FRIENDS OF CUNY

THE FRIENDS OF CUNY
(Formerly the Committee for Public Higher Education)

A Policy Statement
"CUNY Senior Colleges Should Offer Remediation"

Since 1847, the City University of New York has provided an avenue for New Yorkers of diverse backgrounds and origins to pursue higher education. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have received a high quality education, enabling them to make outstanding contributions to business, the professions, the arts, sciences and medicine. The Open Admissions policy of the 1970's widened this door of opportunity even further. Thus access and excellence were combined. Because many students with the basic ability to benefit from higher education have been inadequately prepared in high school, the University has provided remedial and educational support to students, as necessary, as part of the instructional program at all CUNY senior and community colleges.

The recent action of the CUNY Board of Trustees to end remediation in the senior colleges would undermine CUNY’s tradition and legally defined policy of providing access to students whose interests and abilities lead them to seek higher education. While the Board action masquerades as an effort to raise standards and to improve prospects for students to graduate, it fails to recognize several facts, as follows:

• The underlying assumption of the Board action is that it is unsuitable for senior colleges to offer remedial courses, ignoring the fact that 80 to 85 percent of the colleges in the nation, including the most prestigious Ivy League and research universities, offer some form of remedial study for their students;

• The Board action also ignores the fact that over two-thirds of the students who take remediation complete that course work in less than one year;

• The Board action fails to reckon with the educational and financial impact on the community colleges of the thousands of students who would otherwise be admitted to the senior colleges. It equally fails to recognize that the senior colleges would be decimated by the financial impact of losing thousands of students.

A review of the rationale and the potential impact of the policy argues strongly that time be allowed to permit the colleges — their faculties, presidents and administrators — to provide their expert input on how best to provide the necessary remedial services. The Board has ignored the fact that senior colleges have already established general guidelines to limit remedial courses to a minimum of one semester or a maximum of one year. Significantly the CUNY Board of Trustees’ Long-Range Planning Committee itself approved a proposal that have permitted the senior colleges to provide remedial work limited to no more than one semester. However, an unfortunate disregard of these senior college guidelines, and of CUNY’s own Master Plan, the Board of Trustees has acted prematurely (and punitively) to eliminate remedial offerings totally at the senior colleges.

The Committee for Public Higher Education offers the following conclusions on remediation and educational support services.

1. We believe that it is vital that access to CUNY be maintained in both the senior and community colleges and that remedial and support services be offered in both. The Board resolution of May 26^th phasing out remediation in the senior colleges contradicts a generation of successful practice and establishes an exclusion policy that is contrary to the concept of open access.
2. We believe that political interference has prevented CUNY’s Board of Trustees from making rational and informed educational policy.
3. We believe that the Board of Trustees should not seek to prevent the Board of Regents from fulfilling its mandate to review changes in the University’s Master Plan. We urge the Trustees to comply with the Regents’ request for information data.
4. We urge that the findings and reports of the Schmidt Commission on the City University, whose members represent one extreme point of view, be examined carefully to determine if its conclusions and recommendations are consistent with the overall goals of Public Higher Education — particularly the concepts of access and excellence.

Finally, at a time when the proposal has been halted in the courts and while the Board of Regents is examining the Master Plan implications of the Board action, we urge the Board of Trustees to reconsider and review a proposed policy that is educationally and fiscally counterproductive and destructive of the public interest of this great City.

For the Committee on Public Higher Education (in formation):
Frank Bonilla
Roscoe C. Brown, Jr.
Julius C.C. Edelstein
Stanley H. Lowell
Shirley L. Mow