There’s fresh evidence that President Obama’s call for free community college for all, regardless of income, would be a costly feel-good effort with little hope of properly educating the masses.....

.....Since 2007, CUNY has offered free tuition and extra support to selected low-income students at six of its two-year colleges. Those enrolled in Accelerated Study in Associates Programs, or ASAP, receive free tuition, free MetroCards and free textbooks. They get first dibs on classes required for graduation.

Most crucially, they must enroll full-time, take a seminar that teaches study and goal-setting skills and work with an adviser who has a caseload one-tenth or less the size of a standard CUNY counselor’s.

To find out whether ASAP makes a difference, the research group MDRC tracked nearly 900 students who entered LaGuardia, Manhattan and Kingsborough community colleges in 2010.

Half participated in ASAP. Half went through the standard CUNY track. All needed remedial coursework.

Three years in, 40% of the ASAP students had graduated. Among the rest: just 22%, tracking the national average. ASAP students were also much more likely to move on to a four-year college.

Across all ASAP students, who are not limited to those in need of remediation, 57% of students who entered in 2011 had graduated by 2014.

ASAP takes real money, adding an $16,000 in costs per student over the three years on top of nearly $26,000 for the standard CUNY track. But because ASAP is so much likelier to lead to graduation, an ASAP degree is actually more cost-effective than a standard diploma......

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