Back-to-school season arrives every year with a mixed bag of emotions for most educators, including anticipation and excitement, but also anxiety. The opportunity to catch up with friendly colleagues and the reward of helping students connect with material also comes with concern about how best to present and communicate that material in a way that resonates with a new classroom.
An annual challenge for K-12 educators is creating a syllabus that engages students and will be used throughout the year to mutual benefit rather than tucked in a folder and forgotten about. Today’s digital transformation can be a means for educators to create a more dynamic and engaging syllabus that meets students’ and parents’ needs.
While it can be overwhelming to think about learning any new education technology, the good news about a digital syllabi is that anyone who’s sent a digital calendar invite has already done most of the technical-learning legwork. The more prescient task will be learning the best practices that engage students and enable deeper learning throughout the year.
Step one: Ditch the PDFs and print-outs
Creating a syllabus that works begins with educators stepping into the shoes of their students. K-12 classrooms are full of students who are oriented around the digital world. Where textbooks and binders were once the tools of the trade for students, laptops and iPads have largely taken over. This creates an opportunity for teachers to create more dynamic syllabi via digital calendars, rather than printed off or static PDFs with lists of dates, deadlines, and relevant details that will surely change as the year progresses. In fact, many learning management systems (LMS) already have useful calendar features for this reason. Again, teachers need only know the best way to use them. The digital format offers flexibility and connectivity that old-school syllabi simply can’t hold a candle to.
Tips for creating an effective digital syllabus
Classroom settings and imperatives can vary wildly, and so can the preferences of individual educators. Optimization in this case is in the eye of the beholder, but consider a few ideas that may wind up on your personal best practices list for building out your digital syllabus every year around this time:
Make accessing the most up-to-date version of the syllabus as frictionless as possible for students and parents. Don’t attach your syllabus as a static PDF buried in an LMS. Instead, opt-in to the calendar most LMS platforms offer for the mutual benefit of educators, students, and parents. To maximize engagement and efficiency, teachers can create a subscription calendar in addition or as an alternative to the LMS calendar. Subscription calendars create a live link between the course syllabus and students’ and/or parents’ own digital calendar ecosystem, such as Google Calendar or Outlook. Instead of logging into the LMS to check upcoming dates, assignments, or project deadlines, the information becomes more accessible as it integrates into their monthly, weekly, and daily schedules, mitigating the chance of a missed assignment or even parent-teacher conference. Students and parents only have to opt-in to these calendars once at the beginning of the academic year, but any of the inevitable changes and updates to the syllabus throughout the year are reflected immediately in their personal calendar, making it simpler and easier for educators to ensure no important date is ever missed. While few LMS offer this option within the platform, subscription calendar links are like any hyperlink–easy to share in emails, LMS message notifications, and more.
Leverage the calendar description feature. Virtually every digital calendar provides an option to include a description. This is where educators should include assignment details, such as which textbook pages to read, links to videos or course material, grading rubrics, or more.
Color-code calendar invitations for visual information processors. Support different types of information processors in the classroom by taking the time to color-code the syllabus. For example, purple for project deadlines, red for big exams, yellow for homework assignment due dates. Consistency and routine are key, especially for younger students and busy parents. Color-coding, or even the consistent naming and formatting of events and deadlines, can make a large impact on students meeting deadlines.
Encourage further classroom engagement by integrating digital syllabus “Easter eggs.” Analog syllabi often contain Easter eggs that reward students who read it all the way through. Digital syllabi can include similar engaging surprises, but they’re easy to add throughout the year. Hide extra-credit opportunities in the description of an assignment deadline or add an invitation for last-minute office hours ahead of a big quiz or exam. It could be as simple as a prompt for students to draw their favorite animal at the bottom of an assignment for an extra credit point. If students are aware that these opportunities could creep up in the calendar, it keeps them engaged and perhaps strengthens the habit of checking their classroom syllabus.
