The CSU YMOC Consortium aims to enhance alignment, communication, and a shared measurement system between the CSU and targeted community colleges. This involves strategic planning, sharing best practices, and tracking progress to address historical racialized misalignment and misinformation in education. By building capacity and training educators, the Consortium aims to better support young men of color, using data to scale effective programs and collaborating with researchers to share outcomes. Partnerships with community colleges and networks like A²MEND and MOCAN are crucial for addressing common challenges and ensuring resource sharing. Success will be measured through increased communication, knowledge, and skills for educators, development of multi-sector strategies, and improvements in access, transfer, and graduation rates for young men of color.
WHY IS THE CSU YMOC NECESSARY?
Postsecondary degree attainment for Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander and Native American males continues to lag behind national averages. Due to a number of individual, institutional, and systemic factors, young men of color continue to experience a range of racial inequities in educational contexts, from Pre-K through higher education. Critically, they are underserved by the very institutions that are supposed to provide them with opportunities and justice, that ought to protect them, and that “should” improve their career trajectories and quality of life. Too often these injustices and inequities have been viewed through silos that ignore opportunities to develop and leverage a collective approach. A scarcity of investments in opportunities for young men of color (and their communities) has meant that schools, institutions, and community-based organizations often are forced to compete with each other for funding and to attract young men to their programs. What is needed, then, is an approach based on intersegmental collaborations that increases access and opportunities for young men of color and creates greater racial equity and healing.
Foundational Framework
Four Core Pillars Driving Our Efforts
Champion Transformational Change
Cultivate and sustain an intersegmental learning community focused on male students of color across two-year colleges and four-year institutions.
Direct Service
Research and Evaluation (R&E)
LOOKING AHEAD
Moving forward the CSU Consortium intends to strengthen partnerships with California Community Colleges and community-based organizations. Together, we will create alignment between our intersegmental partners by enhancing communication, developing a shared measurement system, increase understanding about the experiences of underrepresented minority males and the effective strategies to better support them, and developing mutually reinforcing activities. Our long-term goals are to improve outcomes for men of color. More specifically, we seek to increase 2-year transfer rates by 15 percentage points. If they attend a university right after high school, we expect to increase their 6-year graduation rates by 20 percentage points. Our success is not just important for underrepresented minority males. For California to sustain its strong economy, which in turn impacts the national economy, the state has to produce at least 1.65 million college graduates by 2030.
