The road from high-school dropout to college honors student took lots of twists and turns for Sherman Allen. The 34-year-old resident of Queens, N.Y., credits a wraparound program of support with inspiring him on that path, which he hopes will lead to law school.
Mr. Allen found out about City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs while combing through websites for a way he could move on from his job installing commercial security systems.
“I wanted a job where I could use my brain and didn’t have to sweat the rest of my life,” he says. “But I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it.”
ASAP promised to cover any tuition that wasn’t met by financial aid, and to provide textbooks vouchers and unlimited transit passes. He’d get a dedicated adviser to see him through to graduation. In return, Mr. Allen agreed to attend full time, complete any remedial courses in the first year, and meet regularly with advisers and tutors.
Sold, he enrolled at LaGuardia Community College, one of nine CUNY campuses that offers ASAP to some 15,000 students. His adviser encouraged him to take an honors English course, which he aced.
“My son is 17, and he wants to go to college,” says Mr. Allen, who is the first in his family to go to college. “I want to lead by example.”
It’s the help students get outside the classroom that often gets them through a course.
The ASAP program, which has been replicated by three community colleges in Ohio and is to be adopted by others, in California and New York, this fall, is considered one of the nation’s most successful examples of intensive support, much of it nonacademic, for underprepared students. It’s expensive — over three years, CUNY spent about $16,300 more per ASAP student than it did on those in the general population, according to a 2015 study by MDRC, a nonprofit education- and social-policy research group.
Still, it’s cost-effective, proponents say, because so many more students graduate. At three CUNY colleges, the program nearly doubled the three-year graduation rate for students who started out in remedial classes, according to the study.
The intensive advising is a key feature, says Michael A. Baston, vice president for student affairs at LaGuardia.
A counselor, for example, would notice that a student had missed several classes and would ask if anything was wrong. If the student said she had to work because there was no food in the house, the counselor might direct her to a food pantry and suggest that someone in the career-services office find her a campus job to cut down on the commute.
“It’s very easy to be aspirational and to say, ‘You know, if you stay continuously enrolled over your lifetime, you may earn $1 million more,’ " says Mr. Baston. “But if you’re hungry, that million dollars seems a million years away.”
CUNY markets ASAP to students on social media, in subway stations, movie theaters, and more traditionally, in high-school guidance offices, where its array of supports appeals to those who find the idea of college overwhelming.
Arlene Lind, a 20-year-old student who signed on with the program at LaGuardia, says that when she was spending all of her time helping her sister, who was struggling in another community college, her adviser reached out to her sister’s counselor with advice. That freed Ms. Lind to concentrate on her own studies.
“Without ASAP,” she says, “I would have been emotionally drained and lost.”
Skeptics question whether such interventions amount to too much hand-holding. What happens, they ask, when a student transfers to a four-year college, or begins work, and has to be much more independent?
Mr. Baston says that the intensity of interventions diminishes as students become acclimated to college, and that the purpose of the program is to get them to stand on their own.
“The goal of these services,” he says, “is to get the students to walk away from you every day, not to run to you.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
