CUNY College Now

A Forum — October 28, 2005

Basics of Transition from High School to College

Only 32 percent of all U.S. students leave high school qualified to succeed in four-year colleges.

About 66 percent of high school graduates enroll in some kind of postsecondary education or training immediately following high school, but only 25 percent earn a degree.

Enrollment in the College Now program, which aims to counter these trends among students from New York City’s public high schools, grew by 51 percent between the 2001-02 and 2004-05 academic years.

College Now Opens Pathways to Success in College

This forum explored the documented successes and persistent challenges in College Now, an $11 million annual program through which the City University of New York (CUNY) helps prepare and encourage public school students in New York City to enroll in and succeed in college. The program is evolving as it grows. Currently, its curricular pathways include non-credit developmental college courses, credit-earning college courses, high school courses, arts activities, workshops to prepare for the state’s high school Regents exams, college advisement, and summer programs. All are offered at no cost to participants, who are primarily high school juniors and seniors.

College Now is the largest of several collaborations with the New York City public schools that have been initiated by the City University of New York, said John Garvey, Associate Dean for Collaborative Programs at the Office of Academic Affairs at CUNY.  Collaboration continues to be a challenge as both systems are large and complex. The university system, serving more than 200,000 graduates and undergraduates includes three graduate schools and 17 colleges – seven senior colleges offering bachelor’s degrees, four comprehensive colleges offering associate and bachelor’s degrees, and six community colleges offering associate degrees. The more than 1,100 public schools in the city’s Department of Education serve more than 1.1 million students, of whom more than 14 percent are in special education and an equal number are English language learners.

Cooperative efforts between secondary and postsecondary institutions require sensitivity, meetings as equals and “deep knowledge” of both systems, Garvey stressed. “You can’t have a superficial knowledge of college or of high school, as far too many people do.” Beyond that, he said, “it’s important to define the academic goals in a way that doesn’t simply meet the minimum requirements to get out of remediation and through the door of college admission, but also builds the expectation that far more students than now can really do very advanced academic work.”

College Now traces its roots back two decades to a small dual-enrollment agreement under which some students from a handful of high schools began taking college-credit courses at Kingsborough Community College. In 1999, this program expanded to other CUNY community colleges. That year is also when CUNY ended remediation classes for students entering baccalaureate programs and   started expanding and transforming this small dual enrollment effort into a system-wide College Now program. Now, the program has spread to all 17 undergraduate campuses at CUNY and enrolls more than 32,000 students from more than 200 high schools, ranging in size from 400 to more than 4,000 students. With a goal of 200 new high schools under the mayor’s small-school initiative, the complexity of the program is expected to continue to grow.

“We encourage campus autonomy, local variation, as long as it is contributing to the achievement of the over-arching goals,” Garvey said. “Baruch College’s College Now program doesn’t look very much like the Kingsborough’s program.”

Jennifer Lee, Baruch College’s Director of College Now, said Baruch tailors elements of its program to suit the variations between the 12 high schools it works with, where official graduation rates range from 37 to 96 percent. Of those students who enrolled in its College Now programs from 2002 through 2005, 63 percent were female, compared to 55 percent for all College Now programs in the city. At Baruch, their ethnic backgrounds were 33% Asian/Pacific Islander, 18% White, 15% Hispanic, 14% Black, and 9% other with 11% unknown.

Over the past three years, 55% of College Now registrations at Baruch were for college credit courses taught on the campus to students who qualified based on their grades and their scores on SAT, PSAT or state Regents exams. In one popular course, Introduction to Business, students learn business principles from business school faculty, attend information literacy workshops taught by library faculty, participate in improvisation workshops run by teaching artists from the college’s performing arts center, and combine the skills to decide whether to buy or sell certain stocks at the Subotnick Financial Services Center, the college’s virtual trading floor.  Additionally, a communication fellow from the college’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute works with the faculty to integrate assignments that focus on oral and written communication.

The other 45% of registrations were for non-college-credit activities, such as an early college awareness course for ninth graders. The instructor developed the 10-week course in close consultation with a high school principal and teachers. It is for students whose test scores and grades indicate they may qualify for a community college -- but not a senior college -- within CUNY. The course includes a campus visit and is taught in an informal classroom environment in which students learn about setting short-term and long-term goals, developing an educational plan, and envisioning one’s future. “We expect to see those students in our college credit courses,” Lee said.   Baruch’s activities also include a non-credit summer journalism workshop in which students produce a sixteen-page newspaper and a college credit summer program in which a high school student can take one of seven courses and participate in a range of co-curricular activities.

Reflecting CUNY-wide trends, registrations in Baruch’s College Now program grew from 464 in 2002-03 to 594 in 2003-04 and 693 in 2004-05. Some students registered for several courses. So far, 266 have entered a CUNY institution as undergraduates, including 127 who enrolled at Baruch.

In fact, College Now is becoming a major source of high school graduates admitted to CUNY’s four-year colleges, either immediately or after attending a CUNY community colleges,  reported two CUNY officials, Tracy Meade, Deputy Director of Collaborative Programs, and Stuart Cochran, Director of Research and Evaluation for Collaborative Programs.  In the fall of 2003, 38% of the New York City public school students who entered CUNY as first-time freshmen had participated in College Now. While most started at community or comprehensive colleges, the percentages at CUNY’s seven senior colleges ranged from 44.8% at Hunter College to 24.0% at Lehman College.

