A landmark community college program succeeded at something higher education has struggled to accomplish for decades: getting substantially more students across the graduation stage.
Fourteen years later, however, researchers found something more complicated.
Students offered participation in the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, better known as ASAP, were significantly more likely to earn a college degree than students in a randomized control group. Yet researchers did not find a statistically discernible increase in their annual earnings in New York State.
The findings, published by MDRC and the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, deserve attention well beyond CUNY.
They raise a question that is becoming increasingly important for community colleges, career and technical education programs and policymakers:
Should completion remain the primary measure of student success—or should institutions be paying much closer attention to what happens after students complete?
The answer is not that college degrees have stopped producing economic value. National labor-market data continue to show higher average earnings and lower unemployment among workers with greater educational attainment.
Instead, the study points to a more difficult reality: increasing graduation rates and improving economic outcomes are related goals, but they are not necessarily the same goal.
Key Takeaways
- A 14-year randomized study found that 57.7% of students offered CUNY ASAP earned a degree, compared with 50.0% of students in the control group.
- Despite that 7.7-percentage-point improvement, researchers found no statistically discernible effect on annual earnings measured in New York State.
- The finding does not mean associate degrees have no economic value.
- ASAP was designed primarily as a college-completion initiative, not as a workforce-development program.
- Earlier research involving ASAP-style programs in Ohio found earnings gains six to eight years after enrollment, suggesting outcomes may differ by location, program mix and labor market.
- For technical and community colleges, the study strengthens the case for measuring completion, employment, earnings, transfer, credential value and career progression together.
Why This Matters
Colleges have spent years improving access and completion. The next accountability question may be harder: Did students complete programs that produced meaningful educational and economic opportunity?
What the 14-Year Study Found
CUNY launched ASAP in 2007 to address many of the obstacles that prevent community college students from completing associate degrees.
It is not a modest intervention.
Students receive intensive academic advising, tutoring, career-development assistance, tuition-gap support, textbook assistance and transportation benefits. Participants are also generally expected to attend college full time.
Researchers began a randomized controlled evaluation of the program in 2010.
That study design is particularly valuable because students were randomly assigned to groups that either had access to ASAP or received the college’s usual services. Random assignment gives researchers a stronger basis for determining whether observed differences were caused by the program rather than simply reflecting differences between students who voluntarily sought additional assistance and those who did not.
The long-term completion result is clear.
After 14 years:
57.7% of students offered ASAP had earned a degree.
Among the control group:
50.0% had earned a degree.
That is a difference of 7.7 percentage points.
For a higher-education intervention measured more than a decade later, that is a meaningful and durable effect.
ASAP’s broader evidence base is also unusually strong. MDRC reports that multiple randomized controlled trials have found substantial improvements in three-year associate-degree completion, and the model is now being replicated across 11 states and approximately 90 institutions.
Then comes the unexpected part.
Researchers found no statistically discernible effect on annual earnings in New York State.
That does not erase the completion gains.
But it complicates the assumption that substantially increasing degree attainment will automatically produce a measurable increase in earnings for the students affected.
What the Study Does Not Say
The finding is likely to attract attention because it appears to challenge a familiar assumption about higher education.
It needs to be interpreted carefully.
The researchers are not saying college degrees are economically worthless.
They are not saying ASAP failed.
And they are not saying students would have been financially better off dropping out.
In fact, national Bureau of Labor Statistics data continue to show a significant relationship between education and earnings.
In 2025, full-time wage and salary workers age 25 and older with an associate degree had median weekly earnings of $1,135, compared with $1,062 for people with some college but no degree and $966 for workers whose highest credential was a high school diploma.
Those national statistics are descriptive rather than proof that obtaining an associate degree causes a specific earnings increase for every student. Different occupations, majors, regions and student populations produce very different outcomes.
That distinction is precisely what makes the ASAP results useful.
Research Snapshot
57.7% — Degree attainment among students offered ASAP
50.0% — Degree attainment among the randomized control group
+7.7 percentage points — Long-term completion effect
No statistically discernible effect — Annual earnings measured in New York State
Source: MDRC / Community College Research Center
Why More Degrees May Not Immediately Mean Higher Earnings
There is unlikely to be a single explanation.
The researchers themselves describe the earnings finding as something that requires additional investigation.
One issue is measurement.
The current analysis focuses on earnings recorded in New York State. Researchers say a future report will incorporate out-of-state labor-market information and synthesize evidence from both the New York and Ohio studies.
That matters because people move.
A graduate working in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania or another state may not be fully represented by an earnings measure limited to New York.
Another issue is field of study.
An associate degree in nursing, electrical technology, industrial maintenance or another high-demand technical field can have a very different labor-market value from a degree in a field where employers require additional education before substantial earnings gains appear.
Timing may matter as well.
Some associate degrees operate primarily as transfer credentials. Their economic return may depend on whether students subsequently earn bachelor’s degrees.
And finally, the relationship between education and employment increasingly depends on the alignment between a student’s program and actual labor-market demand.
That last point is particularly important for CTE.
Completion Is Necessary. Alignment Matters Too.
