Supporting the College Access and Success Community

The CUNY Network for College Success (N4CS) aims to significantly increase college persistence and graduation rates in New York City by coordinating student supports, through harnessing the collective efforts of youth-serving organizations and CUNY college advisors, counselors and student success professionals.

Over the past decade, dozens of community-based organizations (CBOs) have shifted their focus from helping low-income students gain access to higher education to supporting them “to and through” college with a growing emphasis on college success.

While these CBOs share the same objective—helping their students persist in and graduate from college—they often operate in isolation. The result is that their limited financial and human resources are used inefficiently, services are duplicated, information is unevenly disseminated, and students suffer from a lack of coordinated support. To compound that very few have been able to create productive partnerships with CUNY colleges.

Since fall 2018, the Network for College Success has brought together over 250 professionals from 60 organizations and 15 CUNY campuses across New York City.

The Network formalizes the work through several key strategies, including:

• Sharing timely, student-level data with CBOs and providing professional development around using data
• Convening a professional learning community that provides CBO staff with quarterly in-person meetings on CUNY programs and policies, new initiatives, the latest research, trainings, resources, and tools that impact organizational practice
• Promoting campus-based knowledge sharing to connect CBO and CUNY staff to strengthen communication among those that provide academic, financial, or other support to students
• Disseminating newsletters that share important campus-based and CUNY-wide information as well as curated information about internships, scholarships and other special opportunities
• Providing case-by-case support to combat challenges and bottlenecks