The CUNY Network for College Success (N4CS) creates and sustains the ecosystem of community stakeholders and CUNY campuses that are critical for the college success of New York City’s young people.

The Challenge

Over the past decade, dozens of community-based organizations (CBOs) have shifted focus from helping low-income students gain access to higher education to supporting them “to and through” college, with a growing emphasis on college success.

While these CBOs share the same objective—helping their students persist in and graduate from college—they often operate in isolation. The result is that their limited financial and human resources are used inefficiently: services are duplicated, information is unevenly disseminated, and students suffer from a lack of coordinated support. The fact that very few CBOs have been able to establish productive partnerships with CUNY colleges compounds the situation further.

The Opportunity

Since fall 2018, N4CS has brought together over 600 professionals from 88 organizations and 18 CUNY campuses across New York City.
The Network formalizes the work through several key strategies, including:
  • Sharing student-level data with CBOs and providing professional development around using data
  • Convening a professional learning community that hosts CBO staff for quarterly in-person meetings on CUNY programs and policies, new initiatives, timely research, trainings, and resources and that impact organizational practice
  • Promoting campus-based knowledge sharing in order to connect CBO and CUNY staff and strengthen communication among providing academic, financial, or other support to students
  • Disseminating important campus-based and CUNY-wide updates, as well as curated information regarding internships, scholarships, and other opportunities through listserv emails and monthly newsletters
  • Providing case-by-case support to CBO staff and students to combat challenges and bottlenecks

Community Based Organizations and Campus Breakdowns

Use the sidebar links to view each school's CBO breakdown