While the start of the new school year is the perfect time to introduce a digital syllabus into the classroom, it’s important for educators to keep their own bandwidth and comfortability in mind. Commit to one semester with a digital syllabus and spend time learning the basic features and note how the classroom responds. From there, layer in more advanced features or functionality that helps students without being cumbersome to manage. Over time, educators will learn what works best for them, their students and parents, and the digital syllabus will be a classroom tool that simplifies classroom management and drives more engagement year-round.
Joep Leussink, AddEvent
Joep Leussink is the Head of Growth at AddEvent, a San Francisco-based platform that provides event and calendar marketing solutions. With a proven track record in driving growth for B2B SaaS companies from Series B to post-IPO, Joep leverages his expertise in demand generation and growth marketing to make AddEvent known and accessible to everyone.
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I found myself sitting in a classroom, staring at a test I couldn’t answer. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall learning any of the material. The harder I struggled to remember, the more my anxiety grew—until I jolted awake, covered in sweat. It was the same nightmare that had haunted me for over a decade. One day, during a casual conversation, a colleague—a psychology professor—made an unexpected observation: my experience resembled symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Me? Trauma?
My Learning Experience: From a Model Student to Getting Lost
I grew up in China in the 1980s as the only child of factory workers. Having experienced hardship, my parents hoped I would escape their life by earning a college degree. They told me a good education would guarantee a bright future.
From a young age, I pushed myself to excel academically. In my mind, the purpose of learning was to get good grades. Grades were everything—symbols of success and a source of validation. But this came with a constant fear: the fear of failure, of disappointing my parents, and of falling short of expectations.
This fear intensified in high school, where frequent tests ranked students publicly. I studied relentlessly under immense pressure, and my hard work paid off when I was accepted to my desired university. I continued this pattern in college, focused solely on grades and making my parents proud. But when I graduated, I felt lost. I had no clear direction or career. Didn’t my parents tell me a college education would ensure a bright future? Where was my future?
In my confusion, I began reading for curiosity rather than exams. One day, I came across The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, who critiqued the Chinese education system. He argued that modern education prioritized memorization over true understanding, with grades and diplomas replacing the real purpose of learning. He compared knowledge to an adventurous exploration, best enjoyed with an open and curious mind.1
That moment of reading was transformative. I realized I had never understood the true purpose of education; I had equated learning with good grades, a narrow and misleading focus. Reflecting on my educational journey, I saw how it had been marked by stress, fear, and a constant chase for perfection.
In that moment, I knew I wanted to become a teacher educator. I wanted to help future teachers see education for what it truly is—a journey of growth, curiosity, and empowerment, not just a pursuit of grades. My goal was to break the cycle of stress and fear that had shaped my own experience and instead inspire educators to foster passion, encourage exploration, and create a lasting, positive impact on their students’ lives.
My Teaching Journey: Cultivating a Growth Mindset Through Ungrading
For the past 11 years, I have been a professor of social studies education, working with both pre-service and in-service teachers. I have never used traditional tests in my classes because I don’t believe that teaching ability can be measured through exams. Instead, I assess my students’ learning through lesson plans, presentations, and projects—assignments that require logical reasoning, creativity, and critical thinking. To accompany this teaching philosophy, I adopt ungrading2 in all my courses.
Below are some practices I use in my ungraded class, focusing on learning and growth.
Feedback-Only: No Points
I do not attach points to any assignments. Instead, I provide rich feedback. If students want to know how well they did in an assignment, they must read my feedback. I believe that mistakes are one of the most powerful learning tools. By removing the pressure of grades, students are less afraid to take risks and make errors, knowing they will have opportunities to revise and improve. In my classroom, mistakes aren’t something to fear—they’re an essential part of the learning process.
Steps:
Provide explicit instructions in class. Ask for questions to ensure every student understands how to complete the assignment.
