Reynolds remembers the middle-school pledge in less lofty terms. “My history teacher said that if you get good grades, you’ll get into CSU, Long Beach,” Reynolds, 21, said this fall. “I just signed it because they told us to.” But she said it did make a difference to know that if she worked hard and got good grades, she’d get into college. “It was nice to have that there as a guarantee,” Reynolds said, especially since she didn’t feel her parents were pushing her toward earning a bachelor’s degree.

For Robert Fierro, a senior at Millikan High School, Reynolds’s alma mater, the Promise is nice, but he’s hoping it proves unnecessary. Fierro, 18, the son of Mexican immigrants who has “always planned on college,” was able to describe exactly what he had agreed to, and what he could get in return, for signing that middle-school pledge.

But neither a free year at Long Beach City College, nor guaranteed admission at Long Beach State, has pulled Fierro away from his loftier goal of studying at a University of California school—long considered the best of what the state’s public university system has to offer. Fierro is aiming to major in physiology at the University of California, Irvine, and then go on to medical school. At the end of January, Fierro had been accepted to three schools and was still waiting to hear from UC Irvine and Long Beach State, neither of which has announced freshman admission decisions yet. Meanwhile, he’s taking AP Biology this year in order to test out of the requirement next year. “[I]t reduces what I have to pay,” Fierro said of earning AP credits.

The fact that Fierro is in AP Biology is another element of the city’s focus on student achievement. The district now encourages students to sign up for AP classes even if they aren’t at the top of the class or focused on high-flying careers like law and medicine. And to make sure no one is dissuaded by the cost of taking a College Board-administered AP exam, usually $92 each, Long Beach now subsidizes the cost so that students owe only $5 per test. (The Board offers a reduction, to $30 per exam, for children from low-income families, but families must complete a detailed application to qualify.) In part because of the lower fee, Long Beach has seen an increase in AP-exam completion of more than 41 percent in the last two years. Collectively, students took more than 10,000 exams in 2015.

Changes like opening up AP classes to more students or accepting Long Beach grads with lower qualifying scores than other applicants at Long Beach State haven’t been conflict free. Karen Lima, Fierro’s AP biology teacher and a Long Beach native, said some people worried that students would not be prepared for the advanced coursework or that there would not be enough qualified teachers. But she loves the changes. “Any kid who’s willing to put in the work, is going to get something out of it,” Lima said. “I’ve heard some teachers say, ‘we’re getting more kids involved; that’s going to hurt my pass rate.’ Actually, I’ve seen an increase in pass rates since we’ve broadened access.”