CUNY Start: An Intensive Pre-Matriculation Remedial Option

• In Event: CUNY Start: Addressing Students' Remedial Needs at Public Community Colleges

Abstract

The first presentation will provide a description of the CUNY Start model. A leader of CUNY Start, will discuss the intensive preparation in academic reading/writing, math, and “college success” to students admitted to CUNY whose scores on the CUNY Assessment Tests in reading, writing and math indicate that they are in need of remediation. Participating students delay matriculation for one semester and pay $75 to participate in an intensive semester-long program taught by trained teachers who follow carefully designed curricula. CUNY Start instruction is intensive: 25 hours a week in the full-time program and 12 hours a week in the part-time program of either math or reading/writing. Both programs include weekly college success seminars and one-on-one advisement. CUNY Start was designed to serve a diverse population of students and aims to help students reduce or fully eliminate required remedial course needs before matriculation and to foster higher levels of persistence and academic momentum towards graduation once students start their degree programs.

CUNY Start is founded on the belief that students identified with significant developmental needs will benefit greatly by fully eliminating or significantly reducing those needs before they matriculate. While many developmental education reforms focus on moving students as quickly as possible into credit course work, CUNY Start believes that students with significant needs (nearly 70% of CUNY Start full-time students are identified with three needs and 30% have two needs) will be better positioned for degree success if they first participate in an intensive full-semester intervention with carefully designed curricula taught by trained teachers and advisors using a student-centered approach to instruction. CUNY Start aims to not only help students pass skills assessment tests, but to also build the skills, confidence, and stamina they will need for their credit course work: deeper conceptual understandings in math, strategies and processes of effective readers and writers, enhanced belief in one’s abilities as an active learner, and the importance of time management, goal setting, and self advocacy, among others.

CUNY Start has been evaluated by CUNY using quasi-experimental methods and propensity score matching since 2009. Allen and Horenstein (2013) found that once CUNY Start students matriculate, they take and earn more credits with higher GPA and are retained at higher rates over time than matched comparison group students. In 2015, MDRC and CCRC conducted an RCT and qualitative interviews, focus groups and classroom observations to help understand the impact of CS.

CUNY Start is a unique model in the broader landscape of current developmental education reform efforts in its use of a pre-matriculation semester, as a critical space/time to serve students with significant developmental education needs. Understanding whether the model is in fact meeting its short and long-term goals (eliminating or reducing developmental needs prior to matriculation and realizing improved academic momentum and degree success) is critical to the larger discussion of how to improve the outcomes of students with very low basic skills needs.

Author

• Donna Linderman, City University of New York