Student Loan Blog : CUNY

CUNY Wants to Be a Model for Community College Education

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:53:00 GMT

The City University of New York school system hopes to open a “college of the future” that would limit enrollment to under 5,000 students, offer degrees or certificates only in fields with promising job growth, and serve as a model for community colleges nationwide, The New York Times reports (“CUNY Plans New Approach to Community College,” Jan. 26, 2009).

The proposed Manhattan community college is set to open in two years, but planning for the school has only gone as far as a 120-page blueprint. CUNY is currently tapping a number of private donors to help fund the new school, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to help double the number of postsecondary graduates in the United States by 2025.

Students of the proposed college would be required to attend a four-to-six week summer orientation, take classes full time, and keep in close and consistent contact with academic advisors. The school’s curriculum would focus heavily on math and literacy.

Pilot Program Shows Initial Successes

For two years CUNY has been successfully incorporating many of the proposed ideas for the new college into a system-wide pilot program called the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, known as ASAP.

The 1,132 students enrolled in ASAP receive free tuition, books, and commuter passes for the New York metro system. Students also are given priority over other CUNY students for class registration, making it easier for them to manage work and school schedules, and the opportunity to meet with counselors twice a month.

ASAP students have earned higher grade point averages than CUNY students not in the program, a 2.61 GPA compared to a 2.43, and have taken more credit hours than non-ASAP students, 11 credit hours compared to 9.6. And 80 percent of ASAP students have remained enrolled at CUNY after two years, compared to 60 percent of CUNY students not involved in the program.

“What we promised was that within three years, we would graduate half the students who came in,” says CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. “We are on track to do that.”

CUNY School Could Start a Community College Trend

Goldstein says the proposed college, which would be New York’s first new two-year school in 37 years, could help free up resources at CUNY’s six existing schools, which have experienced a 31-percent increase over the past decade, and could help improve the community college system’s 30-percent graduation rate.

In the long run, Goldstein believes that CUNY’s proposed higher education curriculum could serve as a model for the nation’s 1,045 two-year schools, which currently enroll 6.2 million students, about 35 percent of the nation’s college students.

Goldstein says institutions of higher education “need bold and new approaches” to how they engage, support, and educate students.

“Our students will face increasingly competitive pressures in an unforgiving economy, and getting a degree matters,” he told the State Assembly’s Committee on Higher Education during a budget cut hearing. “It is therefore in their interest to attend community colleges where the focus is on high standards and degree completion.”

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Program to Offer NY Students Low-Cost College Loans

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:36:00 GMT

Despite New York’s $15 billion budget deficit, Gov. David Paterson announced he is creating a student loan program that would allow New York college students to borrow $350 million in low-cost private student loans directly from the state, reports The New York Times (“Governor to Unveil a Low-Cost Student Loan Program,” Dec. 15, 2008).

State officials say the new student loan program, meant to help the state “retain the best and the brightest young minds,” will offer lower rates than most private student loans — potentially as low as 8 percent. Interest rates will be adjusted annually based on market conditions.

Paterson plans to allocate $50 million in state funds to jumpstart the program and $10 million each year thereafter — a key recommendation of the Commission on Higher Education. The commission studied New York’s higher education system for more than a year and found that the state’s 1 million college and graduate students had taken out $2 billion in private loans, and that those students often paid as much as 12 percent on their loans, double the interest that students paid in states with low-cost student loan programs.

Paterson hopes the loan program will help ease the financial challenges that face students now that lenders have tightened their credit criteria and as public and private colleges consider tuition increases to cope with state budget cuts. To help balance the state budget, Paterson has proposed increasing tuition at the City University of New York and the State University of New York.

“One of the big problems in the student loan program is that it is drying up,” said Jeffrey Gordon, a spokesman for the budget division of the governor’s office. “People who were able to get loans last year can’t get them this year.”

Under the loan initiative, students at two-year colleges would be eligible to take out a maximum of $20,000 in loans, while undergraduates at four-year institutions could borrow up to $50,000. New York students pursuing both an undergraduate and graduate degree would be capped at borrowing a combined total of $70,000 in private student loans.

