Closing CUNY's Doors by Prof. William Crain (1999)

The Board of Trustees’ decision to end remediation will send New York back to an era of educational apartheid.

By Prof. William Crain

On January 25, the City University of New York’s Board of Trustees voted to eliminate remedial classes at the 11 senior (four-year) colleges. Soon all students whose placement test scores indicate any need for remedial instruction will have to find a spot in one of the six community (two-year) colleges.CUNY’s central administration has estimated that the new policy will bar half of the students who ordinarily enter the four-year colleges.

The new policy creates huge practical problems. CUNY’s two-year colleges are already overcrowded and can’t possibly handle the influx of new students.

More fundamental are issues of social justice. Within CUNY, a disproportionately large number of students barred from the four-year colleges will be students of color (see nearby “Access Denied”). This fact alone should raise widespread concern, but the policy’s unfairness is even more evident when considered in the national context.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 81 percent of the nation’s four-year colleges offer remedial courses. Most of these colleges primarily serve white, middle class students. CUNY’s students are predominantly people of color and poor. To deny CUNY students the same opportunities that most others enjoy is a cruel setback to civil rights and equal opportunity.

The January 25 meeting was rocked by protest. Surrounded by police, an audience of 350 to 500 students, faculty, and community members shouted and chanted in anger. The anger, which was mixed with tears, has deep historical roots. After all, it wasn’t long ago that many state laws prohibited African-Americans from learning to read and write. Even CUNY, whose historical mission has been to provide access to poor and working class students, didn’t open its doors to significant numbers of students of color until 1970. On January 25, the doors were being shut. As one faculty member, an African-American woman, said at a meeting the next day, “I had this image of George Wallace standing in front of the school building to block kids from entering.”

The audience’s outrage also was fueled by the purely ideological nature of the Board’s vote. For over a year, the Board’s majority had cavalierly ignored all the educational data presented to it–including data provided by its own staff. The board majority simply adhered to the right-wing agendas of Governor Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had appointed most of the trustees and had kept constant pressure on them to vote for the remediation policy.

To be sure, the mayor, governor, and Board majority have defended their policy with various arguments, most of which have to do with CUNY’s supposedly low standards. But these arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny.

For example, Mayor Giuliani has loudly and repeatedly accused CUNY of low standards because, he says, the university allows students to linger for years before graduating. The mayor overlooks the fact that students nationwide are increasingly taking several years to graduate. He also ignores the serious obstacles CUNY students face. Most must resort to several semesters of part-time study because they have to work long hours to make ends meet. In addition, many CUNY students, who tend to be older than students elsewhere, have child-care responsibilities. Given the students’ real-life circumstances, their graduation rates are hardly deficient. CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research reports that after 5 years CUNY’s graduation rates are higher than the national average for public two-year colleges. After 8 years, CUNY’s rates exceed the national average for public four-year colleges.

Many trustees argue that CUNY’s four-year colleges are admitting students who need so much remediation that they aren’t “college material.” But the vast majority of the students complete their remedial coursework within two semesters and go on to graduate at nearly the same rates as those who didn’t need remediation. CUNY students take advantage of remedial opportunities efficiently and move forward.

The Board of Trustees’ vice-chair, Herman Badillo, has repeatedly attacked CUNY’s standards on another count, accusing it of grade inflation. The charge is absurd. Two recent U.S. Department of Education surveys (the Post-Secondary Longitudinal Study and Clifford Adelman’s transcript files survey) show that CUNY doesn’t give out anything like the high grades that most of U.S. colleges and universities do.

Other indicators point to the exceptional quality of a CUNY college education. The most recent (1997) National Research Council data indicate that the graduates of Brooklyn, City, Hunter, and Queens Colleges are earning doctoral degrees in higher percentages than the graduates of almost every other college in the New York metropolitan area. An other CUNY colleges are achieving national prominence in their own distinctive domains, such as business, criminal justice, and the arts. An impartial person, looking at the New York region’s colleges for the first time, would undoubtfully conclude most colleges could learn a lot from CUNY’s success. Yet the Board has done little but tear away at our great public university.

Nor has the Board, as directed by the mayor and the governor, finished its job. The mayor has appointed a task force, headed by Benno Schmidt, to recommend ways of delivering remedial courses to private firms. Since private firms typically charge higher fees for these courses, it’s likely that many students will find it even more difficult to get a college education.

The January 25 vote occurred one week after Martin Luther King’s birthday. When one considers how much African-Americans and other people of color have had to overcome to gain basic rights and opportunities, it’s almost impossible to believe that New York public officials could inflict such damage upon them.

Dr. William Crain is a professor of Psychology at City College.

ACCESS DENIED

According to two studies by Lehman College sociologists David Lavin and Eliot Weininger, the Board of Trustees’ decision to end remediation at senior colleges will exclude the following percentages of students who, under the old admissions criteria, would have been permitted entrance.

60% of all incoming freshman
65% of Black freshman
66% of Asian freshman
68% of Latino freshman
45% of White freshman
56% of women
75% of AFDC recipients
81% of low-income women
82% of single mothers

Sources: “Proposed New Admissions Criteria at City University of New York: Ethnic and Enrollment Consequences” and “New Admissions Criteria at the City University of New York: The Impact on Women”.