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Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Work Shift.
Several months ago, leaders at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina, looked at their data on college completion rates and noticed that students in their career technical education programs were not finishing. Among them were machining, diesel mechanics, mechatronics, and construction—relevant programs in a growing region where companies including GE Hitachi and Corning have a big footprint.
Sabrina Terry, vice president of student services at the college, says students in these programs would often take some courses, maybe complete a certificate, and then learn the rest of the skills they needed on the job. They didn’t see the need to finish their degrees until much later.
It’s a common view among students well beyond Cape Fear, especially in the tight labor market of the past few years.
“A lot of students think in the moment, and they don’t think ahead,” Terry says. “In the years that I’ve worked for the community college system, I’ve had so many students come back and say, ‘To get to the next level in my career, I need my degree.’ Twenty dollars an hour may sound attractive to a 20-year-old, but you start to realize that it isn’t going to go as far when you have a family and other responsibilities.”
But completing a degree years later isn’t so straightforward. For many students, it’s hard to find the time to go back to college. The programs change as well, and the courses students took years ago are not always part of the current course sequence. The best path for degree completion is to stay on track from the start, and preferably as a full-time student.
The Big Idea: To ensure more students take that path, the North Carolina Community College System is launching a new program focused on degree completion for high-wage, high-demand careers.
The Boost program is modeled after the highly successful CUNY ASAP program in New York City, and will be the first-ever attempt to adapt that model of financial support and high-touch advising across an entire state. It’s also the first replication of ASAP to focus heavily on workforce needs—and will complement a new funding formula North Carolina rolled out early last year.
With a $35.6M grant from Arnold Ventures, the program will kick off with eight colleges this year, followed by seven more in 2026. It’s the largest-ever private grant received by the North Carolina Community College System, as well as the largest-ever private investment in a CUNY ASAP replication—a sign of optimism about its potential.
Arnold Ventures had previously invested in replications of the CUNY ASAP model at individual colleges, but a little over a year ago, the board began to look at how they could make an even bigger impact. North Carolina was one of five states already in a learning community with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association and CUNY ASAP to implement the model at a wider scale. Combined with North Carolina’s history as a leader in higher education, it was a perfect fit for Arnold Ventures.
“We are not going to address the challenges we have with completion in our country on a school-by-school basis,” says Kelly McManus, vice president of higher education at Arnold Ventures. “We have to think at the system level.”
A winning model
CUNY ASAP launched in 2007, and soon became one of the most talked-about student success initiatives in the country after a randomized control trial found it almost doubled graduation rates. Today, the program serves 25K students a year across nine colleges, and has been replicated in the State University of New York system and other colleges across the country.
Student Supports: CUNY ASAP provides financial, academic, and personal support for full-time students enrolled in associate or bachelor’s degree programs, including money for textbooks and a highly coveted NYC MetroCard. One of the hallmarks of the program is its customized advising, including regular required meetings with advisers. A smaller ratio of advisers-to-students allows them to form a closer relationship and meet more frequently than at colleges where as many as 1,200 students may be assigned to one adviser.
“General advisers don’t have the time or bandwidth to meet with students at that level, nor do they have the kind of structure that would require students to come in to see them,” says Christine Brongniart, executive director of CUNY ASAP. “They go in to see an adviser to register for classes in the coming semester. It becomes kind of transactional.”
“(CUNY ASAP) is different in that students meet with their adviser, forge a relationship, build trust, and talk about their longer-term goals—whether that be transferring to pursue their bachelor’s degree, their workforce or career goals, or how their academic plan maps towards that.”
Boost students also will be required to meet with their advisers and will receive $100 a month for up to eight months to do so. Each participating college will receive grant money to hire a Boost program director and advisers to achieve a ratio of one adviser for every 150 students. In addition, students will receive $600 a year for textbooks, and their tuition and fees will be waived. Some campuses may also give Boost students priority registration and create cohorts where students in similar programs can meet regularly.
