as well as those who do not graduate.  Such student mobility may affect an individual school’s COR, but the statewide trends are conservative estimates, since California had a net increase in the number of high school age underrepresented students over the course of the study. One important aspect of ACCORD’s work is to improve the breadth and quality of the state’s data about its schools and colleges.