Closing the Gap: Meeting California's Need for College Graduates
Hans Johnson and Ria Sengupta

April 2009

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.