For technical education leaders, the study reinforces something employers and workforce programs have emphasized for years:
A credential’s value depends partly on what it prepares a student to do.
Community colleges cannot control the economy.
They can, however, examine whether programs connect students to occupations with meaningful demand, whether curricula reflect current employer expectations, whether students receive meaningful career guidance and whether credentials create additional educational pathways.
That principle is becoming increasingly visible in federal policy.
The new Workforce Pell and CTE accountability framework ties eligibility for short-term workforce programs to factors extending beyond simple enrollment. Program quality is increasingly being evaluated through measures such as completion, job placement, earnings, employer demand, credential value and continued educational opportunity.
TechEd Magazine examined how those requirements moved from policy into practice when the Department of Education approved the nation’s first Workforce Pell program.
The underlying philosophy is important.
Public policy is gradually moving from:
Did the student enroll?
to:
Did the student finish?
and increasingly toward:
What happened to the student after finishing?
The ASAP research suggests degree programs may eventually face more of the same scrutiny.
CTE Has an Opportunity Here
Career and technical education may actually be better positioned than many traditional academic programs to respond to this shift.
Strong CTE programs already use many of the mechanisms necessary to connect educational attainment with employment outcomes.
They maintain employer advisory committees.
They track industry certifications.
They incorporate work-based learning.
They examine regional labor demand.
They update equipment and curriculum around changing technologies.
They build articulation agreements.
And increasingly, they construct stackable pathways in which a short-term credential can lead to an associate degree, additional industry certifications or a bachelor’s degree.
TechEd Magazine has previously examined how short-term workforce programs can serve both as entry points into employment and as stepping stones toward additional education.
That kind of pathway matters because the economic value of education does not always arrive at a single moment.
A certificate can lead to a job.
That job can provide experience.
The certificate can stack into an associate degree.
The associate degree can lead to advancement or transfer.
The broader pathway may be more valuable than any single credential viewed in isolation.
The critical difference is that these outcomes must become measurable.
A program cannot simply claim to be “industry aligned.”
Administrators need evidence showing what graduates actually do next.
Regional Workforce Alignment Matters
The CUNY findings also highlight why national averages alone are insufficient for program planning.
Technical programs operate inside regional economies.
A credential that produces excellent outcomes in one metropolitan area may generate different results somewhere else because employers, wages, industries and advancement opportunities differ.
That means community colleges need to examine their own labor markets.
TechEd Magazine has documented examples of institutions making this connection directly. In Missouri, Ozarks Technical Community College has made substantial investments in advanced manufacturing education around fields including automation, robotics, cybersecurity, mechatronics and precision machining.
Programs built around regional employer needs provide a useful contrast to educational models that focus primarily on enrollment demand.
The key question is not merely:
What programs do students want?
It is also:
Where can those programs realistically take them?
That requires ongoing communication among colleges, employers, workforce boards and economic-development organizations.
Administrator Takeaways
Community college and technical education leaders should consider tracking at least five dimensions of student success.
1. Completion
How many students earn the credential they began pursuing?
Completion remains essential. Students who accumulate debt, spend time in college and leave without a credential face a fundamentally different situation from graduates.
2. Employment
Are graduates finding jobs?
More importantly, are they finding employment related to their field of study?
A 90% employment rate means something very different if most graduates are working in occupations unrelated to their education.
3. Earnings
What happens to wages six months, one year, three years and five years after completion?
Programs should avoid treating the first job after graduation as the endpoint.
4. Educational Progression
Does the credential provide a pathway forward?
That could mean:
Certificate → Associate Degree → Bachelor’s Degree
or:
Pre-Apprenticeship → Registered Apprenticeship → Journey-Level Credential
or:
Entry-Level Certification → Advanced Industry Certification
Programs connecting students with industry credentials, apprenticeships and employer pathways offer one model for thinking beyond a single educational milestone.
5. Employer Validation
Do regional employers actually value the competencies students are earning?
Advisory boards should examine curriculum, equipment, credentials and graduate performance rather than functioning primarily as ceremonial committees.
Questions to Ask Your Program
The new research gives administrators a useful set of questions for institutional review:
- Do we measure success primarily through enrollment and completion, or do we follow students into employment?
- Which of our programs produce the strongest earnings outcomes?
- Are graduates working in occupations connected to their programs?
- Which credentials produce meaningful wage progression over time?
- Do students understand the earnings and career differences among available pathways before selecting a major?
- Which programs primarily prepare students for immediate employment, and which require additional education?
- Are employer advisory boards reviewing actual graduate outcomes?
- Could stronger career advising improve the connection between completion and employment?
- Are our programs designed around regional demand or historical enrollment patterns?
- What happens to graduates three to five years after they leave us?
Common Mistake
Treating graduation as the finish line.
For students, graduation is usually the beginning of the economic outcome that justified enrolling in the first place.
Student Support Still Matters
None of this diminishes what ASAP has accomplished.
The program attacks some of the most persistent barriers facing community college students.
Transportation costs matter.
Textbooks matter.
Unexpected financial gaps matter.
Academic advising matters.
Tutoring matters.
A student who cannot get to campus, purchase materials or determine which courses are required to graduate can be lost for reasons unrelated to academic ability.
