Bill to Automatically Grant CSU Admission to High School Grads Passes Senate

A bill that would automatically offer California State University (CSU) admission to all qualifying high school seniors within California passed a Senate vote this week, moving the bill over to the Assembly for committee hearings.

Senate Bill 640, authored by Senator Christopher Cabaldon (D-Yolo), would specifically establish the CSU Direct Admission Program under which a pupil graduating from a high school of a participating local educational agency is deemed eligible for enrollment into a designated California State University campus. The bill would require that the reporting available on the CaliforniaColleges.edu platform is to be used to provide the data required to determine eligibility for the program. In addition, the bill would require a participating local educational agency to identify each pupil who is eligible under the program on or before September 1st of each year, with the California College Guidance Initiative sending out admission letters on behalf of the California State University. Students are able to then say yes or no to the offer.

Dual admissions would also be covered under SB 640, essentially allowing those who completed a two-year associates degree with a community college to be automatically accepted into the CSU. For all students, there will be no single CSU campus to which they are assigned. Instead, their acceptance letter would have a a list of campuses with enrollment capacity that the student can choose from.

Cabaldon wrote SB 640 to create an ease of transition from 12th grade to being a freshman in college, specifically stating that a jump like that should be as easy to do as going from 11th grade to 12th grade. The bill itself stems from Senator Cabaldon’s time as Mayor of West Sacramento from 1998 to 2020 where he launched the Home Run program, which automatically admits all high school seniors in West Sacramento, tuition-free, to Sacramento City College. In addition, SB 640 will build on a CSU pilot program that sent offers of admission this year to all qualified seniors in Riverside County to a list of 10 campuses in the CSU system. Of the 17,000 students who received offers of admission for the fall 2025 semester, 13,200 completed the required paperwork.

Automatic CSU acceptance

It is also hoped that the bill can help some struggling CSU campuses regain students. In the past decade, enrollment at CSU East Bay has gone down by 30%. Cal State Poly Humboldt saw losses of 31%, while Sonoma State saw a loss of thousands of students, winding up at a 39% loss. While some campuses saw gains, CSU enrollment overall in the past decade has gone down 3.7% altogether. With automatic admission in place, campuses could see a noticeable rise in admissions as Sacramento City College saw under Cabaldon’s Mayoral program.

“SB 640 is motivated by the idea that it should be as easy and seamless to go from 12th grade to the next step as it is to go from 10th grade to 11th grade,” said Cabaldon of the bill. Tens of thousands of California students are fully qualified to go to CSU, but don’t jump the hurdles of the admissions process,” Sen. Cabaldon said. “At the same time, many CSUs are seeing precipitous declines in enrollment and need more students to sustain their high quality academic programs. High schools and community colleges have the transcript information they need in order to validate that a graduating student is CSU-admissible. Getting an acceptance letter will nudge thousands more to attend and help the CSU system as a whole.”

While there has been some opposition against SB 640, with critics charging that automatic admission could lock out students who went through the normal hoops for admission and higher paying out or state and international students, the bill has nonetheless showed resilience. Before the Senate vote this week, the bill passed unanimously through three Senate Committees, passing either unanimously or with one or two non-voting Senators. The Senate vote on Wednesday showed a similar bipartisan vote of 37-0 with three non-votes.

SB 640 is to be heard next in the Assembly.