FOR America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university’s popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend.
A primary draw at CUNY is a program for particularly clever students, launched in 2001. Some 1,100 of the 60,000 students at CUNY’s five top schools receive a rare thing in the costly world of American colleges: free education. Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alumnus, or having an influential sponsor, or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group—criteria that are increasingly important at America’s elite colleges.
Until the 1960s, a good case could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. America’s first free municipal university, founded in 1847, offered its services to everyone bright enough to meet its gruelling standards.
City’s golden era came in the last century, when America’s best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants.
What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddleheadedness. In the 1960s, universities across the country faced intense pressure to admit more minority students. Although City was open to all races, only a small number of black and Hispanic students passed the strict tests (including a future secretary of state, Colin Powell). Faced with upheaval, City scrapped its admissions standards altogether. By 1970, almost any student who graduated from New York’s high schools could attend.
The quality of education collapsed. At first, with no barrier to entry, enrolment climbed, but in 1976 the city of New York, which was then in effect bankrupt, forced CUNY to impose tuition fees. An era of free education was over, and a university which had once served such a distinct purpose joined the muddle of America’s lower-end education.
By 1997, seven out of ten first-year students in the CUNY system were failing at least one remedial test in reading, writing or maths (meaning that they had not learnt it to high-school standard). A report commissioned by the city in 1999 concluded that “Central to CUNY’s historic mission is a commitment to provide broad access, but its students’ high drop-out rates and low graduation rates raise the question: ‘Access to what?’ ”
Admissions standards have been raised. Students applying to CUNY’s senior colleges now need respectable scores on either a national, state or CUNY test, and the admissions criteria for the honorable program are the toughest in the university’s history. Contrary to what Mr Goldstein’s critics predicted, higher standards have attracted more students, not fewer: this year, enrolment at CUNY is at a record high. There are also anecdotal signs that CUNY is once again picking up bright locals, especially in science. One advanced biology class at City now has twice as many students as it did in the late 1990s. Last year, two students, both born in the Soviet Union, won Rhodes scholarships, and a Bronx native who won the much sought-after Intel Science Prize is now in the honorable program.
All this should not imply that CUNY is out of the woods. Much of it looks run down. CUNY’s annual budget of $1.7 billion has stayed largely unchanged, even as student numbers have risen. With New York City’s finances still precarious, city and state support for the university has fallen by more than one-third since 1991 in real terms. It has, however, begun to bring in private money.
A new journalism school will open in the autumn, helped by a $4m grant from the Sulzberger family, who control the New York Times, and led by Business Week’s former editor, Steve Shepard (class of 1961). Efforts to raise a $1.2 billion endowment have passed the half-way mark, helped by (formerly estranged) alumni. Intel’s former chairman, Andrew Grove, who graduated from City in 1960 as a penniless Hungarian immigrant, donated $26m (about 30% of City’s operating budget) to the engineering school, calling his alma mater “a veritable American dream machine”.
For all its imperfections, CUNY’s model of low tuition fees and high standards offers a different approach. And its recent history may help to dispel the myth that high academic standards deter students and donors. “Elitism”, Mr Goldstein contends, “is not a dirty word.”