The New Community College
The New Community College at CUNY: Moving from Concept to Implementation Scott E. Evenbeck, pHD, President, New Community College, CUNY, NY, NY
“This is a rare opportunity to build an entirely new college, the first at CUNY in more than four decades, based upon a new educational model. There is no more urgent task in higher education than to find ways to help more community college students succeed in earning their degrees and transitioning into the labor market. We look forward to welcoming our first students in fall 2012 and are eager for you to visit the campus and celebrate the opening of our new college with us.� Chancellor Matthew Goldstein from a letter to the Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg May 23, 2011
The Concept
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hancellor Goldstein appointed a planning group in early 2008 to prepare a concept paper for the New Community College. That planning team came up with an educational model of the New Community College is designed to mitigate the common experience of college as a jigsaw puzzle of discrete courses, services and administrative obligations. The design would enable students to graduate in three years, although students in good standing would have the opportunity to graduate in two years through full-time enrollment during each semester and additional study during intersessions and summers. The concept paper called for the guiding principle of the New Community College to be a move away from the traditional remediation/credit divide, offering instead an alternative model of required credit-based coursework for all firstyear students. Other defining features of the model include: a required first-year core curriculum; the restructuring of semesters into shorter modules; the incorporation of student development and work-place education in the first-year program; and, the full-scale implementation of learning communities. The teams working across the spectrum of programming for the new institution called for an institutional commitment to professional and curriculum development as central to the success of the educational model. The model called attention to recognizing the importance of faculty collaboration and shared complementary expertise. The City Seminars, the heart of the first-year curriculum, were developed calling for teaching by teams comprised of disciplinary, reading and writing, and quantitative/math faculty working in an instructional team model of faculty, academic advisors, peer mentors, and librarians.
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