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New York May Soon Have Its Own Low-Interest Student Loan Program

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:33:00 GMT

New York is one of the few states in the country where college students do not have access to a low-interest, state-backed student loan program, according to a report by the New York State Commission on Higher Education (“Final Report of Findings and Recommendations,” June, 2008).

The report, the result of a year-long study conducted by a commission appointed by former governor Eliot Spitzer, addresses a number of concerns related to New York's higher education system, including the lack of a state-backed student loan program.

Students enrolled at more than 1,000 public and private postsecondary institutions in New York — including the State University of New York, the largest public university system in the country, and the City University of New York, the nation's largest urban college network — have fewer low-cost financing options than students in many other states across the country.

One commission member estimates that students attending schools in New York pay an average of 9 to 12 percent interest on their loans while those in Texas, for example, pay only 6 percent (“Paterson Set to Embrace Student Loan Plan,” The New York Times, July 21, 2008).

If New York governor David Paterson has his way, the state’s college students may soon be able to complete their degree without being burdened by excessive student-loan debt. Paterson intends to heed one of the report’s chief recommendations, the institution of a low-cost state student loan program, with a petition to state legislators to implement such a program.

Paterson will also consider several other recommendations from the report:

Hiring 2,000 new faculty members
Establishing a $3 billion research fund
Expanding articulation agreements for seamless transfers between colleges by 2011

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Labor Board Rules That Certain Graduate Students Can Unionize

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 03:22:00 GMT

Two recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board have determined that graduate students who work at private nonprofit research foundations attached to public universities have the right to unionize, reports John Gravois in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Unions for Graduate Students Are Allowed in Cases Involving Foundations Attached to Public Universities,” July 10, 2007). These decisions “represent a rare expansion of bargaining rights for graduate students under the current labor board,” writes Gravois. But the expansion is a narrowly defined one, applying only to a very specific group of working graduate students. The ruling makes a point of differentiating the research assistants in these two cases from graduate teaching assistants at private universities.

Graduate Research Assistants: Hired as Employees, Not Students

The two cases came out of private research foundations at the State University of New York and the City University of New York. These foundations, explains Gravois, “like those of many other large public institutions, administer grant money that comes into the universities from government and business sources,” which includes paying research assistants. In each case, the labor board ruled that graduate research assistants who work for the university research foundations are entitled to bargaining rights because they are in “a primarily economic and not a primarily educational relationship with their employer.” Although the SUNY and CUNY research assistants are students at the universities, they are employees when it comes to the affiliated research foundations. These research assistants, the board held, “are employed by an entity that purposely operates outside of … academic bonds.”

Schools Offer Degrees, Employers Don’t

Unions trying to organize graduate students at private institutions have been thwarted before. In 2004, the national labor board ruled that graduate teaching assistants at Brown University are students, not employees, and thus do not qualify for bargaining rights. But in explaining last month’s CUNY and SUNY decisions, the labor board maintains that, unlike Brown University, a research foundation “is not a university or college and does not confer degrees or admit students.”

The SUNY decision was a reversal of the 2005 ruling by the regional labor board, which held that 2,000 graduate research assistants at the SUNY research foundation did not have the right to unionize.

The national labor board, in its reversal, does not dispute the research assistants’ student status. In fact, the national board’s ruling, according to Gravois, “acknowledges that research assistants who work for the SUNY research foundation are all enrolled at the university, that their paid work often relates closely to their dissertations, and that the principal investigators on their work assignments are often their dissertation advisers.” But unlike the graduate teaching assistants in the Brown University decision who worked for the university, these SUNY students don’t work for SUNY, they work for the SUNY research foundation. The board was careful to make this distinction in its ruling. As Gravois quotes, the SUNY research assistants “have an educational relationship with SUNY, but an economic relationship with their employer.”

It is important to keep up to date on the effects of legislation and news on student loans and education. What goes on in government and in your state can have a great impact on your student loans and your college education.

For all the information you need about student loans, go to www.nextstudent.com.

Be sure to tune in next Wednesday for my next blog on student loan legislation in the news.

Student Loan Girl

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