Follow the “Feedback Sandwich”3 method to give each student rich feedback. Through the Learning Management System (LMS) in my university, Desire2Learn (D2L), I prefer giving feedback through video, allowing my students to hear my voice and see my facial expressions to better understand the tone. This personalized approach makes feedback more engaging and encourages students to reflect, revise, and improve their work.
Students revise and resubmit their work.
I review their revised work and provide further feedback.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 until students’ work reaches the standards and the lesson’s objectives.
Guided Reflections
Reflection is a vital part of learning. It encourages students to recognize the value of their experiences, deepen their self-awareness as learners, and apply their knowledge in meaningful ways to their lives.
In addition to the reflections accompanying projects, I use one mid-term reflection and one end-of-semester. 4
Some typical questions in the mid-term reflection include:
What were your goals for this course?
What are some of the main things you’ve learned so far?
Review all your reading quizzes (or any other small assignments). How do you evaluate your preparation for them?
How many assignments have you completed, including peer evaluations?
Is there anything remaining uncompleted? If so, please list them here.
Item(s)
Anticipated date(s) of completion
How do you feel about your participation during class? Explain.
How many class meetings did you miss? If you missed any, what were the legitimate reasons?
Is there anything you would like me to help with?
What would it be if you were to give yourself a grade right now? Why?
Some typical questions in the end-of-semester reflection include:
Read your (individual assignment) and feedback. Have you revised your work based on the feedback? Why or why not?
Read your (group project) and feedback. Thinking of your contribution to this project, what did you learn from it?
What do you know now that you didn’t know at the beginning of the semester?
After taking this course, what profound insights have you gained about social studies education?
How many classes did you miss? What legitimate reasons did you have for missing those classes?
Please suggest a grade for yourself. Justify why you give yourself that grade.
Ungrading may not lighten an instructor’s workload, however, the effort I invested in this approach has proven immensely rewarding. I’ve witnessed a noticeable shift toward more internally motivated students, stronger professor-student relationships, and, most importantly, happier, less stressed students. The sense of fulfillment that comes from these positive changes is unparalleled.
Jing A. Williams is Professor of Social Studies Education at the University of South Dakota (USD). She teaches elementary and secondary social studies methods courses. She is the three-time recipient of the Faculty Excellence Awards in Teaching at the School of Education at USD. In 2024, she was the keynote speaker at the Online Faculty Symposium hosted by USD’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Dr. Williams’ research interest focuses on the global perspective of social studies education. She is the lead author of Teaching with a Global Perspective: Approaches and Strategies for Secondary Social Studies Teachers, published by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in 2024. She is the Book/Media Review Editor of the Journal of International Social Studies, the official publication of the International Assembly of the NCSS.
1 Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (Beijing, China: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1998).
2 Susan Blum, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning(and What to Do Instead, ed. Susan Blum(Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020).
4 These reflection prompts are revised based on the samples from: Susan Blum, “Just One Change (Just Kidding): Ungrading and Its Necessary Accompaniments,” in Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead, ed. Susan D. Blum (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020), 53-73.
References
Blum, Susan. Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning(and What to Do Instead). Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020.
Fink, L. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013.
Lin, Yutang. The Importance of Living. Beijing, China: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1998.
Online learning in high school helps students explore career pathways
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We started working with an online education high school program about 10 years ago and have been expanding our use of online courses ever since. Serving about 1,100 students in grades 6-12, our school has built up its course offerings without having to add headcount. Along the way, we’ve also gained a reputation for having a wide selection of general and advanced courses for our growing student body.
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Two years after Arizona State University replaced all of its introductory biology labs with virtual reality labs, the university’s rising tide of STEM majors are getting better overall grades and persisting longer in their programs, according to the results of a longitudinal study released Monday.
Education-technology experts say the white paper from ASU’s EdPlus Action Lab affirms the university’s recent investment in virtual reality education and shows how virtual reality can be an effective tool to nurture complex reasoning skills in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Additionally, the research indicates that virtual learning could help narrowing historic achievement and workforce gaps in the STEM fields.
