The City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) is a comprehensive student support program designed to help more students graduate with an associate degree or to graduate more quickly. Launched by CUNY in 2007, ASAP provides participants with intensive advising, tutoring, career development services, tuition gap coverage, free textbooks, and transportation assistance, while requiring students to attend full time.The program seeks to address common barriers to degree completion by offering financial, academic, and personal support to help students graduate within three years.
ASAP has demonstrated large and lasting impacts on student success. Rigorous evaluations, including multiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs), have consistently shown that the program substantially increases three-year associate degree completion rates. ASAP is currently being replicated in 11 states and 90 institutions.
ASAP is explicitly a degree completion program—it is not a workforce development program. Nonetheless, a potential indirect consequence of achieving its direct goal of increased degree completion is improved labor market outcomes; completing a CUNY associate degree is associated with a robust earnings return. Recent research has begun to explore ASAP’s long-term labor market effects, with a study of programs modeled after ASAP in Ohio showing earning gains six to eight years after enrollment.
This report revisits the first RCT of the program in 2010 to assess its impacts over a 14-year period. The focus is on educational attainment and, for the first time, labor market outcomes in New York State.
The main findings are:
- ASAP increased the percentage of students earning a degree by nearly 8 percentage points, reinforcing the robust evidence that ASAP increases degree completion. Fourteen years after students first joined the evaluation, 57.7% of those offered ASAP earned a degree, compared with 50% of the control group who were not offered ASAP.
- Despite the large positive effects on degree completion, ASAP did not produce a statistically discernable impact on annual earnings in New York State.
The report explores several possible explanations for this pattern of effects. A future report will synthesize the findings from the studies of ASAP in CUNY and Ohio and will also include out-of-state labor market data for a more comprehensive assessment of ASAP’s effects on employment and earnings.