ABSTRACT
The Planning Stage—In 2007, CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein announced the organization of a planning team charged with developing a concept for an experimental community college. For the university and the nation, this was a historic moment. For CUNY, this would mark the opening of the first new community college in 40 years. For the country, the new college would be the first institution to be developed at scale from research-based, high-impact practices and an embedded developmental skills curriculum. Chancellor Goldstein organized a planning team composed of higher education experts to research and identify successful programs across the country that succeeded in raising graduation rates for a portion of the community college population. One of the key barriers to completion was zero-credit remediation. For over a generation at CUNY and across the nation, students who required basic skills remediation were required to complete a series of zero-credit courses prior to enrolling in credit-bearing classes. The planning team for the new community college, relying on recent research in developmental education reform, proposed an embedded developmental skills model where students would earn degree-granting credits from the point of entry but would spend additional time in the classroom each week focused on basic skills. This chapter will therefore discuss the various dimensions of the planning stage.