“They’re not just executing recipe-like science labs—they’re in the immersive world exploring and working through expertly designed lab assignments that connect to the VR story,” said Annie Hale, executive director at the EdPlus Action Lab and lead author of the paper. “And that’s leading to real, measurable gains in learning and persistence in STEM.”
Since fall 2022, aspiring scientists, doctors, engineers and other STEM majors at ASU have been required to pair their Bio 181 and Bio 182 lectures with a series of 15-minute virtual reality lab sessions in a 3-D intergalactic wildlife sanctuary, where dinosaur-like creatures are on the brink of extinction. Students create field scientist avatars and traverse the virtual world to collect samples and data before returning to the classroom to analyze their findings and use real-world biological principles to save the creatures.
When ASU first piloted the course in spring 2022, a randomized study of about 500 students showed virtual reality’s initial promise in alleviating the historically high attrition rates—especially for low-income, female and nonwhite students—in introductory STEM classes that have long plagued ASU and universities nationwide. Students in the virtual reality lab group were 1.7 times more likely to score between 90 percent and 100 percent on their lab assignments compared to students in the conventional lab group.
A scene from the virtual reality biology lab offered at ASU.
While those results indicated early success of the concept, some experts told Inside Higher Ed at the time that they were interested in seeing long-term outcomes before categorizing it as a “settled piece of pedagogy.”
Hale had a similar idea.
“After we saw great results from that trial, I wondered if it was just a semester effect,” she said. “Pedagogical adjustments can boost ABC rates and student satisfaction, but it doesn’t always have long-term implications.”
To answer that question, Hale and her research team developed a two-year longitudinal study that tracked more than 4,000 students’ learning outcomes in the two-course introductory biology lab sequence between fall 2022—when ASU began requiring all STEM majors to take the virtual reality biology labs—and spring 2024.
They found that students who took the virtual reality biology lab, on average, improved their final course mark by one-quarter of a grade between Bio 181 and Bio 182. Compared to students who took those two courses between 2018 and 2022—prior to the introduction of virtual reality—students in the virtual reality cohort also scored one-quarter of a letter grade higher in advanced biology courses, including general and molecular genetics.
Results of the study also showed that students who took the virtual reality lab were more likely than their peers to remain STEM majors, and that they consistently performed well on all lab assignments regardless of their high school preparation levels, income, race, ethnicity or gender.
Researchers also conducted pre- and post-class student surveys, interviews, and classroom observations to inform their findings, which revealed strong and lasting emotional investment in the high-stakes narrative of saving the creatures in the intergalactic wildlife sanctuary.
“Students come out crying because the story line is so interesting and engaging,” Hale said. “In a world where science curriculum can be boring, hard or a lot of math, the [story] motivates them when the quantitative aspects are challenging. They want to solve it because they want to know what happens next.”
‘Ability to Feel Successful’
Virtual reality has a decades-old presence in the education-technology world, but educators often deploy it tangentially, through one-time experiences that aren’t critical to passing a particular course. Although some of those efforts have yielded anecdotal and small-scale evidence that virtual reality can boost student engagement, the latest data on the technology’s incorporation into biology labs offers more robust, large-scale proof that ASU’s broader investments in virtual reality education are already paying off.
In 2020, the university partnered with the technology and entertainment company Dreamscape Immersive—a virtual reality company with ties to notable Hollywood productions, such as WarGames and Men in Black—to create Dreamscape Learn. Over the past five years, the company has developed numerous virtual reality courses for ASU and more than a dozen other K-12 and higher education institutions across numerous disciplines, including art history, chemistry and astronomy.
But ASU’s traditional introductory biology courses were among Dreamscape Learn’s first endeavors, as it aligned with the university’s push to broaden participation in STEM fields.
Numerous studies have identified such courses as some of the biggest barriers to completing a STEM degree and landing a well-paying job, especially for students who didn’t complete a rigorous biology course in high school.
