As previously covered in CFA Headlines, Chancellor Mildred García sits on the board of Educational Testing Service (ETS), a company that the CSU began contracting with last year. She receives compensation that floats around $100,000 any given year from them since around 2017.  

During the September 2025 CSU Board of Trustees meeting, the administration announced the rollout of Futurenav Compass, an AI-driven career exploration and placement platform developed by ETS—a private educational testing and assessment organization that has been long criticized as a multinational monopoly for its excessive profits and overindulgent corporate structure. Futurenav is being piloted at seven CSU campuses in Southern California and will target roughly 1,000 students across these campuses.  

We remain troubled by Chancellor García’s close professional ties to ETS, where she serves as the vice chair of its board of trustees, and which compensated her $107,000 in 2023. Last week, University Times, the student-run newspaper of CSU Los Angeles, reported that García made $87,000 in the most recently reported fiscal year from her board position at ETS. García has been on the ETS board since 2017, before she became the CSU chancellor in October 2023. has been on the ETS board since 2017, before she became the CSU chancellor in October 2023.  

These partnerships with private entities raise serious questions about the priorities of CSU leadership and to whom the Chancellor’s Office and the Board of Trustees are truly accountable. Incorporating private sector interests into the educational infrastructure of the CSU allows unaccountable corporate executives profit from a system that continually undermines the CSU workers who teach our students, maintain our grounds, and support the resources and programs that students need to thrive.

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