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By Mohammad Tajsar
Staff Writer
Politicians and educators, take heed: California’s students want top-level schools, and they expect to go to college.
In “California Dreamers,” a survey commissioned by the University of California Office of the President and New America Media, California youth expressed an optimistic vision for their educational future, even in an environment where schooling is far from perfect and where living conditions are far from affordable.
“That’s why we called the report ‘California Dreamers,’” recalls Sergio Bendixen, President of Bendixen & Associates, the public opinion research firm that polled youth about their visions and expectations.
“Even though housing costs are sky high and gang activity is so prevalent in some neighborhoods, these young people that we talked to were extremely optimistic. They believe in the American dream. They believe they are going to have a successful career.”
Published in April 25 of this year, the poll was conducted between October 6 and November 15, 2006 on 601 California youth aged 16-to 22-years-old. Represented was a demographic cross-section of California: three-fifths were youth of color and half either immigrants or children of immigrants. Thirty-five percent of the polled currently attend high school, 40 attend a post-secondary institution, alongside 19 percent not currently attending a school in California.
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Of those surveyed, 78 percent see their life in 10 years better than it is at present, with 73 percent expecting a higher standard of living than their parents now enjoy. Seventy-eight percent plan on completing post-secondary institution of higher learning and nearly half of those aspire to post-baccalaureate degrees.
But sadly, the prospects look dim for doubling, in the space of a generation, the current 30 percent of Californians who graduate from college, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
In helping design the survey, the University of California Office of the President asked participants if they were considering attending a school in the UC system sometime in the future. Eighty-eight percent of the Asian American youth and 78 percent of White respondents answered yes. Latina/o and African Americans, groups that are traditionally underserved by the state’s schools, expressed lower expectations with 69 percent aspiring to attend a UC campus. Asked about the differential between White/Asian students and Latino/African-Americans considering the UC, Bendixen echoed the concern for the lack of diversity currently plaguing the UC system, “These numbers are still high, but when there is a 20 point differential between these two groups, you know you have a problem.”
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“California Dreamers” thus represents the state’s young people as a tremendous social resource if their educational expectations can be realized.
“I think the political leadership of the state, the community leadership,” says Benxiden, “needs to take advantage of a generation that seems to be so willing to accept the challenges of the future.”
All of the survey participants were contacted and questioned entirely via mobile phones. With landlines increasingly rare in the lives of young people, and with the youth generation increasingly mobile, a poll exclusively conducted through cell phones became the best way to achieve the most random and representative sample needed for this project, according to Bendixen.
