The City University of New York

In 2007, the three-year community college graduation rate at the City University of New York (CUNY) was below 15 percent. Since the era of open admissions in the 1970s, CUNY has been a wholesale provider of remedial education to students, primarily from New York City public schools, who require additional skills building in basic reading, writing, and/or mathematics. Historically, the common practice was to place students requiring remedial education in one or more zero-credit sections of reading, writing, and/or math. Once a student successfully completed the gatekeeper exam at the conclusion of the course, he/she would be permitted to register for traditional degree-seeking courses for which basic skills were prerequisite. The traditional zero-credit developmental skills model was entrenched in the CUNY community colleges. Developmental skills departments had come to rely on the mass delivery of basic skills courses to maintain their livelihoods and employ their instructors.