They deserve an A — for perseverance.
Scores of CUNY community-college students struggle for a decade or more to earn associate degrees meant to be completed in two years — sticking with studies despite holding down jobs and raising families.
Overall, CUNY’s six community colleges have abysmal graduation rates — part of a national pattern that Chancellor Matthew Goldstein called “unconscionable” in a recent speech about reforms needed to help students graduate faster.
In 2008, the six community campuses graduated just 2.3 percent of the 17,248 students who had enrolled as first-time, full-time freshmen in the fall of 2006, CUNY data show. About 7.9 percent took three years to graduate. Other graduates transferred in with prior college credit.
Lowest-performing Bronx Community College graduated just 0.5 percent of first-time freshmen who enrolled two years earlier. About 6 percent took three years.
One reason: Students do not come prepared for college-level work. Nearly 75 percent of those entering CUNY community colleges from city public high schools in 2008 needed remedial classes in math, reading or writing — down from 81.9 percent in 2002.
“They’re the students with the weakest academic preparation and the greatest social and economic problems,” said Thomas Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University. Many are immigrants with language hurdles, he added.
Unlike traditional, four-year college kids — often 18- to 21-year-olds bankrolled by their parents — many community-college students support themselves or families.
“That’s a problem. It’s not really set up for people who are working,” said Michael Collins, 38, who took an exhausting six years to get a paramedic degree from Borough of Manhattan Community College while holding two jobs as an emergency medical technician in Westchester County.
He caught sleep and cracked the books while on call with his ambulance unit.
Collins did not qualify for financial aid because he made $24,000 a year. So he paid his own part-time tuition, about $1,200 a semester, plus his Bronx rent, car and other expenses.
“It’s a choice between, do you try to advance yourself or do you not?” said Collins, who plans to pursue a BA in nursing, starting at Bronx Community College.
A Bronx woman, 34, has two more classes to complete her associate degree in nutrition – 14 years after she started at BMCC.
Single until recently, she had three kids and “stopped out” – taking no classes –seven of those years.
But she never gave up. After packing her kids off to school or day care, she takes one or two classes, then heads to her job as a medical assistant from 2 to 11:30 p.m. Back home, she studies into the wee hours, often falling asleep over her textbooks.
She said professors showed “no sympathy” for her juggling if she did not finish assignments – and several have failed her. But she makes her kids proud.
“My sons think its cool I have to do my homework, just like they do,” she said.