Closing the Gap: Meeting California’s Need for College Graduates

California faces a shortage of almost a million college-educated workers by 2025. Taking a practical approach, this report finds that this education-skills gap could be cut in half by modest investments in programs aimed at expanding college attendance rates, increasing transfer rates from community colleges to four-year institutions, and boosting graduation rates at four-year institutions. As the state’s economy becomes increasingly reliant on highly skilled workers, a confluence of trends-the retirement of baby boomers, and demographic shifts toward groups with historically low rates of college attendance-makes these investments all the more crucial to the state’s continued economic success.