Metro Academies Initiative: Improving Educational Achievement is a Public Health Issue

In the US the gap in college completion between low-income students and more affluent students has doubled since 1975. Educational attainment is a major social determinant of health. California ranks forty-ninth with nearly the worst graduation gap between under-represented students – African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans – and their white peers. Among African American and Latino community college students with intent to transfer, only twelve percent and nine percent do so within three years. SF State University and City College of San Francisco have developed an intervention to sharply improve timely graduation. Each Metro Academy is a reconfiguration of the first two years of college – a ‘school within a school' for up to 140 students. Outreach is focused on students who are first-generation, low-income and/or under-represented. Metro students co-enroll in two linked classes each semester over four semesters, studying together throughout a highly structured curriculum. Metro students show dramatically improved persistence into the fifth semester (82% vs 62%) compared to a matched comparison. They have better grades and complete more credits. They have statistically significantly better scores on many items in the National Survey of Student Engagement. The Metro program model is scalable and sustainable because it is a more efficient reconfiguration of general education courses already in the base budget. A preliminary cost study by the RP Group suggests that Metro's highly structured pathway and strong guidance cost per graduate goes down. To support scale-up, we are now developing a web-based Metro Toolkit and technical assistance capacity.