When Nicolina Dapilma enrolled at the City University of New York, the odds of earning an associate degree in two years were less than one in 10.....

....Two years after starting CUNY's Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, she had an associate degree in liberal arts from Kingsborough Community College. That gave Ms. Dapilma, 23, a head start on a bachelor's degree in linguistics and teaching English as a second language, which she expects to earn from CUNY's Queens College in May.....

....An analysis released last week by MDRC, a nonprofit education- and social-policy research group, focused on students' first two years in the accelerated-study program, which began in 2007 with financial support from New York City's Center for Economic Opportunity. The report examines ASAP's impact on low-income students at the system's Kingsborough, Borough of Manhattan, and LaGuardia campuses who enrolled needing one or two remedial courses (about 900 students who agreed to participate were randomly assigned to ASAP or a control group).

Two years into the program, the study found, 14.5 percent of the ASAP students needing remediation had completed an associate degree, compared with 8.7 percent of normally enrolled students. After two and a half years, a third of ASAP students had graduated, compared with less than a fifth of the others.

Participating students were eight to 10 percentage points more likely to stay enrolled for each subsequent semester, and ASAP students earned, on average, 37.9 credits over two years, 25 percent more than did the other students.

MDRC, which has hailed the program before, described it last week as "one of the most aggressive efforts in the country to improve the success rates of low-income students."

An earlier study that included college-ready ASAP students, instead of the remedial students the MDRC study focused on, found that 30 percent graduated within two years and nearly 60 percent were expected to do so within three.....

Full Article