Our Impact

Metro Students are closing the equity gap in college graduation. Graduates of the Metro College Success Program overwhelmingly take on leadership roles in their community, advocate for social justice, and pursue advanced degrees.

Metro by the numbers...

15%
more likely to persist into sophomore year
19%
more likely to graduate in 6 years
91%
are traditionally underrepresented

Metro students consistently outperform their matched comparison group in retention and graduation rates. A matched comparison group is created annually by Institutional Research at SFSU. The group is matched on admit team, ethnicity, income, English/math pathway, first-generation college going status, and calculus vs. statistics requirement. These data are based on averages of the last four years of retention data (86% vs. 75%—11 point difference equivalent to 15% on a fractional scale), and the last two years of graduation data (56% vs 47%, a 9 point difference equivalent to 19% on a fractional scale).

I want to...

"Education does not transform the world. Education changes people. People change the world."
—Paulo Freire
  • Achieving equity: An evaluation of a multicomponent, lower-division student success program. Journal of Educational Research and Practice. Love, M. B., Kased, R. A., Malik, S. K., Taylor, S. D., Legion, V., Graterol, C., Shada, A., Previde, P., & Wirth, P. (2021). Achieving equity: An evaluation of a multicomponent, lower-division student success program. Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 11, 64–80. https://doi.org/10.5590/JERAP.2021.11.1.05
  • Analyzing College Students' Advising Records To Improve Retention And Graduation Outcome. H. Yang, A. D. Pimparkar, C. Graterol, R. A. Kased and M. B. Love, "Analyzing College Students' Advising Records To Improve Retention And Graduation Outcome," 2021 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2021, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/FIE49875.2021.9637129. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9637129
  • A Data Mining Approach to Understanding Curriculum-Level Factors That Help Students Persist and Graduate. P. Previde, C. Graterol, M. B. Love and H. Yang, "A Data Mining Approach to Understanding Curriculum-Level Factors That Help Students Persist and Graduate," 2019 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2019, pp. 1-9, doi: 10.1109/FIE43999.2019.9028488. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9028488
  • Growing a New Culture of Assessment: Planting ePortfolios in the Metro Academies Program. Alycia Shada, Kevin Kelly, Ruth Cox, and Savita Malik. International Journal of ePortfolio 1, no. 1 (2011): 71-83. https://www.theijep.com/pdf/IJEP35.pdf ISSN 2157-622X
  • Metro Self Study 2020
  • Metro Cost Efficiency Study 2021
  • 2023 presentation for Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement
  • CSU Student Success Network Equity in Action Grant, April 2022

  • First annual Salesforce Trailblazer Award for Equality, November 2017

  • California Governor's Office—Award for Innovation, 2015

  • Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities—Inaugural Project Degree Completion MVP Award, 2013