57The moral case for diversifying elite institu-
tions is clear. Just a tiny fraction of the student
population at the most selective institutions
comes from low-income families. And the
economic benefi ts of attending those schools
are powerful for disadvantaged students
when they’re admitted. If those institutions
more evenly distributed that opportunity —
which would mean not only admitting more
low-income students but also off ering them
the fi nancial aid they need to make attending
a realistic option — then we really would have
a fairer country with greater social mobility.
Over the last few years, wealthy colleges
have publicly embraced that argument. But
data from the A.T.I. project show that their
actions have not always matched their rheto-
ric. Last February, when the A.T.I. released its
most recent progress report, the collective Pell
percentage at the A.T.I. colleges had actually
gone down in the years since the program was
founded. Despite their high-profi le pledges,
the A.T.I. colleges thus far seem unable to gen-
uinely diversify their campuses.
The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic
makes it hard to imagine that this situation
will improve any time soon. Even before the
nation’s colleges shut their doors in March,
many selective private institutions were in
fi nancial trouble, operating at a loss or barely
breaking even. The virus brought with it a host
of new expenses for private colleges, as well
as dire threats to their revenue streams. The
budget cutbacks they are now experiencing
mean that their economic-diversity numbers
are likely to fall even further over the next few
years. Awarding scholarships is harder to do
when you’re broke.
In place of the airlift strategy, many advo-
cates are beginning to push for a new approach
— which is actually, in many ways, an old
approach. Rather than trying to persuade a
relative handful of private colleges to admit a
few more low-income students, why don’t we
invest in improving the performance of the
public colleges where millions of low-income
students are already enrolled?
In 2017, a team of economists led by
Raj Chetty of Harvard University and John
Friedman of Brown University published a
groundbreaking paper that issued ‘‘mobility
report cards’’ to more than 2,000 American col-
leges and universities, grading each one on its
eff ectiveness in elevating low-income students
into the upper middle class and beyond. To
the surprise of many, the colleges that topped
the list were not the Ivy League schools, which
admitted too few low-income students to make
much of an impact. Instead, most of the top
mobility-enhancing colleges were moderately
selective public colleges, including many from
New York City and the rest of New York State.
At City College, which is part of CUNY, 76
percent of students who grew up in the low-
est economic quintile, meaning families that
earned less than about $25,000 a year, moved
up to the top three-fi fths of the economic
distribution in young adulthood. At Baruch
College, the fi gure was 79 percent.
Public colleges were the main engines of
social mobility in the United States in the sec-
ond half of the 20th century. After World War
II, states from coast to coast rapidly expanded
their public-university systems. According to
calculations by Thomas Mortenson of the Pell
Institute, public funding for public colleges
and universities almost tripled between 1961
and 1980, relative to personal income. Mil-
lions of new college students, most from mid-
dle-class and working-class families, fl ooded
into these public systems, and for many of
them, college was a gateway to prosperity.
In the 1950s, City College became one of the
most academically prestigious colleges in the
country, the ‘‘Harvard of the proletariat,’’ as
it was sometimes called. It served as a step-
pingstone to the middle class for thousands
of young immigrants and children of immi-
grants, and it became a pillar of midcentury
New York Jewish intellectual life.
But starting in the 1960s, as public colleges
became more open to Americans of all back-
grounds, aff luent white students began to
abandon them for private colleges. (City Col-
lege’s student body is now 13 percent white.)
Graduation rates declined at many public
colleges, especially the less selective ones,
and their reputations suff ered. Tax payers and
legislators responded to this decline among
public institutions not by investing more, in
order to polish them back to their original
shine, but by investing far less. From 1980 to
2015, states cut their fi scal support for public
higher education in the United States almost
in half, relative to personal income.
Chetty and Friedman’s data trace this
decline as well. At almost every public col-
lege that topped their mobility list, access
for low-income students actually went down
in the previous decade, as public funding
decreased. Since 2001, states have cut their
higher-education spending by an average of
nearly 18 percent per student. Public colleges
have generally responded by raising tuition
and cutting services.
For CUNY, the situation this year is made
grimmer by the threat of budget cuts. Even
before the pandemic, its fi nances were in
desperate shape. Per-student state funding at
CUNY’s four-year colleges has fallen 21 percent
just since 2008, and tuition is up by 36 percent
over the same period, adjusted for infl ation.
The city’s public advocate issued a report
in December describing the eff ects of those
funding cuts: students who couldn’t register for
the courses they needed, libraries that couldn’t
aff ord to buy new books, buildings ‘‘marked byexposed wiring, persistent fl ooding, swarms of
pests and moldy ceiling tiles.’’
In April, faced with his own budget short-
fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed sharp
new cuts to the CUNY budget, including a
$20 million cut to the Accelerated Study in
Associate Programs, or ASAP, which provides
community-college students with tutoring
and advising support, plus money for books
and free MetroCards. For students who live
on the fi nancial margins — and about 60 per-
cent of CUNY’s students come from homes
with incomes under $30,000 — those extra
supports can make a big diff erence. On aver-
age, ASAP students graduate at rates twice
as high as typical CUNY community-college
students. The ASAP cuts were restored in June
in a last-minute deal, but the program’s future
remains uncertain.
This past summer, the biggest eff ect of
CUNY’s funding shortfall on students was the
one Bianca experienced: a frustrating lack of
communication. At least 39 CUNY staff mem-
bers died from Covid-19 last spring, and in
late June, CUNY responded to the mayor’s
budget cuts by laying off 2,800 employees.
The combination of shutdowns, illness and
layoff s has meant that many offi ces at CUNY
are now seriously short-staff ed.
Susana Lara, one of Richmond Hill’s bridge
coaches, generally prides herself on her abil-
ity to negotiate the CUNY bureaucracy on
behalf of the students in her caseload. She
understands the obstacles many of them face
because she faced them as well. When she
moved to the Richmond Hill neighborhood
from Ecuador at age 9, she spoke only Span-
ish. She learned English watching cartoons
and listening to her American cousins. Her
parents don’t have college degrees. Her moth-
er is a home health aide, and her father is a
carpenter. But Lara is now a senior at CUNY’s
York College, where she’s on track to fi nish
her B.A. in social work next spring.
Lara is compulsively organized, her lap-
top full of spreadsheets tracking her calls to
students and colleges and listing which steps
all her advisees need to take next. But this
summer, she told me, CUNY thwarted her
prodigious organizational skills. She spent
day after day negotiating glitchy websites and
unanswered emails, calling voice mail boxes
that wouldn’t take messages and listening to
phones that just kept ringing.
There is a direct connection between
CUNY’s funding cuts and the relatively low
graduation rates at CUNY schools. Students
at Richmond Hill are growing up mostly in
households constrained by poverty, discrim-
ination and language barriers. They need a
lot of support to make it through the day, let
alone to college, and so seniors at Richmond
Hill are provided with free breakfast and
lunch every day, plus counseling, discounted