California
California College Data and Policy Project Awarded $200,000 Grant from College Futures Foundation to Study CalFresh Use by Students – California Policy Lab
January 28, 2025, Berkeley, California — A new grant from College Futures Foundation will support research to improve the take-up of CalFresh benefits by students in the state’s three main systems of higher education, including the University of California, the California Community College System, and the California State University.
This is the first external support for the research of the new California College Data and Policy Project. The Project is a joint initiative of the California Policy Lab and the Center for Studies in Higher Education, and is led by Professor Jesse Rothstein, the Carmel Friesen Chair in Public Policy and David Gardner Chair in Higher Education and a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UC Berkeley.
“We’re thrilled to receive this grant, which will support our work with our partners to use enrollment, financial aid, and safety-net data to identify students who are eligible for these supports, and then target outreach with a goal of increasing the number of students who enroll,” explains Professor Rothstein. “We’re grateful to College Futures Foundation because this grant will also support our longer-term work to better measure if receiving CalFresh has an impact on student success outcomes like staying enrolled and graduating.”
CalFresh is California’s version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and it provides a monthly benefit amount that can be used to purchase food. Research by the California Policy Lab has shown that among students who are likely eligible for CalFresh, only about 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 students enroll in the program.
Additional background
Student Supports Initiative
Across the country, many college students struggle to meet their basic needs while attending school. Public higher education institutions are well-situated to connect students to safety-net benefits, but data limitations have hampered previous efforts to quantify eligibility and take-up.
To address this, the California Policy Lab has partnered with the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC), the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO), the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), the California State University Office of the Chancellor (CSUOC), and the California Department of Education (CDE) to link anonymized data across these six agencies in order to help get more students the support they need to thrive at college.
This initiative has made it possible to link together data that had not previously been linked, which in turn allows the research team to unlock new insights about CalFresh and college students. This includes analysis showing how many students are eligible and enrolled in the UC and California Community College systems, testing outreach methods with partners, and more recently, showing the impact that temporary, COVID-era policy changes had on making more students eligible for CalFresh, and making benefits more generous. All of the research is available on the CCDPP web page.
The California College Data and Policy Project
The CCDPP is a new research initiative that brings together University of California researchers and government partners to advance equity and improve California’s world class higher education system.
CCDPP will generate new insights and research on what works to better support California students and their families as they transition through the education system. Initial CCDPP research will focus on student supports, college admissions, and transfer students.
California
Latest snowpack survey reveals California could be in for extremely dry year
California’s snowpack has fallen well below average following an extremely dry January, according to the Department of Water Resources’ second snow survey of the season.
The survey was conducted Friday at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada near Sacramento.
The survey recorded 22.5 inches of snow depth and a snow water equivalent of 8 inches—just 46% of the historical average at that location. Statewide, the snowpack sits at 65% of normal for this time of year.
The alarmingly low figures come after California’s snowpack was more than 108% of average at the start of the year thanks to winter storms in November and December in the Northern Sierra.
But persistent dry conditions in January have pushed levels downward and wiped out much of that healthy head start.
“California missed out on critical snow-building storms in January which has pushed the state down below average for this time of year,” said DWR Director Karla Nemeth. “For each day it’s not snowing or raining, we are not keeping up with what we need.”
Currently, the Central Sierra snowpack sits at 58% of average while the Southern Sierra has dipped below 50%.
While some storms are forecast for February, Nemeth says the state has experienced previous years where early-season gains were erased by prolonged dry spells.
“Despite a good start to the snowpack in the Northern Sierra in November and December, we can look back as recently as 2013 and 2021 to show how quickly conditions can change for the drier,” Nemeth said.
But there’s probably no reason to despair quite yet. The state’s snowpack has also gotten off to a slow start and roared back as recently as last year.
During the 2024 January Phillips Station survey, the state’s snowpack level was only around 25% of historical averages. By April’s survey, which DWR says is the most telling, the state had bounced back to more than 113% of average.
And despite lower snowpack levels, officials say California’s reservoirs remain in strong shape due to effective water management.
Lake Oroville, the largest reservoir in the State Water Project, is at 126% of average for this time of year, while San Luis Reservoir is at 101% of average. Southern California’s reservoirs are also near or above normal levels.
Snowpack levels are a crucial component of the state’s annual water supply forecast, which helps determine water allocation across the state throughout the year. The state’s snowpack accounts for about 30% of the state’s water availability, according to DWR.
The California Department of Water Resources conducts four to five snowpack surveys at Phillips Station throughout the year, beginning in early January and continuing each month through April and May, if necessary. The next snow survey will take place Feb. 28.
To read more about California’s current water conditions, click here.
California
Elias: California water agency supply estimates should be more realistic
The thousands of drivers traversing Interstate 5 on any given day this winter can see for themselves: Nothing even remotely like a water shortage currently plagues the State Water Project.
This is completely obvious from the major viewpoint off the east side of the interstate between Gustine and Patterson, from which it’s clear that all major canals of the project just south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta are full to capacity or nearly so.