In typical biology labs, “students are asked to design experiments and hypotheses, but they haven’t actually been taught the skills to do that,” said John VandenBrooks, a zoology professor and ASU’s associate dean of immersive learning, who helped design the virtual reality labs. “For students who come in with a strong background, that’s easier for them to engage with. But other students who haven’t had that same experience really struggle … They feel behind already.”
Leveling the playing field through novel problem-solving is what motivated him to ground the curriculum in a fictional universe.
“Nobody has solved the problems in the intergalactic wildlife sanctuary,” VandenBrooks said. “It gives them a foundation and the ability to feel successful early on in their higher education career and be able to continue on.”
Making ‘Meaning Out of Complexity’
But virtual reality isn’t about making these fundamental STEM courses any less rigorous, but rather teaching students transferable critical thinking skills, those involved with the courses say.
“One of the advantages of making these fictional narratives is that we can develop the story in such a way so that students have to deploy very specific skills at a very specific time to solve that problem,” VandenBrooks said. “That creates a very clear learning progression that goes across this entire curriculum and that really benefits students in their skill development versus giving them a series of labs or assignments that are related but don’t necessarily have as clear of a progression.”
And having those complex reasoning skills are what the droves of STEM majors who want to work in the medical field, for instance, will need to succeed in their careers.
“The key to being a good doctor is knowing what’s abnormal in the normal,” said VandenBrooks, who previously worked at Midwestern University, a private medical school with locations in Arizona and Illinois. “When things are easy, you can use an algorithm, but when things aren’t, you have to do all of this problem-solving. That’s the doctor you want when things are really going wrong, and that’s what we’re trying to train students for.”
Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at the education graduate school, who did not participate in any aspect of ASU’s study, said education research can benefit from studies with large sample sizes to affirm prior studies on virtual reality in education.
In general, immersive learning experiences “reduce barriers to people believing they can succeed in the realm of science,” he said. “If you’re someone who’s been told your whole life that you don’t fit the mold of a typical scientist—because of your income, race, gender or ethnicity—VR provides learners the agency to see themselves as scientists.”
Although the study demonstrates how that theory is already at work in ASU’s virtual reality biology labs, it may not be a feasible approach for every college and university.
According to Josh Reibel, CEO of Dreamscape Learn, implementing the virtual reality education system (which includes software fees and the one-time costs of installing an immersive classroom called a pod) costs “mid–five figures to low six figures,” depending on the size of the school and the scale of the curricular offerings.
In March 2022, The Arizona Republic reported that ASU had at that point invested $5 million in “philanthropic investment for development” to build out a virtual reality biology lab.
If an institution can afford it, virtual reality also offers a strategy for teaching students to think beyond memorization and regurgitations in the age of generative artificial intelligence.
“The more you can use AI to transmit facts, the more pressure there is on higher education to do more than just transmit facts,” Reibel said. “That helps educators see that the real problem to be solved isn’t how to populate students’ notebooks with more information, it’s how to get them to lean in to wanting to do more work.”
Chris Dede, a senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and a learning technology expert, said that though the gains presented in ASU’s study are relatively “modest,” they are “significant” nonetheless.
“It’s showing that it’s reasonable to develop other things based on similar approaches,” he said. “If humans are trained simply on knowing a bunch of facts and doing well on psychometric tests, they’re going to lose to AI in the workplace, because they’re doing what AI does well rather than what people do well.”
And what people do well, he said, “is make meaning out of complexity by pulling together different things they know about the world and developing hypotheses about what’s going on in the environment, which is not something AI can do, because it doesn’t understand the world.”
BOSTON (March 31, 2025) – In recent months, almost 2,000 schools and districts have purchased or renewed licenses for Lexia English Language Development (Lexia English) fromLexia, aCambium Learning Group brand. Using powerful speech recognition technology, the program supports students in grades K-6 to build their linguistic confidence in academic English.
