College Access and Success

ANY intensive career development and leadership training paired with one-on-one mentoring enables high-potential, low-income, first-generation college students to persist in college, earn their degrees and secure meaningful jobs in areas of interest. While retention rates dropped for low-income students nationally over the past year, 90% of ANY students graduated with bachelor’s degrees within six years of college enrollment and nearly 80% of graduates received full-time job offers or enrolled in full-time graduate programs within six months of college graduation.

The CCIF provides grants to colleges and nonprofit community-based organizations with the goal of improving college readiness and degree completion rates in New York City through innovative programs that address the unique challenges faced by underrepresented students. In addition, the CCIF provides professional development and technical assistance to its grantees and facilitates ongoing dialogue related to increasing degree attainment in New York City.

So, we supported a planning grant through the CUNY Network for College Success that aims to address the key issues of data delivery time and expanding CBO access to ongoing uploads from various CUNY data systems in one central repository. Expanding the data points shared and delivering data with a greater frequency between campus and college success programs will help promote post-secondary persistence.

During the pandemic, Epic developed a remote-hybrid model that can exist entirely online or can be combined with live small-group experiences and large whole-group online sessions. Building on successfully engaging students through these means, our funding this year supported strategies to engage new students to participate in Epic’s college access programming by recruiting students from schools where Epic already has strong relationships and offering specific incentives for participation.

The program hinges on a three-week summer immersive experience abroad in a developing country. Though not a traditional college preparation program, Global Glimpse’s experiential learning program yields academic gains: 80% of participants write their college essay on the experience; 100% graduate from high school; 80% matriculate to 4-year colleges, with an additional 15% at 2-year community colleges; and 97% are persisting in college.

The program model has been one of the most significantly disrupted by COVID-19. Global Glimpse was able to adapt its program in 2021 by offering a two-week virtual summer program, Brave New Leaders Academy, that focused on experiential education and leadership development to all students free of charge. The organization offered one travel abroad opportunity this summer in which students participated in an environmental justice program in Costa Rica.

Jeremiah Program (JP) reaches this vulnerable population through a two-generation model of supporting single mothers to access and succeed in college as well as providing their children with the resources they need to be successful in their own educational trajectories.

With our support, JP is piloting its program at two Brooklyn-based CUNY colleges—Medgar Evers and Kingsborough Community College. This is the first time that JP is specifically on a CUNY campus. This strategic partnership is an opportunity to develop a model that can be replicated to other CUNY campuses.

Our 2021 grant suppored CLEP test preparation, covers exam fees and stipends for teachers at partnering high schools to incorporate related materials in their classroom instruction, with the goal of opening this opportunity to hundreds of New York City youth.

Through our initial support of this program students who completed Modern States CLEP courses and took corresponding CLEP exams achieved a pass rate of 85% — more than 30% higher than the 65% national average for CLEP. The program has already helped hundreds of New York City students save on college tuition and move one step closer to earning a degree.

Our 2021 funding supported the growth of both OppNet’s signature Fellows program (direct to student) and the Partnerships model (training other organizations to adopt the model).

The new Fellows model will help OppNet increase its ability to serve more students from a more geographically diverse area by shifting programming to a borough-based model rather than the current centralized location operations. And, as a result of a partnership we supported between OppNet and Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), OppNet has started developing advising guides that can be used to train college access and success organizations that primarily provide individual advising. This will open the doors for OppNet to partner with a wider array of organizations than they are currently working with in the Partnership program.

Overgrad is a college and career readiness platform working to make the college application process more transparent, equitable, and accessible for all students, with a focus on low-income and first-generation students. Part of our earlier grant was to subsidize licensing fees for community-based organizations to utilize Overgrad’s platform with features including a college list building tool, Common App integration, document sending, and counselor/teacher recommendations. Because there was so much interest from college access organizations and high schools to utilize Overgrad’s platform, our support in 2021 subsidized costs for additional partners to adopt the platform.

The program provides individual advising, group-based workshops, college application assistance and SAT preparation classes all focused on guiding students to apply to and enroll in academically and financially well-matched colleges. RHI also supports students through the college years as needed.

While CBI continues to yield impressive college enrollment results – since 2001, CBI has achieved a cumulative college enrollment rate of 89%, with 74% enrolling in four-year colleges – college retention is still a significant barrier for many alumni.

SLN identified three common drivers to stopping out of college: academic challenges, financial hardship and personal circumstances (most notably related to sense of belonging on campus). We are funding SLN’s response to tackling these issues by supporting an extension of their near-peer coaching – which currently focuses on key college enrollment milestones – into the first year of college. The expanded Bridge Through College program will be piloted in 2022 on two campuses: Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) and Hunter College.

While many programs begin in high school, TEAK is one of the few outcomes-driven college access and persistence support programs that recruits students in the middle school years. TEAK high-achieving, low-income students participate in a six-and-a-half-year fellowship comprised of academic support, mentoring, college success planning, leadership training and career guidance. Through intensive college guidance, historically 27% of TEAK students earn admission to Ivy League colleges (38% in 2021) and 90% earn admission to top-tier universities (96% in 2021).