High Cost, High Success: Programs such as ASAP and Boost aren’t cheap. The original CUNY ASAP model cost about $14K more per student, but had a lower cost per on-time degree, as substantially more students graduate within three years, according to an analysis by the research organization MDRC. With time, Brongniart says, the costs for CUNY have diminished as the program has achieved greater economies of scale, and the college system has received significant funding from the city and state as they proved the success of the model.
North Carolina community college leaders hope to get similar state investment when the Arnold Ventures grant ends in five years.
Longer-term studies of CUNY ASAP have found sustained results. MDRC’s research has found that on-time graduation is especially high—with a three-year graduation rate that is 18 percentage points higher than for other students. But at the six-year mark, graduation rates are still 10 percentage points higher.
MDRCsays it was the greatest impact of a community college intervention that MDRC has studied. And the impact hasn’t just been confined to CUNY. Other colleges that have replicated the model have seen similar gains. A new report from MDRC studying a replication at SUNY Westchester Community College, for example, saw three-year graduation rates rise by 12 percentage points for program participants. The number is especially remarkable given that most of the study period took place during the height of the COVID pandemic.
MDRC has also begun studying the impact of these programs on wages. A program in Ohio led to an 11 percent increase in earnings six years after students began the program compared to their peers who were not enrolled.
“What CUNY ASAP does that makes such a big difference for students is the package of services where they treat the whole student, in terms of encouraging them to enroll full time, giving them the message that it’s really important to take care of your developmental courses early and stay enrolled, but then also provides all these wraparound supports,” says Colleen Sommo, a senior fellow researching postsecondary education at MDRC.
“It’s not a one-semester intervention. … It’s really seeing students from start to finish.”
High-wage, high-demand jobs
What makes the Boost program unique compared to other CUNY ASAP-inspired programs is its tie to local workforce needs.
A New Funding Model: Less than two years ago, the North Carolina Community College System created a new funding model called Propel NC that ties funding not just to general enrollment, but also to full-time enrollment in degrees related to “workforce sectors” such as advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, information technology, and healthcare. The move is similar to what Texas has done with its funding formula focused on “credentials of value.”
“The more we talked about it, we were like, ‘Let’s bring these two together and conceive of this as a workforce program,’” says Patrick Crane, vice president of strategic initiatives at the North Carolina Community College System. “Propel NC will help create incentives for colleges to offer more of these programs and try to recruit students into them. And Boost will provide colleges the tools and support to actually get students through that pipeline and into the workforce.”
Colleges are still finalizing which programs they’ll include in Boost based on their local workforce needs, but Crane says healthcare, advanced manufacturing, transportation, information technology, and public safety are likely to top the lists. The state also wants to support transfer students who hope to attain bachelor’s degrees in high-demand jobs such as teaching and engineering, so colleges can choose to include teacher prep programs or associate degrees in engineering.
The Importance of Data: To help colleges launch their programs and track their success, the community college system is building a new data collection tool. Colleges will need to collect data on completion and demographics for Boost—data they already collected before—as well as collect new data about how often students are meeting with their advisers, what activities they’re participating in, and how they are progressing academically.
Terry, of Cape Fear Community College, says that meeting regularly with the CUNY ASAP team has given leaders at her college the time and space to look more closely at existing data and coursework. They are considering revising some curriculum to motivate students to finish their degrees, such as changing the required general composition class to a class on technical writing for CTE students.
They’ve also noted a shift to fewer full-time students and more part-time students, partly due to dual enrollment of high school students but also due to other factors including students needing to work. Boost will allow students to complete some credits in the summer, meaning they are technically enrolled full-time, but they are able to spread out those classes over the whole year.
Terry says that keeping a close eye on data will be crucial going forward.
“It’s really forcing us as an institution to look at data points that we never looked at before or that we just don’t necessarily have the time to always look at,” she says. “It’s forcing us to be a little bit more strategic and thoughtful.”