“More than 162,000 students and 77,000 educators at 7,400 schools used the program during the 2024 school year. In addition, those students practiced academic conversations 4.3 million times in the program,” said Lexia President, Nick Gaehde. “The numbers show just how much students and educators have needed access to a culturally responsive language learning solution.”
One of those educators who used the program is Lynmara Colón, the director of Student Opportunity and Multilingual Services at Prince William County Schools in Virginia. After a pilot, the district has allowed individual middle and elementary schools to purchase Lexia English during the 2024-2025 school year. Prince William County Schools serves more than 20,000 English learners who speak 140 languages. “We are the 10th most diverse district in the nation,” Colón said. “But when I try to find tools for diverse students, there’s not a lot that meets the specific needs of the student population we serve.”
Colón noted that the program had boosted student growth to the point of reducing her worries about providing staff with a high-quality tool focused on helping Emergent Bilingual students. She expressed appreciation for the way the program helps her forecast and make sense of language acquisition data. “With Lexia, I can have visibility into how they’re doing with language comprehension,” she said. “I always know to expect the best from our Lexia partners. I have high expectations, and they never disappoint.”
Lexia English’s approach to English language learning is to empower emergent bilinguals by honoring their heritage languages and offering culturally responsive, adaptive learning pathways to foster academic and linguistic growth. Seventeen characters with diverse backgrounds help students practice speaking skills by engaging with content in academic subjects such as math, science, social studies, and general knowledge.
Gaehde concluded, “With Lexia English, educators can celebrate multilingualism in the classroom, providing students with the tools to succeed in both English language development and overall academic achievement.”
About Lexia
Lexia®, a Cambium Learning® Group brand, is transforming literacy education, driving change in 1 of every 3 school districts across the United States. For more than 40 years, Lexia has been a thought leader in literacy education, delivering award-winning, research-based solutions grounded in the science of reading. With a full spectrum of offerings, including professional learning, curriculum, and embedded assessment tools, Lexia provides educators with Structured Literacy solutions that are proven effective and designed to drive meaningful literacy outcomes. By empowering educators with unparalleled ease of use and the knowledge and tools they need, Lexia helps more students unlock their potential to read, write, and speak with confidence. For more information, visit lexialearning.com.
About Cambium Learning Group
Cambium Learning Group is the education essentials company, providing award-winning education technology and services for K-12 educators and students. With an intentional collection of respected global brands, Cambium serves as a leader, helping millions of educators and students feel more seen, valued, and supported every day. In everything it does, the company focuses on the elements that are most essential to the success of education, delivering simpler, more certain solutions that make a meaningful difference right now.
To learn more, visit www.cambiumlearning.com or follow Cambium onFacebook,LinkedIn, andX. The Cambium family of brands includes: Cambium Assessment®, Lexia®, Learning A-Z®, ExploreLearning®, and Time4Learning®.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
More than 17,400 high school seniors last fall got the sweetest news any anxious student can get: Congratulations, because of your high school GPA, you’re automatically admitted to one of 10 California State University campuses of your choice — and they’re all relatively affordable.
Even with less than a week to go before the campuses wrap their final decisions about whom to admit, a pilot program focusing on Riverside County is already showing that more students have been admitted from the county than last year, about 10,600 so far in 2025 compared to last year’s roughly 9,800.
The pilot builds on Cal State’s efforts to enroll more students and works like this: High school seniors receive a notice in the mail that they’re automatically admitted as long as they maintain their grades, finish the 15 mandatory courses necessary for admission to a Cal State, and complete an admissions form to claim their spot at a campus. Cal State was able to mail the notices because it signed an agreement with the Riverside County Office of Education that gave the university eligible students’ addresses.
Now in the program’s first year, Cal State joins other public universities across the country in a growing national movement to automatically admit eligible students. From November through January, Cal State informed students they were accepted to the 10 campuses. To claim a spot, students needed to go online and pick at least one campus.