CUNY’s current ASAP model continues to provide tuition-gap assistance, transportation benefits, textbook support, personalized advising and academic and career assistance.
That model has now influenced institutions well beyond New York.
The lesson from the new research is therefore not to replace student-support programs with workforce programs.
It is to connect the two.
Imagine combining the completion power of a program such as ASAP with stronger occupational information, career exploration, employer engagement, internships, work-based learning and program-level labor-market data.
For technical colleges especially, that may be the next evolution of student success.
A Bigger Debate Is Emerging Around the Value of Credentials
The ASAP findings arrive at an important moment.
Higher education is increasingly being asked to demonstrate value in ways that extend beyond graduation.
Students want to know what credentials will lead somewhere.
Families want to understand the return on tuition and time.
Employers want evidence that graduates possess usable competencies.
Policymakers are attaching funding to measurable workforce outcomes.
And community colleges are being asked simultaneously to provide transfer education, career preparation, short-term training, adult education and regional workforce development.
Those missions sometimes produce different definitions of success.
A student transferring successfully to a university may have no immediate earnings gain because the student is still enrolled.
A nursing graduate may see a substantial wage increase almost immediately.
A manufacturing technician may begin earning sooner but require recurring training as automation changes the job.
A liberal arts graduate may eventually earn a bachelor’s degree.
One metric cannot adequately capture all four outcomes.
The challenge is building accountability systems sophisticated enough to recognize those differences while maintaining the broader mission of technical and STEM education.
What Happens Next
The researchers themselves are not treating the earnings question as settled.
MDRC says a future report will combine findings from CUNY and programs modeled after ASAP in Ohio and will incorporate out-of-state labor-market data.
The Ohio evidence is particularly important because earlier research found earnings gains six to eight years after enrollment among students participating in ASAP-style programs there.
If similar interventions produce different labor-market effects in different places, that would reinforce an important lesson for workforce education:
Program design matters, but regional economic context matters too.
A successful model cannot simply be copied.
It must be aligned.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is CUNY ASAP?
CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs is a comprehensive student-success initiative designed to increase college completion. It provides financial, academic and personal supports including advising, tutoring, career assistance, textbook support and transportation benefits.
Did ASAP improve graduation rates?
Yes. In the 14-year follow-up, 57.7% of students offered ASAP earned a degree compared with 50.0% of students in the randomized control group.
Did ASAP increase graduate earnings?
Researchers did not find a statistically discernible effect on annual earnings measured in New York State in this 14-year analysis.
Does the study show that associate degrees do not increase earnings?
No. The study estimates the effect of being offered the ASAP program, not the overall economic value of associate degrees. National Bureau of Labor Statistics data continue to show higher median earnings for workers with associate degrees than for workers whose highest attainment is high school or some college without a degree.
Why might the earnings results differ from the completion results?
Possible factors include field of study, regional labor markets, transfer to bachelor’s programs and limitations in measuring employment outside New York. Researchers are continuing to examine the issue.
Has ASAP been replicated outside New York?
Yes. MDRC reports that ASAP is now being replicated across 11 states and approximately 90 institutions.
What should technical colleges take from the research?
Completion should remain an important metric, but institutions should also measure employment, earnings, occupational alignment, credential progression and transfer outcomes.
Does this research apply directly to CTE programs?
Not directly. ASAP is a college-completion program rather than a workforce-development intervention. Its findings are useful to CTE because they illustrate why educational completion and labor-market outcomes should be measured separately.
TechEd Magazine Perspective
For years, higher education’s central student-success challenge was clear: too many students entered community college and never completed.
Programs such as CUNY ASAP demonstrated that institutions can substantially change that outcome when students receive enough structure, financial assistance and academic support.
The next challenge is more complicated.
Getting students to graduation is not the same thing as ensuring that every credential produces the economic outcome a student expects.
That does not make completion less important. It means completion should be viewed as one part of a longer pathway.
Technical education is particularly well positioned to lead that transition because CTE already operates close to employers, occupations and regional labor markets.
The strongest institutions will increasingly ask not only how many students graduate, but where graduates go, what they earn, whether employers value their skills and whether their first credential creates a pathway toward something better.
The future measure of educational success may therefore be less about whether a student crossed the graduation stage and more about what opportunities became available on the other side.
Related Reading
- First Workforce Pell Approval Tests New CTE Model
- Workforce Pell and CTE Incentives
- Short-Term Workforce Programs
- Educational Investments for Manufacturing Interest
- Training Program for Construction Industry
- Technical and STEM Education 2026
Sources
MDRC — The 14-Year Effects of CUNY ASAP on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes
https://www.mdrc.org/work/publications/14-year-effects-cuny-asap-educational-and-labor-market-outcomes
Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University — The 14-Year Effects of CUNY ASAP on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes
https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/effects-cuny-asap-educational-labor-outcomes.html
City University of New York — CUNY ASAP
https://www.cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/student-success-initiatives/asap/
City University of New York — About ASAP
https://www.cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/student-success-initiatives/asap/about/
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Earnings by Educational Attainment
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat37b.htm
