Grant Recipient: Westchester Community College Foundation
Term: 2016 –2022
Funding: $1,000,000
Summary: Under this project, Westchester Community College (WCC) in New York is implementing ASAP – a comprehensive community college program that provides academic, personal, and financial supports to low-income students who need remedial education. An earlier randomized controlled trial (RCT) of ASAP at CUNY found that the program nearly doubled three-year graduation rates in a population of primarily low-income students with modest basic skills deficits (22 percent of the control group graduated versus 40 percent of the treatment group). These effects on college completion are far larger than identified in any previous well-conducted RCT in postsecondary education.
WCC is implementing ASAP with support from other (non-LJAF) funding sources. LJAF’s grant is funding a WCC-CUNY partnership under which CUNY is providing WCC with technical assistance for two years beginning in January 2017, to ensure faithful implementation of the ASAP model. WCC will implement ASAP with a pilot of 100 students in Fall 2018, followed by cohorts of 150 in each of the following two fall semesters. Beyond the period of the grant, WCC plans to scale up the program to serve the 1,200 students it estimates are eligible for ASAP.
Under a separate grant, LJAF is funding a randomized controlled trial of ASAP as implemented at WCC, to determine whether the large effects on college completion found in the earlier ASAP RCT can be reproduced at WCC.