If past admissions and enrollment trends hold, Cal State as a system will educate hundreds of more students, all from Riverside, than they would have without the pilot. That’d be a boon for a system that prides itself on its affordability and motto that it’s the people’s university; Cal State admits a far higher percentage of students than the University of California. It also could serve as a much-needed budget boost from the extra tuition revenue those students bring, especially at campuses with sinking enrollment.
Eight campuses — Channel Islands, Chico, East Bay, Humboldt, Maritime Academy, Monterey Bay, San Francisco, and Sonoma — are so under-enrolled that Cal State is pulling some of their state revenues to send to campuses that are still growing. Cal Maritime is soon merging with another campus because of its perilous finances. The pilot also includes the two closest campuses to the county, San Bernardino and San Marcos.
The system chose Riverside County because all of its public high school students were already loaded onto a state data platform that can directly transmit student grades to Cal State — a key step in creating automatic admissions. Riverside is also “ethnically and economically representative of the diversity of California — many of the students the CSU is so proud to serve,” a spokesperson for the system, Amy Bentley Smith, wrote in an email.
At Heritage High School, a public school in Riverside County, the pilot encouraged students who previously didn’t even consider attending a public four-year university to submit the automatic admission forms to a Cal State.
Silvia Morales, a 17-year-old senior at Heritage, got an automatic admissions letter. “I was pretty set on going to community college and then transferring, because I felt like I wasn’t ready for the four-year commitment to a college,” she said.
Even with a 3.0 GPA, higher than the 2.5 GPA Cal State requires for admission, she nearly didn’t submit the forms to secure her admission until early January. That’s well past the standard Nov. 30 admissions deadline.
It wasn’t until her counselor, Chris Tinajero, pulled her into a meeting that she decided to opt into the pilot. “I went through the sales pitch like, ‘Hey, you get this guaranteed admission, you’re an amazing student,’” he recounted.
The pitch worked. Though Cal State sent a physical pamphlet and her high school also emailed her about the pilot, “I wasn’t really paying attention,” Morales said. She needed an adult she trusted at the school to persuade her that the applications were worth the effort, she said.
Morales applied to three Cal State campuses in the pilot plus two outside the program that were still accepting late applications — Chico, Humboldt, Los Angeles, Northridge and San Bernardino. She got into each one, she said.
Her parents are “proud of me because I want to go to college,” Morales said. Neither went to college, she added.
Final enrollment figures won’t be tallied until August, including how many of the students admitted through the pilot attended one of the 10 campuses. But the system’s chancellor’s office is already planning to replicate the pilot program in a Northern California county, which will be named sometime in April, Cal State officials said.
A bill by Christopher Cabaldon, a state senator and Democrat from Napa, would make automatic enrollment to Cal State for eligible students a state law. The bill hasn’t been heard in a committee yet.
A boost in application numbers
Of the 17,000 students who received an invitation to secure their automatic admissions, about 13,200 submitted the necessary forms. That’s about 3,000 more students who applied from the county than last year.
Those who otherwise wouldn’t have applied to a Cal State include students who were eyeing private colleges, said Melina Gonzalez, a counselor at Heritage who typically advises students who are already college-bound.
Nearby private colleges offer all students application fee waivers; at Cal State, typically only low-income students receive fee waivers. But the pilot provided each Cal State student one fee waiver worth $70, which was a draw to students and their parents who don’t qualify for the fee waiver but might struggle to pay.
Last year, 10 of the 100 senior students Gonzalez counseled didn’t apply to a Cal State. This application season, all her students submitted at least one Cal State application, she said.
“It was big, it was really cool, their eyes, they were so excited,” she said of the automatically admitted students. “They would come in and show me their letters.”
Parents called her asking if the pamphlet from Cal State was authentic. With guaranteed admission, some parents ultimately decided to pay for additional applications to campuses in the pilot, knowing it wasn’t in vain.
At Heritage, high school counselors reviewed Cal State’s provisional list of students eligible for the pilot to add more seniors, such as those who hadn’t yet completed the mandatory courses but were on track to do so.