One-year retention rates for College Now students, based on the number who returned for a third semester at a CUNY college, are higher than those for comparable students from the city’s high schools who did not participate in College Now. Among College Now alumni entering CUNY in the fall of 2003, the retention rates were 87.9% at senior colleges, 78.7% at comprehensive colleges and 76.4% at community colleges. For New York public school graduates who hadn’t participated in College Now, the one-year retention rates were lower: senior colleges, 81.8%, comprehensive colleges, 70.4%, and community colleges, 66.5%.

Each campus writes an annual report on its program and adjusts strategies in reaction to its own conclusions. Campus programs are supported by borough-level exchanges between campuses, consultation of college and high school faculty, and guidance from CUNY’s central office, which compiles performance statistics using data collected by the  schools and colleges.  These data are used to inform program management and development.  Recently, data studies led to a focus on involving more males, African Americans and Hispanics in College Now overall and particularly more students in the Bronx and Manhattan so that the program serves a representative population of New York City public high school students.

Garvey said that, within the boundaries set by limited funding and the need for more longitudinal data to show which parts of the fast-growing program are most efficient, CUNY officials and academics are focusing on how “to reach a balance between wanting to do enough for each student to make a difference, and at the same time to prepare as many students as possible for college.” 

Lee and the CUNY officials from the College Now Central Office responded to many questions from the audience about details of the program. Among the points made were these:

• CUNY has just initiated an effort to extend its work to students in middle school grades.
• About 1,000 of the 17,000 College Now students in college-credit courses sit alongside college students in their classes, but most are in special classes taught by full-time or adjunct faculty.
• Within CUNY, the transferability of such credits varies from college to college, just as it does for other courses. There is no transferability agreement between CUNY and the 37-campus State University of New York, another common destination for College Now graduates.
• Lee said the primary benefit for students is the sampling of the college experience during their high school years, making it more likely that they will pursue a four-year degree, even if they begin at a community college.
• While regression analysis showed that College Now participants are much more likely than similar peers to continue past their first year in college, it didn’t find significant differences in grade point averages or credits accumulated during that first year. Nor could it determine the degree to which their persistence at CUNY reflected College Now’s effects, rather than any unmeasured differences between the comparison groups.
• Meade said some indications of “best practices” have already emerged from the program. For example, college and high school faculty together developed a high school social studies course for English language learners that many students voluntarily attend after school hours.
• Garvey supports the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses, but believes the College Now courses can provide a “more nuanced, subtle kind of academic learning experience” because they offer leeway for faculty to experiment in curriculum and methods of instruction.
• High school teachers are among the adjuncts hired by community colleges offering credit-bearing College Now courses and are subject to the same hiring screens and observation as other adjuncts.
• Recruitment efforts must be tailored to each school. But, it is evident that peer recruitment is most effective, students are usually referred to College Now by friends or classmates who already took part.

Online Resources For College Now

College Now. http://collegenow.cuny.edu/

Pathways to College: Access & Success (2005). Katherine Hughes, Melinda Machur Karp, Baranda Fermin & Thomas Bailey, Community College Research Center, Columbia University. www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ovae/

Add and Subtract: Dual Enrollment as a State Strategy to Increase Postsecondary Success by Underrepresented Students 2005, Nancy Hoffman, Jobs for the Future. www.jff.org/jff/kc/library/0250

Presenters

John Garvey

John Garvey is the Associate Dean for Collaborative Programs at the Office of Academic Affairs of The City University of New York.  He is responsible for coordinating the work of seventeen undergraduate colleges with almost three hundred public high schools.  Currently, collaborative programs include fifteen University-affiliated high schools, the system-wide College Now Program, CUNY Prep, and an early college initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Recently, he has played an active role in the work of the Chancellor’s Task Force on the Black Male Initiative and in efforts to launch a new Teacher Academy at CUNY.  Mr. Garvey has been at the University’s Central Office for the last fifteen years.  He has conducted research projects involving adult literacy students, teachers and programs.

Tracy Meade

Tracy Meade is the Deputy Director of Collaborative Programs at the Office of Academic Affairs of The City University of New York. She directs the College Now program and oversees all aspects of Central Office program management, development and budget for the University's largest partnership with the New York City secondary schools.  Before she joined Collaborative Programs five years ago, she was the Director of the Learning Center at The College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota, and taught developmental and freshman writing at both St. Catherine’s and De Anza Community College in Cupertino, California.  Ms. Meade is on the Board of Directors of Urban Word NYC, a youth development organization committed to building the next generation of leaders through the written and spoken word.

Jennifer Lee

Jennifer Lee is the Director of College Now and Collaborative Programs at Baruch College.  She is responsible for the development, administration, and assessment of the College’s academic outreach programs for New York City public high school students.  Currently, Baruch College has partnerships with twelve high schools, including a University-affiliated high school. Ms. Lee has been at Baruch College for the past three years. Prior to her work at Baruch College, she was at the Steinhardt School of Education, New York University.

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