SECTION 1.
(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(1) California is falling behind in producing the necessary postsecondary education to ensure our state’s prosperity and opportunities for individuals in the 21st century.
(2) California faces a degree and certificate gap, and is projected to need one million more workers with bachelor’s degrees and an additional 1.3 million workers with associate degrees or certificates by 2025. Today, one in every four jobs requires at least an associate degree.
(3) In the near future, one in every three jobs will require at least an associate degree. Failure to make significant improvements in degree completion will result in a less productive economy, lower incomes for residents, less tax revenue for the state, and more dependence on social services.
(4) The California Community Colleges are the state’s largest workforce provider, offering associate degrees and short-term job training certificates in more than 175 different fields.
(5) Meeting the current and future need for higher education requires that postsecondary institutions improve their success rates with current students and attract, and graduate, individuals from groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in postsecondary education.
(6) Degree audit systems efficiently support student persistence and success efforts, and thereby save money for the institutions in the longer term. This will be especially true of a degree audit system that is centralized at the Office of the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges and paired with the online educational planner that is being developed as part of the Seymour-Campbell Student Success Act of 2012.
(7) As movement toward performance-based budgeting continues, degree audit systems better position an institution to improve student outcomes.
(8) Earning a certificate or degree from a community college doubles an individual’s chance of obtaining a job. At a time when unemployment rates are nearly 9 percent, certificates and degrees are all the more valuable.
(9) Earning a degree or certificate from a California community college, on average, nearly doubles an individual’s earnings within three years, from $25,600 to $45,571.
(10) A national effort, Project Win-Win, is tackling this issue in nine other states and is showing promising results. This project introduces degree audit systems at colleges
to ensure that, moving forward, students have real-time information about their progress toward obtaining a degree.
(b) Therefore, it is the intent of the Legislature to do all of the following:
(1) Build on national and local efforts to identify current students who are eligible to obtain their certificate or degree.
(2) Establish an auditing system at the California Community Colleges that enables individual community colleges to audit student records, identify the students who are eligible for a certificate or degree, and notify these students of this valuable information.