Helping students is in Cardoza’s bones. She calls her philosophy “Students first,” and this informs everything she does at ARC, which serves over 30,000 students, making it the sixth largest public two-year college in the nation.

Despite polls showing overwhelming public support for teaching financial literacy skills to school students, prior to the passage of McCarty’s bill California had no statewide requirements around financial literacy courses in the schools. As a result, the infrastructure that does exist around this has largely been developed through the initiatives of a few banks and some forward-looking schools. 

At St. HOPE, Jennings oversees a collection of nonprofit entities — including a charter high school, a development company and an endowment — aimed at revitalizing the Oak Park neighborhood. She is, and has always been, a community builder.

CalMatters: College presidents across the state say the new housing projects are a long-term solution to wildfire recovery and to the state’s enduring affordability crisis, which has hit community college students hard. In study after study, researchers have found that around 20% of California community college students experience homelessness at some point over the course of a year, and many more struggle to pay rent. 

As an Albanian immigrant who grew up poor, Aldi Agaj dreamed for his children to have the access and opportunities he didn’t have. When his daughter was 4, he had an idea to create an edtech company that gives kids free access to innovative games.

CalMatters: One of California’s starkest — and most important — letdowns is the consistent failure to help elementary and middle school students achieve higher national test scores in basic educational skills, such as reading and math. Moreover, California schools have not yet recovered from the educational losses suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic.