Approximately 40 percent of graduates from NYC public high schools attend CUNY the fall after their high school graduation, while nearly 70 percent of CUNY first-time freshmen graduated from a New York City public high school. The ability for both institutions to track students across their entire educational career is essential to informing and improving student support. In 2008, CUNY and the DOE signed a groundbreaking agreement that allowed the institutions to share data through a longitudinal tracking database. With support from GraduateNYC CUNY further developed a matching process considered to be the “gold standard” for identifying DOE graduates who apply to and/or enroll at CUNY. In 2015, the Research Alliance for NYC Schools at New York University joined the ongoing collaboration with NYC DOE and CUNY data and research teams to develop a data warehouse used strictly for research purposes. This research database provides not only longitudinal tracking of students from a PK-12 system into college, it also incorporates data from other sources and is the foundation of a long-term research partnership.
