In 2004, California launched the Early Assessment Program (EAP), developed jointly by the California Department of Education (CDE), the State Board of Education, and the California State University (CSU), to help bridge the gap between preparation for college in high school and the knowledge and skills necessary for success in postsecondary education. A key aspect of the EAP was augmenting the state's 11th grade assessment by providing students (and schools)--on a voluntary basis--information about their level of college and career readiness prior to their senior year of high school. Several years later, California adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the CCSS-aligned Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium assessments to both improve college readiness of California's youth and better align K-12 educational standards with the demands of postsecondary schooling. The adoption of the Smarter Balanced Assessment also extended the earlier EAP system by making the 11th grade assessment of college readiness a feature of universal statewide testing rather than something voluntary. In this paper, the authors review student performance on these new assessments and then describe the early college outcomes for the 2014-2015 cohort of California 11th graders, the first cohort of Smarter Balanced Assessment takers. Specifically, they ask: How well are K-12 schools preparing students for the demands of college as measured by performance on the Smarter Balanced Assessments? What are the disparities in college readiness by key student characteristics (in particular, race/ethnicity and socioeconomically disadvantaged)? Are the current signals of college readiness on the Smarter Balanced Assessment predictive of student success in college? To answer these questions, they focus on the state's two large postsecondary systems of higher education: the California State University (CSU) and the California Community College (CCC) systems.