Preparing LAUSD Students for College and Career
LAUSD has built one of the most comprehensive career pathway systems of any large urban district in the country, with 442 unique pathways across 14 industry sectors spanning nearly all its high schools. Yet in SY24-25, only 6,099 of 31,817 students — 19% — graduated having completed both a career pathway and the A-G coursework required for admission to California's public universities.
No dedicated methodology section. Data from LAUSD’s Open Data Dashboard (school-level files exported from the dashboard). Focuses on three measures: career pathway enrollment, CTE sequence completion, and dual readiness (both A-G and CTE requirements).
The sections below pull out the major points from the full report — the data, the examples, and the context behind the findings.
“Dual readiness” means completing both the A–G coursework required for admission to California’s public universities and a full CTE pathway — a minimum two-year sequence ending in a capstone course passed with a “C” or better. Because no single metric fully captures whether a student is prepared for life after high school, this report treats dual readiness as a floor, not a ceiling.
Los Angeles Unified has built one of the most comprehensive career pathway systems of any large urban district in the country: 442 unique pathways across 14 industry sectors, delivered across 166 schools. Yet participation narrows sharply at each stage. In SY24–25, 30% of students in grades 9–12 — 36,660 of 123,060 — were enrolled in a career pathway, meaning they took at least one CTE course. CTE sequence completion stood at 25% of graduating students (7,915 of 31,817), and dual readiness — completing both A–G and a CTE pathway — reached just 19%, or 6,099 of 31,817 graduates.
Even among students who reach a pathway, the experience is uneven. It depends heavily on which school a student attends, which pathways that school offers, and whether the right work-based learning opportunity exists in their sector and part of the city. A student does not need to attend a themed school to access an internship, and a student in a CTE sequence is not automatically guaranteed one — so not every student progresses from initial exposure to deeper engagement, even where the system as a whole is comprehensive.
The report’s central finding is that college and career preparation are not competing priorities. Across LAUSD, schools with stronger career pathway enrollment graduate more students who complete both A–G requirements and a CTE sequence, and schools with higher CTE completion rates also tend to have higher A–G completion rates. Nearly all of LAUSD’s CTE courses have been approved to meet at least the UC/CSU “G” requirement, so for most students completing CTE coursework counts toward, rather than competes with, their A–G requirements.
A growing body of research reinforces the point. Studies of California’s Linked Learning model found that students in high-quality pathways were 2.1 percentage points less likely to drop out and 3.1 percentage points more likely to graduate than similar peers. For students entering high school with lower academic preparation, pathway participation increased the likelihood of enrolling in college immediately after graduation by 5.7 percentage points — with effects roughly twice as large as for higher-achieving peers.
Internships have one of the clearest districtwide infrastructures behind them. LAUSD’s CTE–Linked Learning office sponsors more than 1,000 placements a year, supported by a team of roughly 25 work-based learning coordinators, and students must first earn an “Internship Ready Certificate” demonstrating a completed resume, cover letter, and professional-readiness skills. In practice, these intensive opportunities tend to flow to students already performing well academically. GPSN launched its own High School Internship Program in 2023 and, in the past year alone, doubled the number of participating employers and tripled the number of completed internships.
Of the district’s 442 pathways, 98 are certified Linked Learning programs that integrate academics, work-based learning, and industry partnership; the remaining 344 operate as standalone CTE sequences. The structural differences translate into meaningfully different results: certified Linked Learning pathways showed a 48% completion rate, compared with 37% for noncertified Linked Learning and 29% for standalone CTE — differences that likely reflect the more structured, cohorted nature of the model and the student supports built into it.