When Nicolina Dapilma enrolled at the City University of New York, the odds of earning an associate degree in two years were less than one in 10.
Ms. Dapilma, who immigrated to the United States from the West African nation of Togo at age 11, was considering various academic programs when a CUNY adviser called. The pitch: free tuition and textbooks, intensive academic and career advising, monthly subway passes, and a structured schedule that could accommodate her part-time job. In exchange, she’d have to enroll full time, attend mandatory tutoring sessions, and commit to graduating in two or three years.
“I asked her if it was a scam,” Ms. Dapilma recalls, “but she insisted it wasn’t.” Instead, the adviser said, the college system had identified her as someone who could benefit from a cheaper, faster route to an associate degree.
She signed up.
Two years after starting CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, she had an associate degree in liberal arts from Kingsborough Community College. That gave Ms. Dapilma, 23, a head start on a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and teaching English as a second language, which she expects to earn from CUNY’s Queens College in May.
At a time when community colleges struggle with stubbornly low completion rates—estimates show that just 4 percent to 11 percent of students who start at two-year institutions earn a degree in two years and just over a third do so in six years—Ms. Dapilma’s sprint through the system made her a rarity.
But in ASAP, she was less unusual. Studies of the program have found that by ditching an extensive array of courses and majors for a carefully structured experience, the college is able to keep more students on track to graduate.
Staying Enrolled
An analysis released last week by MDRC, a nonprofit education- and social-policy research group, focused on students’ first two years in the accelerated-study program, which began in 2007 with financial support from New York City’s Center for Economic Opportunity. The report examines ASAP’s impact on low-income students at the system’s Kingsborough, Borough of Manhattan, and LaGuardia campuses who enrolled needing one or two remedial courses (about 900 students who agreed to participate were randomly assigned to ASAP or a control group).
Two years into the program, the study found, 14.5 percent of the ASAP students needing remediation had completed an associate degree, compared with 8.7 percent of normally enrolled students. After two and a half years, a third of ASAP students had graduated, compared with less than a fifth of the others.
Participating students were eight to 10 percentage points more likely to stay enrolled for each subsequent semester, and ASAP students earned, on average, 37.9 credits over two years, 25 percent more than did the other students.
MDRC, which has hailed the program before, described it last week as “one of the most aggressive efforts in the country to improve the success rates of low-income students.”
An earlier study that included college-ready ASAP students, instead of the remedial students the MDRC study focused on, found that 30 percent graduated within two years and nearly 60 percent were expected to do so within three.
Buoyed by such promising assessments, CUNY is expanding the program this fall to include more than 4,000 students at six of its seven community colleges. Campus officials recruit participants by contacting students who have already been accepted and who meet certain criteria, including being financially needy New York City residents who require no more than two remedial courses.
Despite the added cost of the intensive counseling and small classes, a Columbia University study concluded that the program reduces the cost per degree because so many more students graduate.
Later this year MDRC plans to publish a report examining the program’s costs and students’ outcomes over all three years they are in it.
‘Like Training at the Gym’
The trend toward greater structure and less choice reflects a fundamental rethinking of how community colleges can best accommodate students’ needs as the sector faces heightened scrutiny and expectations.
Community colleges have long prided themselves on offering flexible schedules that allow mothers of young children and full-time workers to squeeze classes into their hectic lives, and students with shaky academic backgrounds to start and finish at their own pace. But that flexibility comes at a cost. A recent study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that just one-fifth of part-time students earned a credential in six years, compared with three-quarters of those enrolled full time.
Groups like the nonprofit Complete College America have been pushing for incentives to make more students attend full time, arguing that when students take time off or attend part time, life gets in the way and they are more likely to drop out.
The ASAP program requires full-time enrollment. “The idea that ‘I’m a little overwhelmed, so I guess I’ll drop to part-time status’ is just not an option,” says the director, Donna Linderman. “It’s like training at the gym. You lose your momentum once you get out of the habit of structuring your life around your studies.”
ASAP classes are scheduled in blocks. Ms. Dapilma’s, for instance, ran from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every Monday through Thursday. The predictable schedule from semester to semester allowed her to keep her weekend job, handing out food samples at Costco.
And the financial break—ASAP waives any gap between students’ aid and their tuition and fees—meant that she didn’t have to work during the week. The friends she made in her study cohort offered their notes when she missed a class, she says, and kept her motivated when she struggled in mathematics.
‘Game Changing’ Strategy?
CUNY students are younger, less likely to have children, and more likely to attend full time than are students at other urban community colleges, making it a good if not representative setting for such an experiment. But Complete College America, which considers block scheduling and full-time enrollment “game changing” strategies for increasing completion rates, is now working with CUNY to adapt the approach to community colleges in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington.
Whether a program that demands persistent full-time enrollment can be widely replicated remains to be seen. Nationally, less than half of community-college students attend full time. Despite the program’s assurances that students who need to care for children in the afternoons can take classes in the mornings, and those who work in the mornings can attend in the evenings, less flexibility in scheduling may be a barrier or even a nonstarter for many students.
Remediation is another significant challenge. For most students who place into remedial, or developmental, courses, the MDRC study acknowledges, graduating in two years is probably unrealistic.
On both counts, Michael J. Weiss, one of the report’s authors, is optimistic. “With the right support and incentives, it may be possible for more students to attend full time” and to complete their remedial courses early on, he said in an interview.
Ms. Dapilma placed into remedial math, and she finished her course the summer before entering the ASAP program. Now, months away from her bachelor’s degree, she’s student-teaching at a middle school. The immigrants in her classroom, she says, remind her of herself a dozen years ago.