It’s much the same a few dozen miles to the southwest, where the water project’s largest manmade lake, the San Luis Reservoir, is chock-full. Sand-colored margins that grew steadily larger during the decade of drought from 2010 to 2020 have long since been inundated, with the artificial lake shining bright blue on crisp, sunny winter days.
Water officials also promise the San Luis Reservoir will soon be expanded. So why does California’s Water Resources Department persist in providing preliminary farm water allocations that can only be described as small?
It may be due to insecurity, a sense that the Pacific Ocean is due for a long-running “La Nina” condition that could produce a new drought and lower State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project water volumes to the dangerously dry levels of seven and eight years ago.
It may also simply be bureaucrats reminding farmers that they control the lifeblood of America’s most productive agricultural region, also one of the five largest industries in California.
The reality, though — especially after heavy “atmospheric river” rains in mid-November and December drenched Northern California — is that farms will receive far more water than the 5% of requested amounts promised them in late December, when state officials behaved as if the November downpours would be the water year’s last precipitation.
Yes, it is the duty of water officials to husband California’s water supplies to make sure neither cities nor farms ever run completely dry. But 5% made no real sense. It’s as if the bureaucrats who work for Gov. Gavin Newsom wanted to put the lie to his post-election pledges to pay more heed to the Central Valley and its interests, whose sense of being disrespected was one reason that region was the only major part of California carried by President Trump in last fall’s election.
This adds up to a need to change some practices, including a few outlined by Karla Nemeth, the Water Resources Department’s director. “We need to prepare for any scenario, and this early in the season we need to take a conservative approach to managing our water supply,” she said.
That makes planning crops difficult, though, if not impossible, for farmers unless they depend greatly on ground water, a resource becoming increasingly depleted while ground levels above aquifers subside, which they have, as anyone can deduce from seeing onetime irrigation pipes that now rise several feet above current ground levels.
Compromising a bit would be better in years following a few seasons of heavy rain, today’s situation. Another way to put this might be to ask why state bureaucrats push a number and then essentially wink at farmers to tell them what they’re hearing is nowhere near what will eventually govern.
That’s what happened last year too, when the initial estimate of what farmers would get was 10% of requests and the ultimate amount was 40% — still using conservative allocations to make sure, unnecessarily, that reservoirs and canals remained full all year round rather than just partially full.
Even now, after a 2024 that was much drier than 2023 and an early winter with virtually no rain in Southern California, drinking water reservoirs remain nearly full. Diamond Valley Lake, near Hemet, the largest such potable water storage facility in Southern California, was at 97% of capacity shortly after Christmas.
All this makes the time high for California water bureaucrats to cut out their act and provide farmers and other citizens with realistic supply estimates, rather than constantly reserving the right to leave water districts and their people and industries high and dry, even when supplies are copious.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com, and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.
Originally Published:
California
Northern California’s dry January only put a minor dent in region’s water supply
The incoming storms follow what has been an exceptionally dry January for the Bay Area, with the lack of rain having an impact on the region’s water supply.
Healdsburg residents Tom and Molly Nicol visited Lake Sonoma to see where its water levels stood before they rise again with the rain from this weekend’s atmospheric river.
“Yeah, when the water is up to the bottom of those trees over there, you know it’s full,” laughed Tom. “And you can see that it’s dropped a little bit from the last storm we got in December. So it’s down a little, but it’s full.”
There is still room in the lake, with a good chunk of winter yet to come.
“That’s the thing. You need more storms,” explained Jeffrey Mount with the PPIC Water Policy Center. “We need somewhere in the order of five to seven big storms. That makes up the bulk of our precipitation. Just the difference of two storms can be the difference between an average year and a wet year.”
Mount cautions that this winter’s full story is yet to be written.
“We can tell what kind of year it’s gonna be by the end of February,” he said of California’s water year. “That’s it. And then we kinda know what it’s gonna be like.”
So where do things currently stand? After significant rains in November and December, the dry January has landed Northern California right back at an average winter. But looking at reservoirs like Lake Sonoma, the situation is better than average.
For that, Californians can thank the current streak of wet winters, which could turn into something very out of the ordinary.
“Shasta and Oroville are well above their historical averages,” Mount said of the state’s largest reservoirs. “So we’re about average, and our reservoirs are in really good shape right now. That’s the one thing. Even in the dry parts of the state.”
It is the continued payoff of the good year, and then an average year. Throw in another average year and — as far as recent decades — that’s a pretty decent three-year stretch.
“Yeah, and in two ways,” Mount explained. “One is we don’t get back-to-back wet years. It just doesn’t happen in the system. We usually have intervening dry years. 2017 was very wet. 2018 was dry, 2019 was wet. So yeah, ’23 and ’24 were really unusual. And if we come up with an average year on top of that, that is unprecedented in the 21st-century, is the best way to describe it. We haven’t seen that.”
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