More Degrees But Not Higher Earnings: Puzzling Data from CUNY’s Famed ASAP program | KQED

Every community college reformer wants to help more students earn degrees and get through college faster. A much-admired City University of New York support program has done that, some say brilliantly — but a recent 14-year study finds that those additional degrees haven’t translated into higher earnings. 

That’s a puzzle. 

College graduates generally earn more than people without degrees. In New York, even completing a two-year degree is associated with $10,000 to $14,000 more earnings a year. So why didn’t the extra degrees generated by CUNY’s ASAP program produce bigger paychecks?

ASAP, short for Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, was created in 2007 to tackle one of community colleges’ biggest and most pernicious problems: a majority of students drop out before graduation, with poor employment prospects and often with debt. The ASAP program surrounds students with unusually intensive support; not only do they have access to extra academic advising and tutoring, they’re required to use these services. And they receive help with expenses such as textbooks and transportation. 

In 2010, CUNY subjected ASAP to a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for evaluating education interventions. Some 900 low-income students who had enrolled full-time in three of CUNY’s community colleges were randomly assigned either to ASAP or to the regular CUNY experience. After three years, the difference was enormous: 40 percent of the ASAP students had earned a degree versus 22 percent in the control group — an 18-percentage-point difference. 

The astounding results were replicated in separate randomized evaluations of similar programs in Ohio and Westchester County, New York, demonstrating that the program also worked for older students and in less urban settings. On the strength of this research, the ASAP program spread rapidly. Today more than 90 colleges are following CUNY’s recipe across 11 states, and an unknown number of copycat programs have sprung up around the nation. 

In the latest follow-up study, released last month and which tracked students through 2024, the degree advantage for ASAP had shrunk at CUNY, as more non-ASAP students had slowly earned degrees, too, but the edge remained substantial. About 58 percent of students offered ASAP had earned at least a two-year degree, compared with 50 percent of students in the control group.

But when researchers from MDRC, an independent nonprofit research organization, looked at earnings over those 14 years, the advantage completely disappeared. Students who went through ASAP — graduates and drop outs combined — earned about the same income, on average, as those who had the usual CUNY experience, according to New York state employment data. 

The former students’ average wages are low — roughly $37,000 a year — because the averages include people who are unemployed or working outside of New York state (counted as earning zero). A future study is expected to include out-of-state earnings, but Michael Weiss, a researcher at MDRC who conducted the evaluation, doesn’t expect out-state earnings to suddenly shift the results in favor of ASAP.

Another possible explanation is that not all associate degrees are highly valued in the labor market. In 2010, the year the study launched, CUNY’s ASAP program excluded many fields of study, including nursing and relatively well-paying health fields such as radiologic technology. Many of the additional two-year degrees documented in this study were earned by students in the liberal arts. Those degrees may not lead to high-paying jobs. Some graduates end up in customer service or childcare. Meanwhile, a student who left college without a degree might have entered the workforce sooner and worked their way up to a better-paying position, such as a retail store manager.

A liberal arts degree might, of course, be a stepping stone to a bachelor’s degree, which typically carries a bigger earnings premium. But researchers found no discernible long-term effect of ASAP on bachelor’s degree completion. The program did appear to help a small share of students — about 3 percent — earn bachelor’s degrees faster than they otherwise would have.

Steering students toward higher-paying fields has been top of mind at some community colleges that embraced the ASAP program. In North Carolina, for example, the program targets high-demand, workforce-aligned majors, often excluding liberal arts.

But Christine Brongniart, executive director of CUNY’s ASAP program, wants to stick with its ASAP-for-all approach, assisting any full-time student, regardless of field of study. The goal, she said, is to help students complete degrees quickly in the field of their choice. 

CUNY says ASAP’s mission isn’t simply to maximize earnings, and there may be other personal and societal benefits to finishing a degree that wages cannot measure. But if taxpayers are spending tens of millions of dollars on an intensive intervention, earnings are one legitimate outcome to examine.

The cost per student has dropped from $6,000 a year back in 2010 to $3,400 today (thanks to higher caseloads for each advisor), and the program has expanded greatly, now serving more than 22,000 students. The city’s budget for it surpasses $76 million a year. 

CUNY has also updated ASAP since 2010, adding a stronger career component. Advisers require students to take advantage of career resources such as job fairs and resume workshops, and are more deliberate about helping students find a lucrative Plan B when Plan A fails. For example, a student who can’t get into nursing might be steered toward another healthcare field, rather than defaulting to liberal arts. It’s possible that today’s ASAP students will earn more than their predecessors.

And there is an important counterexample in Ohio. A separate randomized evaluation of ASAP launched in 2015 found significant earnings gains six to eight years after students enrolled. The Ohio program served a different population, including many older students, in a different, less urban labor market.

That’s one reason Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy that has helped fund ASAP’s expansion, hasn’t given up hope. Arnold acknowledged that the New York graduation gains did not translate into higher cumulative earnings, while pointing to the positive Ohio findings as evidence that more research is needed. (Arnold Ventures is one of The Hechinger Report’s many funders.)

“Single studies rarely provide complete answers,” the foundation said in a post on its website. 

But student results from CUNY’s ASAP program are providing an important lesson: Getting across that graduation finish line is something to celebrate, but it isn’t the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a long, complicated path to a good middle-class life. 

This story about CUNY’s ASAP program was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.