Program
History and Philosophy
College Now Timeline
1983
The beginnings of College Now go back 23 years to Kingsborough Community College and a handful of Brooklyn high schools. Two years later, LaGuardia Community College launched a College Now program of its own. At the time, college-high school collaborations were a fairly rare phenomenon.
1999
In the late 1990s, New York state announced that it intended to implement tougher graduation standards for high school students. Nearly simultaneously, the City University of New York unveiled a plan to eliminate remediation at its senior colleges. Since CUNY draws much of its student body from the New York City public schools, it was clear that something needed to be done to ensure that the University's potential students were (a) able to graduate under the higher standards and (b) better prepared to enter college without need for remediation. To this end, the university took the ambitious step of expanding its College Now effort to encompass all seventeen of its undergraduate colleges.
2006
Today, College Now offers dual enrollment programs in more than 250 New York City public high schools. It is the University's major collaboration with the New York City Department of Education (DOE) and serves more than 30,000 students annually. Its defining goals remain the same: to help students meet high school graduation requirements and to ensure that graduating students are ready to do college-level work.
Our Approach: Multiple Approaches
We don't believe that there is a magical route to preparing students for college success. It's a complicated endeavor which must take into account the diversity of the students themselves—how they learn, what they've learned so far, their personal and institutional backgrounds—and the diversity of the many high schools and colleges that come together to create College Now partnerships. Our hope is that each College Now program will draw on the particular strengths of its constituent institutions to provide students with appropriate and purposeful opportunities to enhance their learning and see themselves as future college students.
Following are some of the avenues by which we attempt to achieve that:
- College-credit Courses. The centerpiece of College Now continues to be the opportunity for qualified students to take free college-credit courses while still in high school. Eligibility for enrollment is determined by Regents or SAT scores, grades, and teacher/counselor recommendations. In addition to courses offered to students at their high schools and in special sections at the colleges, hundreds of students register each year to take courses with matriculated college students.
- Skills Development. For those students not yet ready to take college-credit courses, College Now provides opportunities to develop the academic skills that are essential for high school graduation and college preparedness. These opportunities include college preparatory workshops, arts and music workshops, and courses jointly developed by college faculty and high school teachers that are offered for high school credit.
- Professional and Curriculum Development. We believe that a successful transition from high school to college involves shared input and thoughtful reflection from teachers and administrators in all areas of secondary and post-secondary learning. For this reason, we've formed a collaborative relationship with The Discovery Institute at the College of Staten Island. In existence for nearly twenty years, The Discovery Institute works directly with high school teachers, taking a professional and curriculum development approach to student engagement. More recently, College Now has also pursued partnerships with other CUNY and city-wide education-based programs in support of teaching and learning for New York City students.
We're Still Learning
College Now is constantly evolving. We endeavor to collect data and encourage research about our programs and approaches. We're eager to know what's working, what isn't, and what could be made better.
