It might be summer, but the City University is focused on bringing students back to campus. The system has been struggling with low enrollment since COVID-19, especially at its community colleges, which have lost as much as 27% of their student population. A 2021 City Council Finance and Higher Education Committees report showed that, across six of the community colleges, enrollment was down from 60,287 students in the fall of 2020 to 43,915 students during the 2021 spring semester. It’s rebounded since, but not enough to make up the gap.
To help bring students back, the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) spent a recent Saturday hosting a summer Open House along with a myriad of classes in various modalities. BMCC is CUNY’s largest community college by student population and has a glamorous Tribeca location, but it reported more than $8 million in lost tuition revenue in Fiscal Year 2021 due to enrollment declines.
CUNY is in a quiet panic. Their reaction is evidence of higher education’s over-reliance on tuition dollars in general, but goes far beyond arguments over tuition costs. If CUNY starts cutting, its remaining student population, a majority of which comes from households making $30,000 or less, will feel it first.
This Fiscal Year and last, the Legislature guaranteed a funding floor to sustain CUNY’s state operational support and offset the financial impact of enrollment declines. This isn’t guaranteed in next year’s budget. If this support doesn’t carry over, it will end at the same time that pandemic relief funds expire.
The city, which traditionally funds about 40% of the community college budget, needs to step in on behalf of its flagship college system. Back in March, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams told the Association for a Better New York that she planned to use her first budget as speaker to help bring New Yorkers with some college credits but no degree back to class, saying “We must help create and recruit these New Yorkers back into CUNY, providing the necessary supports of financial aid, child care, pre-enrollment counseling and flexible scheduling that facilitates their success.” The $23 million proposed ended up as a $4 million pilot when the budget finally closed in June.
Exactly how CUNY will spend this reduced amount of money is not yet clear. But ask anyone who works with CUNY students what is missing and they’ll tell you that more wraparound services are needed to get students to graduation after they return.
Every semester, CUNY receives new students who don’t yet have the academic skills that they need for credit-bearing college classes. The proportion of incoming students with these skills gaps has been estimated at as high as 80% at community colleges. Students in need of additional college preparation are placed in programs called remediation. This year’s city budget finally baselined $2 million to support remediation programs — an important victory for CUNY and its Council allies on the Higher Education Committee and beyond.
Moving forward, the city must do even more to help CUNY provide full-time academic support and immersive skills-development curricula in math, reading, writing, as well as support for critical non-academic issues such as housing or food insecurity which, if left unaddressed, impede or prevent any chance for graduation. Without these services, students end up dropping out because they can’t make it all work.
High dropout rates are an unspoken driver of enrollment declines. We must prioritize the services that retain students. Moreover, remediation and other programs that boost retention must be taught by full-time CUNY employees, not part-time staff, interns or student helpers who are themselves struggling to pay the bills.
Remediation programs serve the most under-resourced populations in the city, immigrants, and first-generation college students. Angela, a CUNY Language Immersion Program (CLIP) instructor whose mother came to New York as an immigrant, knows their value. For Angela’s mother, “the most fearful situations were not hiding alone from Allied bombs, or the seven-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean but the experience of sitting in an English-only classroom, bewildered, disoriented, and humiliated.” Angela believes “no student should endure this feeling of inadequacy in a learning institution to which they have been accepted.”
This story highlights one of the many challenges CUNY students face that can be addressed with a commitment to programs that support academic success.
To bring students back and help them stay enrolled, we must build on the gains made in this year’s city and state budgets and capitalize on this pivotal moment in which CUNY may be forced to make changes. CUNY will need more, not less, investment next year to make this commitment real. The budget cycle might be over, but for CUNY the conversation about solutions is just beginning.
Marte represents Chinatown and the Lower East Side in the City Council. James is a political science professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