Our 2021 support has enabled uAspire to train more practitioners on college affordability, expand training offerings and provide real-time support to partnering organizations through an online Partner Portal.
The Portal is a highly valuable but underutilized tool, which our funding aims to change by subsidizing costs for our college access grantees (including both community-based organizations and high schools) to sign on as partners. To ensure that partnering organizations are also benefitting from uAspire’s workshops, the subsidy was only offered to organizations that sign up for both the training and the Portal.

Our funding has included SAT preparation services through TestRocker and construction of a dormitory complex to house participants at the Bridge in Long Island, which enables the young men to have paid internships at the Bridge golf operations as well as benefit from broader cultural and educational opportunities.

We supported strengthening pre-algebra programming to its students through adoption of a new curriculum that is delivered to students after school in small groups or one-to-one settings. Eighty percent of 8th graders were admitted to high schools with graduation rates above 90%.

Last year, 100% of high school seniors graduated on time and matriculated to post-secondary education. In 2021 we completed a three-year grant to New Heights to fund a major expansion as the organization transitions to new headquarters in Brooklyn. New Heights’s new 30,000 square-foot facility at the Bedford Union Armory in Crown Heights provides the organization with basketball facilities, administrative offices, and classroom/computer labs. New Heights will be able to exponentially grow its program to serve 3,000 youth annually.

Row maintains an impressive record of 95% college matriculation, 95% first-year completion and 70% college graduation within six years. Our prior funding helped to create a new boathouse and learning center and in 2021 our funding supported a college success pilot in collaboration with CARA. CARA is providing training of its College Allies model (peer-to-peer program focused on navigating obstacles during the college years) to Row New York staff and ongoing support (including through high school students trained in CARA to act as mentors).

SBU serves a particularly unique population, 95% of whom are from immigrant families with 30% of the youth born outside the United States. In the past five years, since SBU has institutionalized its academic practices, 100% of high school seniors have graduated and 94% of graduates have enrolled in college with a goal of 55% college graduation within six years.

In the 2020-21 school year, 98% of Central Park East High School’s 128 seniors completed the FAFSA. This statistic is outstanding, so we supported the creation of a “how to” guide, written by the College Access Staff of Central Park East, detailing how CPEHS accomplished a near perfect FAFSA completion record.

CARA trained and paid high school students (“Peer Leaders”) to work in high schools that have significant numbers of students in need of additional post-secondary planning support. The Peer Leaders guided students through the college applications (CUNY and SUNY specifically), Opportunity Programs, and financial aid processes. This initiative dramatically increased CUNY and FAFSA application completion rates between January and June.

We are also supporting three of CARA’s flagship programs: College Inquiry (program to help schools build their college access infrastructure through a coaching model); College Bridge (college students supporting college advising in their alumni high schools); and, Right to College (peer leadership program for college access). These programs propel more students into and through college by starting early and supporting all students with a whole-school change model and deploying Peer Leaders to address the guidance gap.

We supported NYU-CAC advisers to redouble FAFSA engagement efforts, using CAC tools such as texting campaigns. CAC also extended its support for the class of 2021 into the summer months to mitigate concerns around students failing to enroll in college after the summer. CAC had found success in its summer advising in Atlanta, so our support helped CAC to replicate this program in New York City. Through an opt-in model, NYU-CAC advisers were able to troubleshoot student questions about college matriculation, remind students to monitor the transfer of their high school transcripts, offer guidance regarding monitoring and balancing financial aid, and assist students with course selection and enrollment.

The Baruch “Business Academy” is offering students at the largest CUNY community college, Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), a well-defined path to matriculation at Baruch. The Business Academy created a program designed to remove barriers to transfer and improve diversity in the student body at Baruch, providing a path for students to transition from BMCC to Baruch and an organizational structure for student support, including dedicated advisement on courses, priority registration for required courses and peer-to-peer mentoring support.

A foundational principle behind this work is that complete transparency regarding how credits transfer will help students make optimal course and college choices and will help colleges facilitate those choices.

Our funding has led to a dramatic improvement in the amount of Hostos to Lehman transfer students who were able to count all of their transfer credits toward their Lehman degrees. In fact, the number of students on track to graduate in a shorter period of time increased by 15% from Spring 2020 to Spring 2021. The collaborative has also decreased the length of time it takes to evaluate transfer credits at Hostos Community College, Bronx Community College and Lehman College, and significantly reduced the percentage of transfer credits that do not count toward a degree. Our support also enabled the creation of an innovative digital tool called Transfer Explorer (“T-Rex”) that offers organized, searchable, user-friendly information on how every course in the CUNY catalog transfers across any combination of undergraduate institutions within the CUNY system. This is the first time such information has been made available. Our 2021 funding support continuous improvements to the tool, as well as trainings and presentations to key stakeholders to promote utilization.