Over a thousand Cal State Long Beach students who left school before earning bachelor’s degrees may soon be granted associate’s degrees through a partnership between Long Beach City College and CSULB.
A bill recently proposed by Long Beach Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal aims to address the “some college, no degree” gap, which affects nearly six million Californians who completed some college credit, yet have no credentials.
“The path to career growth and success is often not linear,” Lowenthal said. Many people experience interruptions, whether due to the COVID-19 pandemic, personal financial challenges, family obligations or something else. “It’s important the system recognizes that and provides opportunities for people to get back on track and to grow,” he said.
For years, professors and administrators at CSULB have recognized that the absence of a path like this hurts students. “This idea that 30% of our students leave without anything in their hand bothers me,” said Dhushy Sathianathan, vice provost for academic planning.
In 2023, Sathianathan and his colleagues proposed that CSULB students who earned at least half the credits toward a baccalaureate degree and maintained a 2.0 grade point average could be awarded joint associate’s degrees from the university and a community college.
When Sathianathan and his co-authors analyzed data from the nearly 10,000 students who discontinued their studies in the last decade, they found that 11%, or 1,103, would be eligible for an associate’s degree. Thousands more could earn associate’s degrees if they took additional units.
When Sathianathan wrote the paper, he “knew it was almost an impossible task” to eliminate the legislative and regulatory barriers to offer these degrees to students who stopped out. But in the time since, the idea of awarding joint associate’s degrees has gained traction, he said.
Now, Lowenthal’s proposed legislation would formalize this pathway, creating a pilot program to retroactively award joint associate’s degrees from CSULB and LBCC to eligible students. These institutions are already bound together through the Long Beach College Promise, which guarantees Long Beach Unified students free and priority admission to higher education in the city.
“This is a way to build bridges between community college and CSU,” Sathianathan said. “We can work together as one system.”
In order to launch the joint degree, not only does the state education code have to be changed, but the residency requirements would have to be waived, eliminating the mandate that units be completed at the community college as a prerequisite to earning a degree, Sathianathan said.
Additional credits would be required at the community college level only if students had not yet met the 60-credit threshold, a spokesperson for LBCC said. And survey data show that former students are interested in that option, the spokesperson said.
Though the legislation would qualify thousands for degrees, students would still have to opt into the program. CSULB plans to launch a large social media campaign to reach eligible students, rather than placing the burden on them to prove they are entitled to associate’s degrees, Sathianathan said.
There will be startup costs of launching the pilot, especially when it comes to evaluating transcripts, sharing student data, processing degrees and engaging students, an LBCC spokesperson said. But the intention is that no costs are passed onto students, Lowenthal and Sathianathan said.
The legislation, if passed, allows for several other (yet to be named) CSU campuses and community colleges to participate in the pilot. And if the initial program proves successful, “there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be statewide, throughout the entire CSU and [University of California] systems,” Lowenthal said.
The impact doesn’t have to stop there, Sathianathan said. It’s powerful to see institutions working together to solve regional problems, and “if California leads the way,” that model can catch on in other states, he said.