There’s an interesting piece in EdSurge about the potential access to education challenge that CUNY will face if Governor Cuomo makes good on his proposal to make college tuition free:
According to the CUNY 2016 Student Experience Survey, 21 percent of the system’s community college students were not able to take required courses, most citing “lack of seat availability” as the reason. In an interview, George Otte, CUNY’s director of academic technology, described the “bottleneck” created by course shortages. Students were not able to take required courses because demand for space exceeded capacity—a problem that could get worse if more free tuition-seekers pour in. “We have always had lots of enrollment, which is one of the reasons I think we were late to the online course offerings. Our mission was never to gain students from the outside,” he explains, “but we are just beginning to realize that this has an enormous impact on capacity.”
“The real challenge is that eligibility is predicated on full-time enrollment,” Otte says, citing a caveat community colleges cannot ignore. Without taking 15 hours a semester, which equals full-time enrollment, students are not elible for Gov. Cuomo’s free tuition program—the Excelsior Scholarship. However, at least half of community college students work full-time. It is unlikely that such a population can opt-in to campus-based instruction that requires them to commute and show up for courses offered only at, say, 9 a.m. or 4 p.m.
It turns out that we’ve done a lot of work in this area, particularly in the state of California, and have some lessons learned that are worth sharing.