Just over half of the Boston Public Schools Class of 2009 have now completed college, just shy of the 52 percent goal that late-Mayor Menino set in 2009 when he launched an initiative aimed at improving college matriculation rates. The Boston Foundation hailed the news as progress on Monday in its release of a new report on Success Boston called “Reaching for the Cap and Gown.”

Success Boston tracked students for six years after high school graduation and provided targeted coaching to 264 students as part of the program, 80 percent of whom were intentionally black or Hispanic.

The Boston Foundation, as well as federal grants, have provided funding to coach 1,000 BPS students.

According to Joseph McLaughlin from the Boston Private Industry Council, “this is good news” because it marks the highest percentage of college graduates since the study began. The number of high school graduates in Boston has been increasing as well.

“I believe that every major city should do what we did,” Boston Foundation president Paul S. Grogan said on Monday at the release of the “Reaching for the Cap and Gown” report.

The study is the third post-secondary study of BPS students in recent years. The first was conducted by the Boston Private Industry Council in 2000 and found that only one in four BPS graduates had graduated with a college degree within six years.

“Family income is playing much larger roll in college completion,” said an ABT Associate, citing a 2002 study of 10th graders who had earned a Bachelor’s or Higher Degree by 2012. The study found that only 41 percent of high-achieving math students from low-income families earned degrees as opposed to 74 percent of wealthier students with the same test scores.

The study also found a gender and ethnicity gap. According to the study, less than 30 percent of black and Hispanic male students from the classes of 2005 and 2009 completed a higher level degree.

According to the report, roughly 52 percent of black male students who had access to coaches earned degrees, compared with 33 percent of black male students who were not coached.

School officials emphasized that the findings were a descriptive examination and not a causal relationship, as there is not yet enough data to prove a direct correlation between college coaching and graduation rates.

Results about the impact of coaching for the 2013 and 2014 graduates will be available in early 2017.

“We still have quite a long way to go,” said Superintendent Tommy Chang. “If only 50 percent of our graduates from Boston Public Schools are going on to college and getting through college, we could do better, and we need to do better.”