Tinajero was also able to persuade some students who hadn’t completed all the required courses for Cal State entry to take those, including online classes. Still, others with qualifying grades didn’t apply because they weren’t persuaded that a four-year university was for them. Tinajero sees program growth in the coming years, assuming Cal State continues with the pilot. Younger high school students who witnessed the fanfare of automatic admissions may take more seriously the need to pass the 15 required courses to be eligible for a Cal State or University of California campus, he said.
That’s part of Cal State’s vision for this pilot, said April Grommo, the system’s assistant vice chancellor of strategic enrollment management: Begin encouraging students to take the required courses in ninth grade so that by 11th and 12th grade they’re more receptive to applying to Cal State.
Pilot leads to more applications
The automatic admissions pilot is likely what explains the jump in overall applicants, said Grommo. “If you look at the historical numbers of Riverside County students that have applied to the CSU, it’s very consistent at 10,000, so there’s no other accelerator or explanation for the significant increase in the applications,” she said.
Some campuses in the pilot are probably going to see more students from Riverside County than others. The eight under-enrolled Cal State campuses each enrolled fewer than than 100 Riverside students as freshmen, a CalMatters review of 2024 admissions data show. Two enrolled fewer than 10 Riverside students as freshmen.
Cal State isn’t solely relying on past trends to enroll more students. Grommo cited research that suggests direct admissions programs are associated with increases in student enrollment, but not among low-income students, who are less familiar with the college-going process or have additional economic and family demands, like work and child care.
The quad at San Francisco State University in San Francisco on July 7, 2023. Photo by Semantha Norris, CalMatters
Even after students are admitted, some don’t complete key steps in the enrollment process, such as maintaining their grades in the second semester, completing registration forms to enroll, and paying deposits. Others, especially low-income students, have a change of heart over summer about attending college, which scholars call “summer melt.” Then there are the students who got into typically more selective campuses, such as at elite private schools and the University of California, and choose instead to go to those.
To prompt more students to actually enroll, Cal State officials in early March hosted two college fairs in Riverside County for students admitted through the pilot. About 2,600 students signed up to be bussed from their high schools to large venues, including the Riverside Convention Center, where they met with staff, alumni and current students from all 10 Cal State campuses participating in the program. Those were followed by receptions with students and parents.
Grommo said they maxed out capacity at both venues for the student events. While it’s common for individual campuses to host events for admitted students, it was a first for Cal State’s central office.
The event costs, physical mailers to students about their admissions guarantee, invitation to the college fairs and another flyer about the relative affordability of a Cal State cost the system’s central office around $300,000, Grommo estimates. But if the event moves the needle on students agreeing to attend a Cal State, the tuition revenue at the largely under-enrolled campuses alone would be a huge return on investment.
The effort is a far more targeted approach than another admissions outreach effort Cal State rolled out last fall to inform students who started but didn’t finish their college applications that they’re provisionally accepted, as long as they complete and send their forms. The notification went to 106,000 students and was the result of a $750,000 grant Cal State won from the Lumina Foundation, a major higher education philanthropy. The system will know by fall if this notification resulted in more students attending a Cal State.
But that was aimed at students who already applied. The Riverside pilot brings in students, like Morales, who wouldn’t have applied without the mailers and entreaties from counselors. She’s leaning toward picking Cal State San Bernardino for next fall. It’s close to home and an older cousin recently graduated who had a good experience there, she said.
Her next task? Working with her parents to complete the federal application for financial aid by April 2, the deadline for guaranteed tuition waivers for low- and middle-income students.
It’s possible that Cal State may take the direct admissions pilot statewide. All counties are required by state law to join the state-funded data system that Riverside is already a part of to electronically transmit students’ high school grades to Cal States and UCs. Doing so removes the need for schools to send campuses paper transcripts. The deadline for all counties to join the state data system is summer of 2026.
