All community college reformers want to help more students earn degrees and complete college faster. A much-admired support program at the City University of New York has done this, some say brilliantly – but a recent 14 years of study notes that these additional diplomas did not translate into higher incomes.
It’s a headache.
College graduates generally earn more than people without a degree. In New York, even earning a two-year degree is associated with an additional salary of $10,000 to $14,000 per year. So why haven’t the additional degrees generated by CUNY’s ASAP program produced higher salaries?
ASAP, short for Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, was created in 2007 to tackle one of the largest and most pernicious problems facing community colleges: a majority of students drop out before graduating, with poor job prospects and often debt. The ASAP program surrounds students with unusually intensive support; not only do they have access to additional academic advising and tutoring, but they are also required to use these services. And they receive help to cover expenses such as textbooks and transportation.
In 2010, CUNY submitted ASAP to a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for evaluating educational interventions. Some 900 low-income students enrolled full-time in three of CUNY community colleges were randomly assigned to either the ASAP experience or the regular CUNY experience. After three years, the difference was enormous: 40 percent of ASAP students had graduated compared to 22 percent in the control group, a difference of 18 percentage points.
The surprising results were replicated in separate randomized evaluations of similar programs in Ohio and Westchester County, New York, demonstrating that the program also worked for older students and in less urban settings. Building on this research, the ASAP program quickly spread. Today, more than 90 colleges are following CUNY’s recipe in 11 states, and an unknown number of copycat programs have sprung up across the country.
In the latest follow-up study, released last month and which followed students through 2024, the degree advantage for ASAP had declined at CUNY as more non-ASAP students had also slowly earned degrees, but the advantage remained substantial. About 58 percent of students offered the ASAP program had earned at least a two-year degree, compared to 50 percent of students in the control group.
But when researchers at MDRC, an independent nonprofit research organization, looked at earnings over those 14 years, the advantage completely disappeared. Students who have gone through ASAP — graduates and dropouts combined — earned on average about the same as those who had the usual CUNY experience, according to New York state employment data.
The average salary for alumni is low – around $37,000 per year – as averages include people unemployed or working outside New York State (counted as earning zero). A future study is expected to include out-of-state income, but Michael Weiss, an MDRC researcher who conducted the assessment, doesn’t expect out-of-state income to suddenly change the results in favor any time soon.
Another possible explanation is that not all associate degrees are highly valued in the job market. In 2010, when the study was launched, CUNY’s ASAP program excluded many fields of study, including nursing and relatively high-paying healthcare fields such as radiologic technology. Many of the additional two-year degrees documented in this study were earned by liberal arts students. These degrees may not lead to well-paying jobs. Some graduates end up in customer service or child care. Meanwhile, a student who left college without a degree could have entered the workforce earlier and worked their way up to a better-paying position, such as retail store manager.
A liberal arts degree can, of course, be a stepping stone to a bachelor’s degree, which typically carries a greater salary premium. But researchers found no discernible long-term effect of ASAP on bachelor’s degree attainment. The program appears to have helped a small portion of students — about 3 percent — earn a bachelor’s degree faster than they otherwise would have.
Steering students into higher-paying fields is a priority at some community colleges that have adopted the ASAP program. In North Carolina, for example, the program targets high-demand, workforce-friendly specializationsoften excluding the liberal arts.
But Christine Brongniart, executive director of CUNY’s ASAP program, wants to stick with her ASAP-for-all approach, helping any full-time student, regardless of their field of study. The goal, she said, is to help students quickly earn a degree in their chosen field.
CUNY says ASAP’s mission is not simply to maximize earnings, and that there may be other personal and societal benefits to earning a degree that salaries cannot measure. But if taxpayers spend tens of millions of dollars on an intensive intervention, the gains are a legitimate outcome to examine.
The cost per student has increased from $6,000 per year in 2010 to $3,400 today (thanks to a higher workload for each advisor), and the program has grown significantly, now serving more than 22,000 students. The city’s budget for this exceeds $76 million one year.
CUNY has also been updated ASAP since 2010, adding a stronger career component. Advisors ask students to take advantage of career resources such as career fairs and resume workshops, and are more committed to helping students find a lucrative Plan B when Plan A fails. For example, a student who can’t get into nursing might be steered into another health field, rather than defaulting to the liberal arts. It’s possible that today’s ASAP students are earning more than their predecessors.
And there is an important counterexample in Ohio. A separate randomized evaluation of ASAP launched in 2015 found significant earnings gains six to eight years after students enrolled. The Ohio program was aimed at a different population, including many older students, in a different, less urban job market.
That’s one reason why Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic organization that helped fund ASAP’s expansion, hasn’t given up hope. Arnold acknowledged that New York’s graduation gains have not translated into higher cumulative earnings, while pointing to Ohio’s positive results as evidence that more research is needed. (Arnold Ventures is one of several backers of the Hechinger Report.)
“Isolated studies rarely provide complete answers,” the foundation said in a statement. job on its website.
But the results of students in CUNY’s ASAP program provide an important lesson: Crossing the finish line of graduation is something to celebrate, but it’s not the end of the story. This may be just the beginning of a long and complicated road to a good middle-class life.
Contact the editor Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
This story about CUNY’s ASAP program was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization that covers education. Register for Proof points and others Hechinger Newsletters.
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