They’re moving on up.
Enrollment at the City University of New York has reached its highest point since the college began charging tuition in 1976, new statistics shows.
The university system – which includes 23 campuses citywide for community, four-year and graduate colleges – has seen enrollment jump by nearly 25 percent since 1999, to 242,898 this year.
That includes an increase of 10,000 students since last year – a 4.3 percent gain that included a significant bump in students who excelled in high school.
Since 1999, the number of high school graduates with 85 or better averages attending CUNY has more than doubled to 5,122.
The school also has made significant strides in attracting students who scored above 1,200 on their SATs – a 166 percent jump since 1999 to 1,487 students this year – and who attended top-tier city public high schools.
Those familiar with CUNY credit much of its upswing over the years to the school’s controversial decision to raise admission standards in 1999, and to the addition of the Honors College two years later.
“I think it shows that students . . . are attracted to high standards – not put off by them,” said Heather McDonald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who served on former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s CUNY task force in the 1990s.
She said she expects the current financial environment to push even more students toward CUNY, which charges $4,000 for undergraduate tuition.
“It’s going to make CUNY even more attractive as private tuition becomes more outrageous,” she said.
Former New York Congressman Herman Badillo, who once served as chairman of the Board of Trustees of CUNY, said the university had been known as the “Harvard of the poor” when he graduated from City College in 1951.
But after the system began to nose-dive in the late 1960s – and particularly after it instituted an open enrollment policy in 1970 – things got so bad that it became known by many unflattering nicknames, including “Tutor U.”
The decision to raise standards in the late 1990s was controversial because many people feared it would limit the opportunities for minority students, according to Badillo.
But the latest CUNY data show that the percentage of black, Hispanic and Asian students enrolled since 1999 has risen at an even faster rate than it has for white students.
“I think that CUNY has had extraordinary leadership and the leadership has been very committed to standards and access and opportunity,” said state Board of Regents Vice Chancellor Merryl Tisch.
She singled out CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who was appointed in 1999, for much of the system’s turnaround.
“I think he’s been an extraordinary leader,” she said.