SACRAMENTO – The percentage of California high school seniors who received diplomas increased in 2003, state education officials said Wednesday.

The class of 2003 lost 52,697 students since they enrolled as freshmen in 1999, for a graduation rate of about 86.6 percent, said the California Department of Education.

About 33.5 percent of those graduates completed the requirements for admission to the University of California or the California State University systems. That's slightly lower than the year before, when 34.6 percent of seniors met those requirements.

The state changed the way it calculates dropout and graduation rates this year to incorporate federal guidelines, officials said. Using the old formula, the graduation rate for 2003 would have been 70.7 percent – up from 2002's rate of 69.6 percent.

Using the new formula, the percentage of high school students who dropped out grew from 2.7 percent in 2002 to 3.2 percent in 2003. Officials attributed the increase to the change in calculation methods.

The dropout rate for black students – 5.8 percent – was higher than the average for all students, as was the rate for Hispanic students, who had a 4.4 percent dropout rate in 2003.

Among male students the dropout rate was 3.6 percent last year compared to 2.9 percent rate for female students.

Hilary McLean, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the system for tracking both dropout rates and graduation rates is imperfect because, for example, some students who move to another district could be counted as both dropouts and graduates.

"Part of the problem is that schools don't often know if a student moved to a new school district, or went on to adult education or in some cases, enrolled in college early," she said.

State education officials say the best way to track dropouts and graduates is with a system that tracks individual students – something California doesn't have yet. By 2005, the state expects to have a way to track K-12 students and schools, which will give more accurate numbers.