At a Committee on Higher Education hearing, CUNY officials detailed how two student‑support programs — ASAP (Accelerated Study in Associate Programs) and ACE (Accelerate, Complete, Engage) — materially increase degree completion and urged the City Council to provide sustained funding and benefits to scale them.

Christine Bronyart, CUNY’s executive director for ASAP and ACE, said ASAP has served nearly 22,554 students recently and is funded at a city baseline that supports up to 24,000 students, with an annual cost per student of about $3,391. ACE, an adaptation for senior colleges, enrolls roughly 4,400 students this academic year and has an average annual cost per student of $3,447. Bronyart told the committee the programs “have doubling impact on degree completion rates when compared to non program first time freshmen.”

Bronyart and Provost Allison Pease described program elements that drive results: intrusive, personalized advisement; tuition support for acceleration courses (summer/winter); textbook stipends and OmniCards; case‑management; and a focus on early warning and re‑engagement for students near completion. Pease highlighted John Jay’s CUSP (Completion of Upper Division Students) intervention, which used machine‑learning to identify at‑risk seniors and increased graduation from 54 percent to 86 percent in its first year.

Witnesses also discussed practical constraints. Dinowitz and CUNY staff explored why some internships are not credit‑bearing and emphasized that ASAP requires continuous full‑time enrollment, so students who drop to part time (often for work or unpaid internships) become ineligible. Jeff Rodis, CUNY vice chancellor for government affairs, emphasized the importance of paid internships: “You gotta pay them,” he said, adding that unpaid internships limit student access.

Funding and scaling requests: CUNY said ACE currently reaches only a small share of eligible students (about 3 percent) and asked for baseline state and city support to increase capacity. Bronyart cited philanthropic replication funding ($35 million) and a recent $8 million state allocation for ACE this fiscal year, and asked the council to consider OmniCard expansion and baseline ACE funding to produce larger systemwide gains.

Committee response and next steps: Councilmembers expressed support for expanding programs that demonstrably boost completion and asked CUNY to prepare detailed budget requests and program scale plans for the next budget cycle. CUNY agreed to provide more disaggregated data and a budget ask.

Why it matters: CUNY serves hundreds of thousands of students across community and senior colleges; scaling proven supports could raise on‑time completion for low‑income and first‑generation students and reduce long‑term opportunity costs to both graduates and taxpayers.

What remains unresolved: Committee members asked for fuller documentation of ROI calculations, exact costs to scale ACE systemwide, and precise enrollment ceilings tied to baseline funding.