In 2015, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research commissioned an analytic study to determine the number of California students who were eligible to attend college within the University of California (UC) and/or the California State University (CSU) systems. The study, University Eligibility Study for the Public High School Class of 2015, conducted by RTI International, required the collection of individual transcripts from high schools across the state.

This current commissioned report examines whether federal reporting data submitted to the California Department of Education by local education agencies could be utilized as a surrogate for individual transcript data in future UC/CSU eligibility studies.

The report examines:

  • Data similarities and differences across four data sources: California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS), UC admissions files, CSU admissions files, and raw transcript data files collected for the eligibility study
  • The student-level records across the different sources for the four school years between the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2015 to examine the patterns of discrepant information
  • Both the availability and the alignment across sources of credits during this period